Contests App Overview
Contests turns everyday work into time-boxed competitions with a real start, a real finish, a winner, and a prize — scored automatically from verified work activity, entered by hand from outside systems, decided by community votes or judges, or predicted bracket-style.
What is the Contests App?
Contests is the episodic layer of the engagement stack. Where Levels & Badges rewards steady progress, Contests creates events: “most open shifts picked up this month,” “first location to 50 safety inspections,” “best holiday storefront photo,” “pick the March Madness bracket,” “highest fundraising total.” Standings update live, leaderboards broadcast to the home dashboard, mobile, and break-room digital signage, and prizes pay out as redeemable Recognitions points, badges on the badge wall, or pure bragging rights.
Core Value Proposition:
- 🎯 Nothing to enter, nothing to game — Metric contests score automatically from the same verified activity ledger that powers Levels & Badges. People do their jobs; the standings move.
- 🤝 Fair by design — Per-capita team scoring lets a six-person store beat a forty-person one; most-improved handicapping and cooperative goals keep the same stars from winning everything.
- 🛡️ Governed, not chaotic — Manager- and employee-created contests pass through an admin approval queue, spend only admin-delegated prize budgets, and lock their rules the moment they go live. Every intervention is audited.
- 📺 Everywhere your team is — Home-dashboard widget, a mobile play surface (join, photo entry, voting, picks), digital-signage leaderboards, a weekly email digest, and an Ask AI agent.
Key Concepts (How It Works)
If you only read one section, read this — it explains the model behind the screens.
The four scoring modes: metric, manual, submission, and prediction
Every contest has exactly one scoring mode, and it determines where the score comes from:
- Metric contests score automatically from the platform’s verified activity ledger (the same XP-event stream that powers Levels & Badges). The creator picks which actions count — from a curated catalog of platform-verified actions like shift pickups, completed inspections, passed quizzes, or recognitions given — and whether to count events or XP points. Nobody submits anything; standings are computed from work that actually happened.
- Manual contests track numbers that live outside the platform — sales dollars, steps walked, fundraising totals, a custom KPI. An admin or the contest’s creator posts scores from a dedicated score-entry page, one at a time or by CSV upload, and every write re-snapshots the leaderboard. Contests can carry a unit label (e.g. “miles”, “$”) so the board reads correctly.
- Submission contests collect entries — a photo and/or a story per person, one entry each. The winner is decided either by community votes (one vote per person per entry, you can’t vote for your own) or by a judge panel (named judges score each entry 0–10; the average decides). Submission contests get a judging window after the end date so voting and judging can wrap up.
- Prediction contests are pick-em and bracket formats: the organizer posts events with options and point values, everyone locks in picks before each event’s lock time, and correct picks on resolved events earn the event’s points. When both events of a bracket pair have results, the next-round matchup is generated automatically.
Two common points of confusion:
- Submission and prediction contests are always “highest score wins.” Target-based and improvement-based goals only apply to metric and manual contests, because only a running count can be raced against.
- Manual contests can’t run “most improved.” Improvement is measured against a pre-contest baseline computed from the activity ledger — and external numbers have no such history.
The four goal types
- Highest score — classic leaderboard; the top of the standings at the end wins.
- First to target — a race: the first entrant whose running total crosses the target wins, and the contest completes at that moment (no dead air racing out the clock). Ties are broken deterministically — there are no co-winners.
- Everyone reaches the target (cooperative) — not a race against each other: every entrant who reaches the target wins the top prize. Because this pays every achiever, it can’t be funded from a fixed delegated prize budget — cooperative contests use badge or bragging-rights prizes when created by non-admins.
- Most improved — each entrant competes against their own baseline: their score over the same-length window immediately before the contest, frozen at activation. The biggest improvement wins, which levels the field between veterans and newcomers.
Individual vs. team contests — and why joining works differently
- Individual contests are always opt-in. Nobody is publicly ranked without joining. You enroll yourself (one tap on mobile), and you can withdraw. In submission contests, entering a submission is joining; in prediction contests, making your first pick is joining — every path runs the same eligibility gate. When you can’t join, the button tells you why (not yet open, already ended, outside the audience, disqualified, creator of a funded contest) rather than failing silently.
- Team contests enroll automatically. The teams are your real org units — locations or departments in the contest’s audience — snapshotted when the contest goes live. Every member is auto-enrolled; the team’s roster size is frozen at that moment so mid-contest roster changes can’t game the math.
