What is a Fundraiser Challenge?
Challenges in Pacer are online (or virtual) fitness events that participants can complete at their own time and place. They include all the elements necessary for a fun and engaging virtual experience including live leaderboards, social engagement and branding and sponsorship opportunities. The most popular type of virtual event in Pacer is a step challenge, but Pacer's flexible platform supports many times of fitness challenges.
Fundraiser Challenges work similarly to our free community challenges, with the added requirement that participants must pay a registration fee to the challenge organizer to join.
This article will outline how to get started creating virtual Fundraiser Challenges on Pacer. Follow the simple steps below to start publishing your own customized fitness challenges.
Why create a Fundraiser Challenge?
✔️ Engage your community, workplace or audience in physical challenges
Pacer’s virtual challenges engage communities and groups and motivate them to be more active together.
✔️ Earn income or raise money for a cause.
Collect registration fees directly from your participants. You can use these fees to offset the cost of providing participation gifts or swag to your participations, donate all or a portion to a charity or cause, or earn a little extra revenue from your community.
✔️ Enjoy easy and secure payments with Stripe
All payments are processed via the secure third party provider Stripe. You will receive payouts (minus Stripe and applicable platform feeds) directly to your Stripe account.
Once you have create a Pacer account, there are four simple steps to creating a Fundraiser Challenge.
This article will walk you through those four steps for your first fundraiser challenge. It will also cover the basics of Pacer's virtual challenge rules and configuration options.
Before we get into that though, you'll need to make sure you have a Pacer account set up and can access the Fundraiser Challenge website. Read the next section, "Getting Started" for instructions.
Getting Started
Before getting started you will need to have a Pacer account. If you do not have a Pacer account yet, you will need to download Pacer on your mobile device and register an account before proceeding.
If you already have a Pacer account, you'll need to log into our Fundraiser Challenge website. Go to https://fundraiser.mypacer.com/ in your web browser. Be sure to use the same log in method as the account you created in the Pacer app.
Once you've logged in, click on "Challenges" in the left side navigation menu and click on the "Create a New Challenge" button.
Basic Challenge Set Up
The first step is to choose your challenge title, timeframe and rules. This is the most basic information your participants will need to know about your challenge in order to successfully participate.
You’ll need to give your challenge a title. This can be anything you want as long as it fits within the 50 character limit and abides by our Community Guidelines.
Choose your challenge type. Pacer offers a number of different challenge types:
- Step Challenge - participants compete for who can take the most steps
- Distance Challenge - participants compete to see who can go the farthest
- Pace Challenge - participants must use GPS to complete a qualifying activity (like a 5K or a 10K), and they are ranked by their best pace.
- Daily Step Goal - participants must reach a daily step goal (like 10k steps) to score a point, and they are ranked by number of points accumulated in the challenge period.
- Route Challenge (coming soon) - participants have to complete their activity at an actual real-life location (like a local park) by following one or more pre-defined routes.
Each challenge type may have advanced settings that allow you to further customize your participants’ experiences.
Set a Total Step Goal (optional) - If you set a total step goal, each participant will see a progress bar showing their progress toward the goal. Step goals can only be set in 10,000 step increments. Cannot be changed after challenge is published.
Set a daily step limit (required) - This is the maximum number of steps a participant can add to their challenge score each day. This setting is to prevent overexertion and cheating. The default setting is 30,000 steps per day, but you may wish to adjust this up or down depending on your audience. Can be changed after challenge is published.
Set a Total Distance Goal (optional) - If you set a total distance goal, each participant will see a progress bar showing their progress toward the goal. Participants will see the goal in their preferred distance unit (miles or kilometers). Pacer will automatically handle unit conversion. Cannot be changed after challenge is published.
Set a daily distance limit (required) - This is the maximum distance a participant can add to their challenge score each day. This setting is to prevent overexertion and cheating. The default setting is 20 kilometers per day (~12.4 miles), but you may wish to adjust this up or down depending on your audience. Can be changed after challenge is published.
Choose to only allow GPS-tracked activities (optional) - This option allows you to require participants to record their challenge activities using Pacer's GPS tracking feature. Enabling this feature would ensure that challenge activities are from purposeful outdoor activities, and would not include data recorded by Pacer's 24/7 pedometer feature (i.e., normal daily activity). This option is disabled by default.
