Challenges

Everyone who purchases your challenge will gain access to the course and go through the lessons simultaneously.

Jump to a section in this article:

• Introduction
• How To Create a Challenge in Heights Platform
• Setting the Challenge Launch and End Date
• Challenge Lesson Comments
• Lesson Lock Days
• Challenge Lessons
• Lesson Release Emails
• Restart a Completed Challenge

What Does a Challenge Look Like?

The style of a challenge in Heights Platform is very similar to a regular online course, with only a few differences.

Before a challenge starts, if published, it will be visible to students together with its start date. Once the challenge has started, it will show the remaining days before the end and after the challenge is completed, it will show its status on the card.

Challenges Use Cases

A challenge can have many different uses cases, depending on its objective. You could use challenges to create relatively short courses and offer them as lead magnets to your audiences, with the goal of upselling other courses on your site to students who complete a challenge. 

You could use challenges as a way to further engage with your current students, or offer content that for its nature expires after some time.

Challenges can also be used as flagship courses within your program, if you believe that your audience would respond better to recurring, limited content.

To learn more about the benefits of challenges and how you could use them to grow your business, don't miss this article we wrote for our blog: 

How To Create a Challenge in Heights Platform

From the creator dashboard, click on "Create Product" on the vertical menu on the left side of the screen. Then select "Challenge".

This will open a page where you can add a title, description, preview image or video to your challenge, and change the settings.

In the Challenge Settings section, you can choose whether to allow free enrollment or charge a fee for students to join the challenge (paid enrollment).

If you select Paid Enrollment, you will be able to set the challenge price and a few pricing settings, as shown in the picture below.

Has Upsell?: Check this off if you wish to offer the opportunity for students to purchase another product from your program at a special price immediately after completing the challenge. The picture below shows an example of an upsell page:

Allow Purchase from Landing Page?: Allow website visitors to checkout and purchase this course from its landing page without first enrolling in your program. Do not select this option if you want to charge for your whole program enrollment. Purchasers get enrolled after buying this course. This option should be used if you intend to sell all courses individually.

Under the challenge payment settings, you can also choose to "Enable Public Landing Page?", if you wish to allow website visitors to access a public landing page for this challenge before enrolling in your program.

If you wish to hide this challenge from the other products in your program, select "Hidden Challenge?". This will hide the challenge from the sidebar and course list unless the student owns it. Students will only be able to purchase the challenge if they know the landing page link, from a bundle, or if you grant them access directly.

To customize the button students have to click in order to join the challenge, enter the text you want under "Join Button Text". If you leave it blank, it will say "Join Program" by default.

If you wish to change the enrollment link, insert your link under "Replace Join Button URL". Do this if you need to add a URL to an external checkout to replace the default Heights enrollment/checkout pages. You may want to use this when you accept payments through an external checkout and enroll students via Zapier. Leave blank if you wish to use Heights built-in enrollment and checkout.

Setting the Challenge Launch and End Date

Challenges are courses with a specific start and end date. If you are creating a new challenge, you can set the dates from the Challenge Settings page. (Creator Dashboard > Create Product > Challenge).

If you wish to edit the start or end date of a challenge you have already created, you can do this by clicking on the challenge and then "Edit". 

! Please note that once the challenge is published you will not be able to change the launch and end date anymore.

Under "Challenge Launch Date" select the date and time when you wish to launch your challenge course. Please note that the maximum length of a challenge is 1 year!

If you set a launch date in the future and click "Published" right away, your challenge will be immediately visible and purchasable once it is published, but your customers will not be able to access their purchased content until the challenge start date. This is useful for preselling your content or ensuring that your group of new customers starts on a program at the same time.

For example, in the picture below it shows a challenge with a start date set for the 15th of November. The challenge is already published. This means that before the 15th of November, people are able to purchase the challenge, but cannot access its content. On the 15th of November, everyone who purchased will be able to join the challenge.

If you don't want your challenge to be visible before its launch date, simply do not select "Published?".

Under "Challenge End Date" insert the date and time when you want your challenge to end. After this date, students who were enrolled in the challenge will lose access to the content. 

Once a Challenge ends, students will not have access to your content anymore, but will be able to see the upsell page and purchase other products within your program (if you previously set this).

Challenge Lesson Comments

Under each challenge lesson, you have the option to allow students to post comments. 

While students have access to the lesson, they can post their comments and thoughts. As challenge lessons are only available for a set period of time, the comments left by students are more relevant, as they are posted in real-time.

Comments are enabled by default, to disable students to leave comments under each challenge lesson, tick off  "Enable Lesson Comments?" under the Challenge Settings.

The comment date and time is only visible to creators, not to students participating in the challenge.

Lesson Lock Days

With Challenges, lessons become available to students on set calendar dates, and you can customize how many days it takes for a lesson to expire.

