There are some key decisions you’ll need to make to design your challenge. You can go through most of these using the pre-challenge survey. Additionally, you’ll find advantages and disadvantages of each option as you work through the guide.
The key questions to ask yourself include:
What are your goals for the challenge?
Will access to the challenge be open, private or by invitation?
What happens with selected ideas? Will the submitter win a prize or finance to help them implement the idea, or will you implement the idea yourself and offer non-financial support?
How will you select the finalists? Will the community or a jury have the full say, or will the responsibility be shared?
How will you handle intellectual property? Many challenge facilitators worry that participants will be wary of sharing their ideas in an open manner. You’ll need to communicate the benefits of open-sourced innovation to build trust around this. Here’s an example of a blog you could share with your members on the subject.
How do you want your community to collaborate? We’ve seen that high financial rewards can turn a challenge into a competition, where participants attempt to “win” rather than look to collaborate. There are benefits to both options, so you’ll need to decide which to go for. The only real benefit to a competition-style challenge is that it allows participants to evidence their skills in convincing people (participants, donors and judges) to back their idea and support them.
How long will the online challenge space be live? While this may depend on how technical your ask is, the reach of your community and the number of ideas you want to attract, we’ve found that shorter submission times work well online. However, you may have reasons to run a longer process.
Additional things to think about include an assessment of the resources you may need, both within your team and in terms of recruitment, and how you want to communicate with your community before, during and after your challenge.
