In Crowdicity, there are three types of challenges: Milestone, Funnel and Standard challenges. In this help guide, we outline the different types and explain how ideas can progress through each one.

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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 ideas don't pass through any targets or stages, it's an open call for ideas. You can choose to open and close a standard challenge at any time; there's no automatic start and finish date.

Standard challenges are particularly useful in the early stages of a project, when you're trying to gather a wide range of ideas, or in a challenge where you would like to elicit some feedback from your users on a particular idea or topic.

If you'd like to set up an open challenge, take a look at our Creating a new challenge guide to help get you started.

In a milestone challenge, ideas meet certain targets to progress through the challenge. When you set up the challenge, you can set the number of targets (milestones) and the criteria for meeting each target. As an example, an idea may need to get 20 votes from other users in the community to progress, or an idea author may have to add additional questions to progress their idea.

Administrators may set a time limit for how long an idea should take to pass all the milestones. For example, they could say that an idea has 30 days from when it was posted to meet all 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 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 you can add to a challenge: Vote target, Refinement and Approval.

Vote target milestone

Ideas must receive a required number of votes or have a specific idea score to hit the milestone.

You can use thumbs up or scorecard voting in a vote target milestone. For thumbs up, ideas must receive a certain number of votes to reach the milestone. For score cards, the ideas need to receive a minimum average rating. When the vote target is reached, the idea progresses automatically.

Voting phases can also be configured to give a select number or group of users voting abilities while still allowing those with access to the challenge to see an idea progress.

Refinement milestone

Ideas must have additional information added to them in order to reach a refinement milestone.

Administrators add questions to the idea submission form that must be answered in order for their idea to progress. When the questions are completed, the idea progresses automatically.

Approval milestone

Ideas need to be reviewed and approved by a challenge moderator to reach an approval milestone.

Moderators can approve the idea, reject it or 'revert' it, which means that it will be sent back to the previous milestone. If an 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 (e.g. there may be more than one refinement stage) and you can even create a challenge that only has one type of milestone (e.g. a challenge with 4 different approval milestones). In each case, ideas will have to meet the requirements for each milestone to progress to the end of the challenge.

If you'd like to set up this type of challenge in your community, take a look at our Creating a milestone challenge help guide.

Funnel challenges have timed stages and challenge moderators decide whether an idea will advance to the next phase of the challenge. The concept 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. Administrators can choose to allow or restrict certain activity within each phase. For example, users may be able to vote on existing ideas, but not 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.

Ready to start? Take a look at our help guide to Setting up a Funnel Challenge which will show you how to add phases to your challenge.