To do this, in the Challenge Settings, enter your preferred number of days after which each lesson will expire from the lesson launch date under "Challenge Lesson Days Until Lock".

The number of lock days you insert here is going to be the same for all the lessons in a challenge.

For example, if you write 2, each lesson in the challenge will expire (lock) after 2 days from its release date. You can set every lesson release date individually under the lesson editor. So if a lesson is set to be released on November 1st, and the lock days are 2, that lesson will expire on November 3rd.

This setting lets you optionally lock challenge lessons a certain number of days after they are released to incentivize students to participate in them while they are available. Enter a number of days that lessons should be available after their launch date. 

This setting is optional, if you do not want lessons to expire for students, simply leave the field blank. If left blank, lessons will be available to students until the challenge's end date.

Challenge Lessons

To start creating new lessons to include in your challenge, select the challenge you want to edit and click on "Lesson Editor" on the right side of your screen, as shown in the picture below.

In Heights Platform, creating a challenge lesson is exactly like creating a lesson in a course. Learn all about creating lessons in Heights Platform. 

The only difference between online course lessons and challenge lessons is in the release settings. Within a challenge, you can set the dates when each lesson will be released to students, and when it will lock.

If you want to drip lesson content to students based on their individual enrollment time, instead of releasing to all enrolled students on a specific calendar date, consider making a Course instead.

Every lesson in a challenge has a fixed calendar release date. The lesson release date can be set from each lesson's setting. From the lesson editor, scroll down until you see a section called "Release Settings", as shown in the picture below:

Under Release Date, insert the date and time when you want the lesson to be released and available to students. 

The two lines of text under the release settings inform you about the challenge end date you previously set from the challenge editor, and a preview of when the lesson will expire according to the lesson release date and lesson lock date (which can be also edited from the challenge settings).

For example, the picture above shows a situation where the lock days are set as "3"  for each lesson, so if we set the lesson release date on November the 3rd, the text shows us that the lesson will automatically expire on November the 6th (after 3 days). This can help you better plan the release dates for each lesson.

Lesson Release Emails

You have the option to send automated emails to students once a challenge lesson is released. The email reminder can make a difference in how many people join each lesson and engage with your challenge. Please note that it is not mandatory to set an email release for your challenge, simply ignore this field if you do not wish to notify your students.

You can use this email feature to inform students enrolled in your challenge that a new lesson is available for them. The email will only be sent to students enrolled in that challenge. 

To compose a lesson release email, under each lesson editor, select "Set Up Lesson Release Email" under the Release Settings. You will see an email editor as shown in the picture below.

You can personalize your email by using the liquid tags on the right side of the email editor. Simply copy the liquid tag you wish to use and paste it into your text. 

When you are done, click on "Finish Editing Email" and this will schedule an email to send automatically on the date and time you set for the lesson release.

Don't forget to click "Save Lesson" on the top right side of your screen to save your changes!

After you have scheduled an email, you will see the tag "Email Scheduled" in the release settings.

You can always modify your email, as long as you do this before the lesson release date. 

Once the email is sent, you will see a tag "Email Sent" under the release settings and in the lesson editor view, as shown below.

Only one email can be delivered to students per day to avoid overloading them, so if you are releasing multiple lessons in one day, the first lesson that has an email will be the one where an email is sent. 

Please note that once you schedule an email, you will not be able to modify the launch date of that lesson anymore. If you need to change the launch date of a lesson after you already scheduled the email, you will need to delete the lesson and create a new one.

Restart a Completed Challenge

After each challenge is completed, you have the option to restart it. 

This option is extremely useful for creators as it allows you to rerun the same challenge again without manually re-uploading all of your content. You don't even have to change the challenge settings, as the system automatically applies the old settings to the new dates.

To restart a challenge, select the completed challenge you want to rerun. Click on "edit" and then scroll down until you see the Challenge Settings. 

Here you will see a button called "Restart Challenge". If you select it, you will see a pop-up like this one:

Here you can set a new launch date and Heights will automatically calculate and apply your new challenge end date and lesson launch dates based on the distance of the new launch date from the previous launch.

If you want to run the same exact challenge, you can choose to have all emails scheduled automatically (first option). 

Alternatively, if you wish to modify some of your content before scheduling your lesson emails, select the second option to manually publish your challenge and lessons again when ready.

After restarting your challenge, lessons in your challenge will be able to have their launch emails sent again. 

If you restart a challenge while it is still live for students, this will not affect the current challenge and students will keep accessing the challenge until its end date. Restarting a challenge simply lets you run the same course again in the future, without affecting the current challenge. Once a challenge ends, students who were enrolled in that challenge automatically lose access to it. The restart option does not affect enrollment, which means that changing the launch or end date or restarting the challenge on a day in the past, does not let you re-enroll past students nor affects the enrollment in any way.