Contests App Overview

Contests

1. What it is

Contests lets you run time-boxed competitions with a real start date, end date, winner, and prize. Competitions can score automatically from platform activity, accept manually entered numbers, judge photo or story submissions, or run pick’em prediction pools. Contests supports both individual and team structures, with prizes paid as Company Store points, badges, or bragging rights.

• Enablement: Contests requires a license. An admin enables it from the Apps Marketplace, and it is off by default.
• What it is not: Contests is the episodic, time-boxed layer of engagement. Ongoing XP and badge earning lives in Levels & Badges. Contests scores from that ledger (metric mode) but is a separate app with its own lifecycle.

2. Standing it up

1. Go to Apps Marketplace and enable Contests. This requires a license.
2. Open Contests → Admin → Settings. Set Who can create contests — the default is Admins only. If you choose Managers and above or Everyone, those creators’ contests go through admin approval before going live.
3. If you use metric-scored contests, confirm that Levels & Badges is enabled. Metric contests score from the Levels & Badges activity ledger. Without it, no platform actions are available to score on.
4. For points prizes, go to Admin → Prize budgets and create a budget for each manager who will fund prizes. Without a budget, non-admin creators cannot offer points prizes.
5. Confirm it worked: open the Contests tab in the app sidebar. You should see the contest dashboard with sections for live, upcoming, and finished contests, plus a template gallery if you can create contests.

Silent dependency: Metric contests require Levels & Badges to be enabled. If it is off, the scoring-action picker in the contest form shows no actions, and any metric contest created would score zero permanently.

3. How it fits together

Scoring modes — Every contest uses exactly one scoring mode, chosen at creation and locked when the contest goes live:

• Metric scores automatically from the Levels & Badges activity ledger (XP points or event count). The creator picks which platform actions count — for example, “open shifts picked up” or “training courses completed.”
• Manual tracks numbers entered by hand or CSV — anything the platform doesn’t measure automatically, like sales calls or pallets moved.
• Submission collects photo or story entries (single image, or a before-and-after pair) judged by community votes or a designated judge panel.
• Prediction runs pick’em pools: the organizer posts questions with options, participants pick, and correct picks earn points. Brackets advance automatically from round results.
• Business metric (site-metric race) scores location teams on the improvement of a registered business metric compared to the same-length period before the contest window.

Structure — A contest is either individual (each person competes alone) or team (grouped by department or location). Individual metric and submission contests are opt-in — nobody is publicly ranked without enrolling. Team contests and individual manual contests auto-enroll the entire audience when the contest goes live. Team contests support per-capita scoring, so a six-person store can compete fairly against a forty-person one.

Goal types determine how a winner is decided:

• Highest score — top of the leaderboard wins.
• First to target — first to reach a number wins.
• Everyone reaches the target — every team member must hit the target for the team to win. This is the cooperative, works-council-safe goal.
• Share of team reaches the target — a configurable percentage of team members must hit the target, optionally with a secondary qualifying activity gate.
• Most improved — scored on the difference between the contest window and a baseline of equal length immediately before it.
• Raffle — individual only; participation earns tickets, and winners are drawn from the pool. The draw is seeded and audited.

Example: A “Safety Sprint” contest uses metric scoring on the “safety checklist completed” action, team structure grouped by location, with a “first to target” goal of 50 events. Per-capita scoring is on, so a small crew has the same shot as a large one. The prize is 500 Company Store points for the winning team, funded from the safety manager’s delegated prize budget.

Prizes — Three types: Company Store points (deposited into the winner’s rewards balance), badge (minted onto the winner’s badge wall via Levels & Badges), or bragging rights (no tangible prize). Prediction contests are restricted to badges or bragging rights — points prizes are not available on pick-the-winner formats. Employee-created contests can only offer bragging rights.

Rule lock — When a contest goes live, its scoring contract freezes: structure, scoring mode, goal type, target value, audience, prize type, and time window all become immutable. Corrections after that point go through admin override tools (score adjustments, disqualification, early end), never edits to the locked rules.

Programs and seasons — A program (e.g. “Q4 Safety Cup”) is a container that groups related child contests with roll-up standings across them, using either placement-points or summed-scores rollup. A season (e.g. “Monthly Pickup Challenge”) is a recurring program — it automatically generates a new round on a weekly, biweekly, or monthly cadence from a chosen template. Ending a season stops new rounds; contests already running finish on their own schedule.

Challenges — Any member can challenge a coworker to a 1v1 duel. Accepting spins up a real two-person contest that rides the full scoring engine. Duels always award bragging rights. Pending duel invitations expire automatically after 14 days if the opponent does not respond. If your organization restricts contests to team mode (works-council setting), duels are disabled.

