Can I end an ongoing challenge and replace it with a new one?

To learn more about challenges, including setup and badges, visit Beanstack for Everyone.

Want to phase out an ongoing challenge at your library? Or perhaps you’d like to replace an ongoing challenge with a new one? Here are some tips and best practices for seamlessly ending an ongoing challenge and replacing it with a new one. We recommend reading all the steps all the way through before making any changes to a published challenge!

1. Pick a target end date

Once you’ve decided you want to end your ongoing challenge, pick a specific future date when you want to end challenge participation. We recommend picking a date at least a month away. Let staff members and readers know, but don’t make any changes to your challenge just yet!

1. Contact active participants

You’ll want to directly contact all readers currently logging reading for the challenge and let them know of the plans to sunset the ongoing challenge on the selected end date. If you plan to replace the challenge with a new one, we recommend letting them know and assuring them that reading totals for the current challenge can be manually added to the new one. You can run, customize, and download the Individual Reader Participation by Challenge report to get readers’ contact information.

1. Create your new draft ongoing challenge

If you’re replacing your ongoing challenge with a new one, you can use one of our pre-created ongoing challenge templates as a starting point. Customize and save the challenge as a draft, making sure to leave it unpublished until your other ongoing challenge is ended and to name it something different than the first, soon-to-end ongoing challenge, i.e., 1,000 Books 2.0. If possible, consider mirroring the same prizes in the soon-to-end challenge in the new one for ease of transferring current participants.

1. Edit and end the ongoing challenge on the target end date

When your target end date arrives, edit your soon-to-end ongoing challenge and add a start and an end date. The end date should be the current date, and the start date should be a past date around the time when the challenge started. Not sure when your challenge started? You can view the Earned Badge Details by Badge report for your challenge registration badge in order to see the date when the first one was earned. Setting the start date as close to the original challenge launch as possible will preserve reading history for both your readers and your reports.

1. Publish the new ongoing challenge the day after the target end date

Once your past challenge is over, publish the new ongoing challenge you have waiting in the wings (if you are replacing the old challenge). Make sure to do this the day after your past challenge ends!

1. Bulk-add reading from any carryover participants to the new challenge

If any participants from the old challenge want their reading totals to count toward the new ongoing challenge, simply register them for the new challenge and add the total number of logged reading to their profile on or after their registration date and be sure to update the prizes to mirror all previously redeemed prizes from the old challenge.