Participating in Challenges

OuterSpatial's organization partners run challenges throughout the year to help them collect feedback, answer questions (like "What's most important to backcountry campers?" or "What kind of damage occurred to this trail during the last storm?), and encourage visitors to get outside in new and exciting ways. If there are no challenges currently available in your OuterSpatial community, check back regularly; organizations run regular seasonal challenges and many organizations plan to publish challenges in the coming months.

Getting Started

To get started with a challenge, you can either tap on the "Challenges" tab on your community's home screen and select a challenge there or you can follow an invite link or scan a QR code to access a specific challenge.

When you're ready to start participating in a challenge, tap on the "Participate" button:

If you are not already logged in to your OuterSpatial account, you'll be prompted to log in before continuing. Next, you must view and accept the rules of the challenge and start participating. 

Troubleshooting

If you run into issues while trying to start participating in a challenge, you can follow these steps to troubleshoot:

1. Ensure you have an internet connection. A network connection is required to start participating in a challenge. After you've started participating, however, you can complete challenge tasks even while offline.
2. Ensure you're on the latest version of the OuterSpatial app by checking for an update in the Apple App Store or Google Play.

If neither of these steps solve your problem, reach out to our Visitor Support team by emailing visitors@outerspatial.com.

Getting Back to a Challenge

Once you've started participating in a challenge, you can access it again to check in on your progress and respond to a challenge task a couple of different ways:

1. Via the "Challenges" tab of the community home screen.
2. Via the "Challenges" section of the main "Me" tab.

A challenge will show up in both of these places even if it's invite-only once you're participating in it.

Completing Challenge Tasks

Each challenge is made up of one or more "tasks". Depending on the challenge, you'll need to complete one or more of the tasks to successfully complete the challenge. Currently, the two supported task types are "Questionnaire" and "Check-in":

1. To complete a "Questionnaire" challenge task, you must answer one or more question.
2. To complete a "Check-in" challenge task, you must check-in while located within ~5,000 feet of the location (area, point of interest, trail, or outing) that's attached to the challenge task.

In either case, you can initiate a response to a challenge task by tapping on its associated card in the "To Do" list.

If the challenge task is of type "Questionnaire", after tapping the challenge task card you'll be presented with a questionnaire form. Walk through this form to complete the challenge task.

If the challenge task is of type "Check-in", after tapping the challenge task card you'll be presented with the check-in screen. Check-in to the location, optionally adding a description and a photo, to complete the challenge task.

As you complete challenge tasks, the cards of the task you complete will move from the "To Do" tab to the "Done" tab.

Once you've completed the minimum number of challenge tasks required by a challenge (remember that this varies from challenge to challenge), the button on the challenge screen will change to "Completed" with a green color. Some organizations may follow up with you via email once you've completed a challenge to send you a reward or congratulate/thank you.

Offline Support

Once you've started participating in a challenge, the rest of the challenge functionality will work even when you're using the OuterSpatial app in low network or no network situations. You can respond to challenge tasks while offline, but, if/when you do so, you must submit your challenge task responses when you get back into network service.

To submit challenge task responses that were saved while offline, come back to the challenge screen, tap on the "More" button in the upper, right-hand corner, and select "Submit Pending Responses". This will submit the challenge task responses that were saved while offline.