Approval flow — Non-admin creators always go through admin approval. When a manager or employee creates a contest, it enters Pending approval and appears in the admin approval queue. Approving moves it to Scheduled (and, for points prizes, locks the budget hold at that moment). Rejecting sends it back to the creator as a draft with the admin’s reason, so they can revise and resubmit.

Integrations — Contests appear on the Comms Hub calendar alongside posts, surveys, and broadcasts, so an engagement campaign reads as one coordinated plan. Contest leaderboards are available as a Digital Signage content type. Winners earn participation XP through the Levels & Badges economy, and the Contests Agent in Ask AI lets users check standings, join contests, and make predictions conversationally.

4. Running it

Creating a contest

1. Open Contests and click the New contest button, or pick a template from the gallery. Templates pre-fill structure, scoring mode, goal, and suggested duration.
2. Fill in the name, time window, audience (company-wide, specific locations, or specific departments), and prize.
3. If you are not an admin, the contest goes to the Approvals queue. Admin-created contests go straight to Scheduled.
4. Once scheduled, the contest activates automatically at its start time. For team contests, teams are snapshotted from the org structure at activation and membership is frozen for the duration.

Reviewing approvals

Go to Admin → Approvals. Each pending contest shows who created it, the prize, and — for points prizes — the creator’s remaining budget. Approve to schedule it (the budget hold is taken at this moment) or reject with a reason, which sends it back to the creator as a draft.

Admin overrides on a live contest

Open the contest detail page. Admin tools are available while a contest is live:

• Adjust score — adds or subtracts points as an audited overlay. The original score is never changed.
• Disqualify / Reinstate — removes or restores an entrant. Disqualification is immediate; the standings refresh.
• End early — freezes the contest at the current moment and triggers the normal completion path (payout, winner announcement).
• Cancel — terminates the contest. Any budget hold is released.

Every override requires a reason, which is recorded on the audit trail.

Managing prize budgets

Go to Admin → Prize budgets. Create a budget by naming a grantee (the manager who will fund prizes), setting an allocated-points amount, and optionally an expiration date. When the grantee’s contest is approved, the prize total is reserved from their budget. When the contest completes, the actual payout is confirmed and any remainder is released.

Announcing and featuring winners

After a contest completes, the creator or an admin can:

• Announce to audience — sends a notification to every audience member who hasn’t yet enrolled, for opt-in contests that are upcoming or live.
• Feature winners — publishes the winners to the company News Feed as a post (idempotent — safe to click twice).
• Winners automatically receive an in-app notification and an email with their shareable win card.

Rerunning a finished contest

From a completed contest’s page, the creator or an admin can launch a rerun. The rerun pre-fills the same format, scoring mode, goal, and declared business goal, but with a fresh time window and no pre-approved budget — the creator reviews everything before saving, and the rerun goes through the normal approval and budget flow.

Saving a custom template

On any contest’s detail page, the creator or an admin can click Save as template. This captures the contest’s format (scoring mode, structure, goal, prize type) as a tenant-scoped custom template in the gallery. The time window, audience, and live state are not copied.

5. Settings

All settings are under Contests → Admin → Settings.

Setting	Default	What it changes
Who can create contests	Admins only	Controls who sees the “New contest” button. Managers and above adds managers (with admin approval); Everyone adds all members (with admin approval and bragging-rights prizes only).
Restrict to team contests with cooperative goals	Off	When on, individual contests and individual ranking are disabled organization-wide. Only team contests with cooperative goals (everyone or a share of the team reaches the target) are allowed. Designed for regions where publicly ranking employees requires works-council consultation.
Locations restricted to team mode	None	Per-location restriction: contests whose audience includes any of these locations must be cooperative team contests, even when the organization-wide switch is off.
Send weekly contests digest email	Off	Sends enrolled participants a weekly email summarizing their active contests and open contests they can join.
Send real-time rank nudges	On	Notifies entrants when they take the lead, move in or out of a prize spot, or hit the final hour of a live contest.
Announce winners to company feed	Off	When a contest ends, automatically posts the winners to everyone’s News Feed.
Show contest leaderboards on digital signage	On	Makes contest leaderboards available as a content type on Digital Signage screens.
Enable the Contests Agent in Ask AI	On	Lets users check standings, join contests, and launch templates conversationally through the Ask AI sidebar.

Viewing contest history

The main dashboard shows the 12 most recent completed contests. For the full archive, click Contest history in the sidebar. Completed and archived contests remain viewable there indefinitely.

6. More help

• Contests FAQ — specific setup and operating questions, limits, and troubleshooting.
• Ask AI — the assistant answers questions about Contests from these articles.