- Per-capita scoring (team contests) divides the team total by the frozen roster size, so small teams compete fairly with big ones.
Two automatic exclusions: if the contest is set to exclude managers, anyone with direct reports in the contest can’t compete against their own team; and the creator of a budget-funded contest can never win their own prize (blocked at join and again at payout).
What makes someone a contests admin, a manager, or a member?
- A contests admin is anyone with the business Admin/Owner role or an app-admin grant for Contests. Admins govern everything: approvals, prize budgets, analytics, settings, and overrides.
- A manager (for Contests purposes) is anyone with at least one direct report — it’s derived from the org chart, not a setting.
- Everyone else is a member.
The “Who can create contests” setting (admins only / managers and above / everyone) decides who sees the Create button, but the tiers aren’t equal:
| Creator tier | Audience allowed | Prize types allowed | Needs admin approval? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Admin | Anyone (whole business, any location/department) | Points, badge, bragging rights | No — scheduled immediately |
| Manager | Only their own team/location | Points only from their own delegated budget, badge, bragging rights | Yes — always |
| Member | Only their own team | Bragging rights only | Yes — always |
Prize budgets vs. prizes — how points prizes are funded
A prize is what winners get: redeemable points, a badge on the Levels & Badges wall, or bragging rights. A prize budget is a governance object: a points pool an admin delegates to a specific manager, so managers can fund real prizes without being able to mint points at will. When an admin approves a manager’s points contest, the full prize table is reserved from that budget; at payout the paid amount is confirmed and any unpaid remainder is released (cancellation releases the whole hold). A manager can only ever spend what an admin granted. Budgets can be revoked (with a required reason) or given an expiry date — expired budgets are labelled as such and swept automatically.
One hard rule with no setting behind it: prediction contests can only award badges or bragging rights — pick-the-winner formats with points prizes are locked out at the model level for compliance reasons.
Rules lock at activation — corrections are overrides, not edits
The moment a contest goes live, its scoring contract freezes: structure, scoring mode, goal, target, scored actions, window, audience, prize — all immutable. That’s the deal entrants joined under. (The prize section also becomes read-only once a contest is approved, so an approved budget hold can’t be re-pointed.) Admins correct problems through audited overrides instead: adjust a score (a +/- delta with a mandatory reason, layered on top of the computed score — never replacing it), disqualify or reinstate an entrant, end the contest early, or cancel it. Every override requires a reason and lands in the append-only audit trail, alongside approvals, rejections, budget grants, and program lifecycle changes.
Before a contest is live, the creator (or an admin) can still edit it freely, and a rejected contest goes back to the creator with the reason — it reappears in a Drafts section on the dashboard, and saving it again resubmits it for approval.
Programs vs. seasons
Both are containers that group child contests with roll-up standings — but they answer different needs:
- A program is a corporate campaign (e.g. “Q4 Safety Cup”) whose child contests fan out across districts or locations; the roll-up shows who’s leading the campaign overall.
- A season is a recurring series (e.g. “Monthly Pickup Challenge”): the platform automatically generates the next round from the season’s template on a weekly, biweekly, or monthly cadence, and the roll-up crowns the series champion.
Roll-up standings use placement points by default (1st = 10, 2nd = 7, 3rd = 5, 4th = 3, 5th = 1 — configurable per program), which rewards consistent podium finishes; a raw score-sum method is available when every round measures the same thing. Only metric-mode templates can power a season — submission and prediction rounds can’t recur automatically.
Both have a lifecycle: an admin (or the creator) can end a program or season — which stops a season from generating further rounds while children already running finish on their own schedule — and then archive it as historical.
Contests vs. challenges (duels)
A challenge is the lightweight, person-to-person version: you pick a coworker, pick the actions that count and a duration, and send it. If they accept, the platform spins up a real two-person contest behind the scenes and activates it immediately — so the duel rides the ordinary scoring, standings, and payout engine with no separate rules. Duels are private to their two participants and don’t appear on the public contest list. In works-council mode (team-only), duels are disabled entirely, because they individually rank two people.