Set a Minimum Qualifying Distance (required) - Pace challenges require participants to record at least one outdoor activity of a minimum distance using GPS tracking (excluding cycling). The default distance is 5 kilometers (~3.1 miles), but this can changed to a higher or lower value depending on your challenge requirements and audience capability. This cannot be changed after the challenge has been published.
Set daily step goal (required) - This type of challenge requires participants to meet or exceed a daily step goal to earn a point, with maximum of one point earned per day. The default value here is 10,000 steps. This cannot be changed after the challenge has been published.
Every challenge needs a start and end date. Start date must be today or later. Challenges are inclusive of end dates, so challenges end at 11:59:59 PM on the end date.
Handling timezones - challenge start and end times are based on the creator’s time zone. Participants in other time zones can still join, but their scores will begin and stop counting based on the creator’s time zone.
Customize your Branding & Appearance
Each public challenge must be hosted by a public Pacer group. If you do not already have a public group, you can easily create one simply by typing in the name you would like your group to have. See here for more details about Groups.
- You can add your own 400 x 400-pixel Challenge Icon. Choose from your phone's photo album, take a photo with your phone's camera, or use our default icon.
- You can add your own 1440 x 708-pixel Cover Image. Choose from your phone's photo album, take a photo with your phone's camera, or use our default image. There is a 10 MB max file size limit.
- You can also add a Brand Color that will be featured throughout the virtual challenge. Enter the corresponding hexadecimal color code (ex. #000AAA). If you don't have an official brand color, choose 'Use Default Color'
Add a brief message to participants. Up to 255 characters long. Optional
If you are creating a virtual challenge in conjunction with a cause or charity, feel free to tell participants about it here. You have up to 1000 characters to describe your cause, and you can add a link to your cause's website if it has one. Optional
If you plan on offering a reward of some kind to your participants, you may tell them about it here. Note that it is a serious violation of the Pacer terms of use to solicit personal information including contact information or payment information from other Pacer users. Any reward you offer should consider this limitation. For example, it would be unacceptable to offer giftcards that require participants to provide their email address to you.
Set your Registration Fees
1. Under "Registration Fee" you can choose how much you want to charge participants to join your virtual challenge. Note that your registration fee cannot be changed once your challenge has been published.
2. You will see a preview of your earnings per registration (minus Stripe fee and platform fees) in the "Summary List" view. You can experiment with different registration fees and see how your earnings change.
3. "Swag" - You have the option here of collecting shipping addresses from participants. If you intend to send participation gifts to your participants (like medals or t-shirts), you may wish to collect their shipping address as part of the registration process. If you do not intend to send participation gifts, then you should not require participants to provide a shipping address.
Preview your Challenge
Here you can preview what your challenge would look like to participants before you choose to save. At this point your challenge has not been published and you can still go back and change any details that you'd like. If you are satisfied with what you see here you can "Save" your challenge. If you want to go back and change any details, click on "Previous" to return to prior pages.
Link Your Payout Method
You cannot publish a fundraiser challenge until you've set up a payout method. You must use Stripe to collect payouts.
1. Go to "Payouts"
2. Click on "Connect to Stripe"
3. You will be redirected to the Stripe website and asked to fill in your payout details. This information is stored securely with Stripe and will not be shared with Pacer.
4. After completing your Stripe set up, you'll be redirected back to Pacer. You should now see that your payout information is updated.
Publish Your Challenge
1. Go to "Challenges"
2. Under "Upcoming & Ongoing Challenges" click on "Publish"
3. Confirm that you want to publish your challenge.
Note that after publishing, some aspects of your challenge cannot be edited:
- Challenge type
- Start and end dates
- Total step goal (step challenge)
- Total distance goal (distance challenge)
- Allowing GPS activity only (distance challenge)
- Minimum qualifying distance (pace challenge)
- Daily step goal (step goal challenge)
- Challenge title
- Daily limits (step and distance challenges)
- Cover image
- Icon
- Brand color
- Short description
- Cause or Charity
- Reward(s)
Share your Challenge
Now that your challenge is live, you'll want to start inviting participants. Each challenge has a unique registration website that you can share with your audience or community.
Got more questions?
Please check out our Fundraiser Challenges FAQ for answers to our most frequently asked questions.