Overview
Any Count.It challenge can include teams. On Count.It, group admins create teams, and challenge participants add themselves to those teams. Just like individuals, teams are displayed on the challenge path. While individuals have circular avatars, teams are represented by hexagons with the team's initials.
As a team's members accumulate points, their team progresses from the challenge start toward the finish.
Team Size & Score
A team's score in a challenge is equal to the average of the scores of its members. Because teams progress based on the average of member scores, a team with 10 people can compete fairly against a team with 20 or even 40 people. Teams can be of any size — Count.It does not enforce a minimum or maximum number of team members. As a general rule, however, smaller teams will drive more accountability.
Teams scores are updated dynamically any time any team member syncs new activity data.
Team Profile
Users can tap on a team icon to see the team stats as well as an "internal" leaderboard of its members—and each member's contribution to the team score.
(NB: Being on a team does not prevent a user from also showing up on their own on the challenge page.)
Creating Teams
Admins can add teams to a challenge when they create a challenge, or any time thereafter. To add or edit teams, tap on the "edit challenge" icon at the top of your challenge screen:
On the edit challenge screen, simply tap the "Add" link in the teams section to add a team, (or tap the team name to edit that team's info.)
On the "Add Team" screen, add the team's name, and hit the "Save" button to add the team.
Create Team Goals & Rewards
Admins create team goals and rewards just as they goals and rewards for individuals or the group as a whole.
For all the details on adding goals and rewards for teams, please see: How do I create goals and rewards for my challenge?
Joining Teams
On Count.It challenge participants join their team via the Challenge Info screen. This takes just a few clicks. Admins can not manually place users to teams.
Very often, groups create teams that mirror existing parts of their organization, i.e. office locations, divisions, job junctions, etc. In this case, users will know what team they are on by default.
For all the details on how a user joins their team, please see: How do I join my challenge team?
Randomly Generating Teams
Sometimes admins want to create teams from scratch, i.e. teams that are not based on existing things like office location, department, job function, etc. While admins can not actually construct the teams in the app, they can get to the same place fairly easily. It just takes a bit of sequencing and communication, especially as you may not know in advance how many people will sign up for the challenge.
Here is a basic process:
Create your challenge, and invite people to join it. Set a deadine for joining prior to the actual start of the challenge. Advise your participants that they should join the challenge by the deadline to be included on a team.
Once you have people in the challenge, create your teams. (See above.) You can create as many teams as you like, but note that the number of teams will determine you team size. (Again, smaller teams drive greater accountability.) Once you have your teams, assign a number to each of them. For example, if you have 8 teams, assign the numbers 1-8. You'll use this later. The number is not the name. You can name your teams however you like.
Once your challenge has teams, your challenge members will be able to easily join them, BUT they need to know which team they're on. To give them this information, you need to know! This means you will assign your challenge members to teams "behind the scenes," and then tell them which team they're on so they can join.
The best way to do this assigning of team membership is using a spreadsheet. Sign in to your Count.It Admin dashboard, click over to Reports, and download the challenge report. This will give you the list of members, and you can open this in Excel or Google Sheets or other spreadsheet program.
Create a column next to each user's name. You will now add a team number for each member in that column. You can do this manually, or you can use the random number feature in Excel or Google Sheets. (Here's a useful Help article on random number generating.)
Once you have assigned your users to teams, you need to let your team members know which team they're on, so they can join. Either send them a message, or post the list where everyone can see it. Nice job, you're done!