At a Glance
| 🎨 Contest Templates | 🏁 Scoring Modes | 🔗 Integrations | 📱 Mobile Ready |
|---|---|---|---|
| 32 ready-made | 4 (metric, manual, submission, prediction) | 6 apps | ✅ Yes |
Perfect For:
- 🏪 Frontline and multi-location operations — location-vs-location competitions over real operational metrics (shift pickups, inspections, safety actions) with per-capita fairness
- 👥 Managers who want to motivate their own team — create contests scoped to their own people, funded from an admin-granted budget, under admin approval
- 🏢 HR and engagement leaders — seasonal campaigns, roll-up programs, and honest analytics (participation, engagement lift vs. a control group, 30-day behavior retention)
How It Works
The Contest Lifecycle
┌───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ CONTEST LIFECYCLE │
├───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ │
│ ┌────────┐ non-admin ┌──────────────────┐ approve ┌─────────┐ │
│ │ DRAFT │───────────────▶│ PENDING APPROVAL │────────────▶│SCHEDULED│ │
│ └────────┘ └──────────────────┘ └────┬────┘ │
│ │ admin creators skip the queue ▲ reject │ │
│ └───────────────────────────────────────┘ (back to │ at │
│ creator w/ │ start│
│ reason) ▼ time │
│ ┌──────────┐ judging window ┌─────────┐ rules lock ┌────────┐ │
│ │COMPLETED │◀───────────────────│ JUDGING │◀───────────────│ ACTIVE │ │
│ └────┬─────┘ (submission mode) └─────────┘ teams snapshot└────┬───┘ │
│ │ baselines freeze │ │
│ │ metric/manual complete directly at end time ────────────┘ │
│ ▼ │
│ 🏆 PAYOUT: winners picked per goal type → points credited / │
│ badges awarded / bragging rights → winner notification + email │
│ │ │
│ ▼ │
│ 📁 ARCHIVED (filed away; still viewable in History) │
│ │
└───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
A background sweep advances contests automatically every few minutes: scheduled contests activate at their start time (rules lock, teams snapshot, baselines freeze), submission contests move to judging at their end time, and everything completes on schedule — first-to-target races complete the moment someone crosses the line. Payout runs automatically on completion. If a judge panel never scored anything, the sweep holds the contest in judging for a bounded grace period and pings the panel rather than silently closing with no winners.
Integration Ecosystem
┌─────────────────┐
│ CONTESTS │
└────────┬────────┘
│
┌──────────────┬──────────────────┼──────────────────┬──────────────┐
▼ ▼ ▼ ▼ ▼
┌───────────┐ ┌────────────┐ ┌─────────────┐ ┌───────────────┐ ┌───────────┐
│ Levels & │ │Recognitions│ │ Digital │ │Home Dashboard │ │ Ask AI │
│ Badges │ │ Points │ │ Signage │ │ & Mobile │ │ Agent │
│ XP ledger │ │ economy │ │leaderboards │ │ widget + /m/ │ │ 11 tools │
│ + badges │ │ (prizes) │ │ │ │ │ │ │
└───────────┘ └────────────┘ └─────────────┘ └───────────────┘ └───────────┘
│
┌────────┴────────┐
│ Asset Library │
│ (cover images) │
└─────────────────┘
Key Features
🏁 Four Contest Formats, Four Ways to Win
| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| Metric contests | Auto-scored from the verified activity ledger — pick the actions that count (from a curated platform catalog) and count events or XP points |
| Manual contests | External numbers (sales, steps, fundraising) posted by an admin or the creator, one at a time or by CSV, with an optional unit label |
| Submission contests | Photo/story entries, one per person; community voting or a 0–10 judge panel; built-in judging window |
| Prediction contests | Pick-em events and auto-advancing brackets with per-event points and pick lock times |
| Goal types | Highest score, first to target (race ends at the finish line), everyone-reaches-target (cooperative), most improved (vs. your own frozen baseline) |
| Team or individual | Team contests snapshot locations/departments and auto-enroll; individual contests are strictly opt-in |
| Per-capita scoring | Team totals divided by activation-time roster size — small teams compete fairly |
| Cover images | Give a contest a poster image from the shared Asset Library, or let it fall back to a generated gradient |
Use Case: “First location to 50 completed safety inspections” — a team race across locations, scored automatically as inspections are completed, that ends the moment a location hits 50.
💡 Pro Tip: Worried the same top performers win everything? Run a most-improved contest — everyone competes against their own recent baseline, so the biggest gains win, not the biggest numbers.
