Challenges are created with the intention of providing short-term learning experiences that can last anywhere from a week to a semester. Their primary objective is to help participants concentrate on a particular set of actions that align with a learning goal, an environmental objective, or a company's milestone. Challenges provide opportunities for micro-learning, especially with regard to finding real-world solutions for environmental sustainability and social justice.

Challenges may feature seasonal actions that are outside your organization's overall theme.

Your challenge creation journey begins on the Challenges Tab of the Admin Dashboard.

Click the "Create Challenge" button in the top right corner to choose from curated templates or start with a blank slate.

Sustainability – Helps participants visualize how taking small actions can protect the planet. Sustainability Actions include water and energy conservation, waste management, and transportation.

Civic – Educates participants on how to get involved in their community. Whether they volunteer time, make a donation, or help a neighbor, there is a way for everyone to make a positive impact.

Fitness – Makes it simple for participants to get active in a way that suits their bodies, works with busy schedules, and creates joy. Fitness Actions energize participants through habit-forming check-ins with their physical wellness.

Nutrition – Encourages participants to gradually integrate intentional nourishment habits that connect them to the local agricultural economy, seasonal ingredients, and fun food experiences.

Remote Engagement – Connects participants on fully remote and hybrid teams through actions that engage, inspire, and motivate collaboration in joyful and healthy ways.

Diversity & Inclusion – Creates ongoing opportunities for participants to experience the power of inclusion, cementing such practices through fun and intentional actions. Developed in partnership with The Diversity Movement.

Count Us In - Created in partnership with Count Us In, a global community of people and organizations taking action to combat climate change. Count Us In has collaborated with some of the world’s most respected climate science experts to identify a set of high-impact steps individuals can take to reduce their emissions significantly and, at the same time, influence leaders to deliver at-scale solutions to the climate crisis.

Recycling - The recycling challenge reinforces the habits of reducing consumption, reusing like it's never going out of style, and finally, recycling items to be transformed into something new.

Water Conservation - In this water challenge, you'll awaken your habits to mindfully only use what you need and more deeply value your access to potable water. When you compete in this challenge, you're connecting with one of the essential life sources for people, the planet and all living things.

Beat Plastic Pollution - Plastic pollution can devastate our ecosystems and wildlife, our health and well-being and the global economy. Our Beat Plastic Pollution challenge features simple actions that interactively educate people on reducing and eliminating plastic waste.

Ocean Protection – In this ocean challenge, you'll learn new habits to preserve and rebuild one of our most valuable assets, our oceans. This theme was created in partnership with The Oceancy, a team of marine scientists, engineers, and researchers with a focus on creating a positive, long-lasting impact on the oceans.

Blank – This is a clean slate ready to be customized with your content! Update the name and challenge description, and choose actions to add to this challenge on the following screens. Please update this description before you publish me!

Familiarize yourself with the actions in each challenge template before customization.

Fill in all the necessary information–start and end time, participant and challenge type–then scroll to the bottom of the page and click the 'Create Challenge' button.

You will have another opportunity to change the Challenge Name, Description and Icon, or update the challenge duration on the next page.

Note: Participant Type and Challenge Type cannot be changed once you click the "create challenge" button.

Review your selections, and when you have everything set, click 'Create Challenge' to advance to the Edit Challenge page where you'll further customize the challenge.

For your first challenge, we suggest starting with a general Sustainability challenge that encompasses all our actions under the theme. This will enable people to get familiar with the app's functionalities without any restrictions and provide them with a variety of options to participate. For future challenges, you may consider narrowing down the themes, such as office-related actions, water-saving actions, and so on.

Using teams for challenges. Encouraging participants, boosting engagement, and building camaraderie can be achieved by creating manual teams with easily identifiable names like departments, office locations, etc. This helps participants self-select and keeps things simple. Once you become more familiar with the JouleBug Admin Dashboard, you can mix it up by creating challenges with ad hoc teams and allowing participants to create their own teams.

Offer incentives. Providing prizes can greatly enhance engagement, and they need not necessarily be expensive. Our preferred prizes are experiences such as food or tickets to events, which may not always be feasible but can be great when possible. Alternatively, you can consider offering gift cards to local farmer's markets, produce delivery services, plant-based restaurants, or other products that align with the theme of your challenge.