In Crowdicity, there are three types of challenges: Milestone, Funnel and Standard challenges. In this help guide, we explain what you can expect to see in each type of challenge, and the different ways in which your idea might progress through them.

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A standard challenge, is a question or topic that doesn’t have any timed phases or milestone targets. That means that your idea won't be passing through any stages within the challenge, but there will probably still be a time by which you need to post your ideas - just because a challenge doesn't have any stages, doesn't mean that it's open forever!

Read the challenge brief carefully to understand if there's a deadline for when ideas need to be posted, and if there is anything else that you need to take into account when posting your idea.

In a milestone challenge, ideas meet certain targets to progress through the challenge. The number of targets (milestones) and what the criteria are for meeting each target, is set by the community administrator. As an example, your idea may need to get 20 votes from other users in the community to progress, or you may need to add more information to your idea.

Administrators may set a time limit for how long an idea should take to pass all of the milestones, for example, they could say that an idea has 30 days from when it was posted to meet all of the targets and get to the end of the challenge. In the example above, there's no specific time by which ideas have to reach each milestone, but an idea must have met all of the targets within the required time limit.

If there's no time limit set, then ideas can move through the milestones completely at their own pace: one idea might pass through 5 milestones in one week, and another may take a month.

There are 3 different types of Milestones that your idea might need to achieve to reach the end of the challenge, these are: Vote, Refinement and Approval.

Your idea must receive a required number of votes (set by the community administrator) to hit the milestone.

You will be required to submit more information to your idea. The information required will vary between communities; you may be asked to answer further questions or to provide documentation to support your idea.

Your idea will need to be reviewed by a challenge moderator. Moderators can approve the idea, reject it or 'revert' it, which means that it will be sent back to the previous milestone. If your idea is approved, then it will progress to the next milestone.

The type of target and the number of milestones are set by the community administrator, so each milestone challenge will be different. There may be more than one of each type of milestone in a challenge (eg there may be more than one refinement stage) or you may even find a challenge that only has one type of milestone (eg a challenge with 4 different approval milestones). In each case, your idea will have to meet the requirements for each milestone to progress to the end of the challenge.

Funnel challenges have timed stages and challenge moderators decide whether an idea will advance to the next phase of the challenge. The idea behind funnel challenges is that lots of ideas can come in at the first phase, and then fewer and fewer ideas are advanced as the challenge progresses so that only a handful of ideas make it to the final phase.

You can easily tell if you are viewing a Funnel challenge as you will see the phases of the challenge below the brief on the challenge page. You will also see a countdown timer below the phase that is currently in progress, which lets you know when that phase ends and the next begins.

Community Administrators decide how many phases there will be, how long each phase is, what the phase is called and what will happen in each phase. The administrator can choose to allow or restrict certain activity within each phase, for example, you may be able to vote on existing ideas, but not to post a new idea.

In a funnel challenge, you can see the progress of ideas (which phase they are in, whether they will move to the next phase, etc.) from the funnel advancement bar on the idea page.

For more information about what the advancement bar on an idea page means, please have look at the relevant section of the Idea Page help guide.