🎨 Template Gallery (32 Ready-Made Contests)
A curated gallery of 32 out-of-the-box templates across six categories — culture (7), engagement (5), operations (5), learning (4), safety (3), and seasonal (8). Nine are featured, and nine carry seasonal months: seasonal templates get badged and boosted during their season and sink to the bottom out of season (planning ahead still works).
| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| One-click launch | “Use template” opens the create form prefilled with the format, scoring rules, and a sensible duration |
| Category filter + featured row | Browse by culture / engagement / operations / learning / safety / seasonal |
| Save as template | Capture any contest’s format (never its window, audience, or live data) as a tenant custom template — creator or admin only |
| Custom template management | Template creators and contests admins can delete their own custom entries; system templates are curated centrally |
🙋 Employee- and Manager-Created Contests (Governed UGC)
When enabled, contests stop being an admin-only broadcast and become something teams run themselves — inside guardrails:
| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| Creator tiers | Admins only (default) / managers and above / everyone — an app setting |
| Scope limits | Managers and members can only target org units they actually belong to |
| Prize limits | Members: bragging rights only. Managers: points prizes only from their own delegated budget |
| Approval queue | Every non-admin contest waits for admin approval; approvers get an action-required notification; rejection returns it to the creator with the reason in a dashboard Drafts section, and saving resubmits |
| Delegated prize budgets | Admins grant point pools to specific managers (with optional expiry); reserve-on-approve / confirm-on-payout / release-on-cancel accounting means budgets can never be overdrawn. Revoking requires a reason; expired budgets are labelled and swept |
| Works-council mode | An org-level setting (business-wide or per selected locations) that forces team structure + cooperative goals so no individual is publicly ranked — and disables 1v1 duels |
🥊 1v1 Challenges (Duels)
Challenge a coworker to a short head-to-head on the actions you both do. Pick an opponent, pick the scoring actions and a duration, and send it — they get an action-required invite and can accept, decline, or watch you withdraw it. Accepting spins up a real two-person contest that rides the normal scoring and standings engine. The Challenges tab shows challenges received, challenges sent, and your live duels. Disabled entirely in works-council (team-only) mode.
📊 Standings That Motivate (Not Humiliate)
The leaderboard shows the top 10, your own row, and the “chaser” — the one entrant directly ahead of you. It never renders the full ranked tail: being #4 of 6 is motivating; being #212 of 220 is the last time that person opens the app. Standings snapshots refresh every few minutes for live contests; score corrections fold in on the next refresh, and mobile shows how fresh the board is.
Metric contests also get a momentum chart — the horse race: cumulative daily score for the leader and for you (or the runner-up if you’re already leading), so you can see whether you’re gaining ground, not just where you sit.
Personal Stats (widget, mobile, digest): your rank, your score, the gap to the person ahead, entrant count, time remaining.
🏆 Prizes, Ceremony & the Rewards Economy
| Prize type | What winners get |
|---|---|
| Points | Redeemable Recognitions points credited to the winner’s rewards balance, with a per-rank prize table (1st/2nd/3rd…) |
| Badge | A winner’s badge on the Levels & Badges badge wall |
| Bragging rights | The win itself — free, and the only option for member-created and prediction contests |
When a contest finishes it gets a closing ceremony: the top-3 podium, the “unsung grinder” (the most-active entrant who didn’t place), and — if you won — a shareable win card generated as a PNG. Winners also get an email with that card inline.
Beyond prizes, competing feeds the progression system: entrants who actually scored earn participation XP (10 points), winners earn win XP (50 points), and dedicated contest badges unlock over a career — Contender (first contest), Regular (10 contests), Champion (first win), Dynasty (5 wins). Team wins fan out one award per active team member. Payout is fully idempotent — re-runs can never double-credit.
🥇 My Wins, History & Exports
| Surface | What it shows |
|---|---|
| My wins | A personal trophy case: every contest you’ve placed in, most recent first, with total wins and first-place count — and the win card where one exists. Strictly your own awards |
| History | The full list of finished and archived contests (the dashboard shows only a teaser) |
| Standings CSV export | Admins can export any contest’s complete ranked board — the on-screen top-N cap is a motivation choice, not an access limit |
| Analytics CSV export | The selected contest’s analytics rollup as CSV |
🗂️ Programs & Seasons
| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| Programs | Corporate campaigns grouping child contests (e.g. district-vs-district) with live roll-up standings |
| Seasons | Recurring series that auto-generate the next round (weekly / biweekly / monthly) from a chosen metric template |
| Roll-up scoring | Placement points (10/7/5/3/1, configurable) for consistent-podium champions, or raw score sums |
| Cross-contest identity | Team roll-ups track the underlying location/department, so standings survive across rounds |
| Lifecycle controls | End a program or season (a season stops generating rounds; children in flight finish normally), then archive it — both audited |
🛡️ Admin Overrides & the Audit Trail
Live contests are rule-locked; admins intervene through audited, reason-required operations:
| Operation | Effect |
|---|---|
| Adjust score | Append-only +/- delta on an entrant, folded into standings on the next refresh — computed scores are never overwritten |
| Disqualify / Reinstate | Removes an entrant from (or returns them to) the standings; DQ is an admin decision that re-joining can’t clear |
| End early | Finalizes standings now (submission contests move to judging so voting can wrap up) and triggers payout |
| Cancel | Stops the contest and releases any reserved prize budget |
Everything — approvals, rejections, overrides, budget grants/revocations, program create/end/archive, prediction results — lands in an append-only audit ledger.
🖼️ Submission Moderation
Community-visible entries come with a safety net: any user can report an entry (inappropriate / spam / harassment / not relevant), reports flow into the platform’s central content-moderation queue, and admins can remove an entry — it drops out of the gallery and standings but is retained for the audit trail. You can’t report your own entry, and you can’t vote for your own.
📈 Analytics & Insights
Standard Analytics (admin, per contest):
- Participation — enrolled vs. eligible audience, as a rate
- Engagement lift — daily-active rate during the contest vs. the same-length pre-contest baseline, with eligible-but-not-enrolled colleagues as the control group
- Metric movement — daily counts of the contest’s scored actions
- Business impact — the contest’s own outcome measures over the window
- 30-day behavior retention — do people keep doing the behavior after the contest ends, week by week, vs. the control group?
Snapshots compute daily (with an on-demand “Refresh now”), and keep computing for 30 days after completion so the retention curve is captured honestly. If behavior reverts the day the contest ends, this is where it shows. Everything is exportable as CSV.
🤖 AI Agent
The Contests agent is available in Ask AI (toggleable in settings) with 11 tools:
- See what’s running — list live/upcoming/finished contests, check any contest’s standings including your own rank and who you’re chasing
- My contests — your enrollments with rank and score, plus contests you could join
- Join or leave a contest — enrolls or withdraws you with every eligibility rule enforced (confirmation required)
- Launch from a template — create a contest from the gallery (confirmation required; all creator-tier policy rules apply)
- Predictions — see your picks and open events; make or change a pick before lock (confirmation required)
- Admin governance — pending approvals, prize budgets with remaining points, and per-contest analytics
Every agent write routes through the same services as the UI, so the agent and the screens can never disagree on the rules.
🔔 Notifications
In-app (bell/push) — all gated under a registered “contests” notification category, and demo/sample contests never notify anyone:
| Type | When it fires |
|---|---|
| Contest started | Every enrolled entrant, the moment the contest activates |
| Open for enrollment | A one-shot “announce” invite to audience members who haven’t joined yet |
| Rank nudges | You took the lead / moved into the prize ranks / slipped out of them — only on the refresh where the boundary is actually crossed, never every tick |
| Final hour | One-time last call to every active entrant |
| You won | Winners, with their rank and exactly what they won |
| Contest ended | Results-are-in fan-out to everyone who didn’t win, including their final rank |
| Judging open / closing / overdue | The judge panel when their window opens, when entries still need scores, and — with admins looped in — if the window expired with nothing scored |
| No winners declared | Admins + creator, when a contest closed with zero judge scores and the budget hold was released |
| Picks lock soon | Prediction players who haven’t picked a given event yet, before it locks |
| Approval requested / decided | Approvers get an action-required notice; the creator learns the outcome, including the rejection reason |
| Challenge created / accepted / declined | The 1v1 duel invite loop |
Email — two, and only two:
| Description | |
|---|---|
| Weekly digest | Monday-morning standings summary for everyone in a live contest: rank, score, gap to the person ahead — plus open contests they could still join. Off by default; enabled per tenant in settings |
| Winner award | “You won” email with the shareable win-card image inline, sent per award at payout |
📺 Digital Signage, Dashboard & Mobile
| Surface | What shows |
|---|---|
| Digital signage | One leaderboard slide per live contest — for break-room screens; gated by an app setting and per-screen content rules |
| Home dashboard widget | Up to 3 of your live contests with rank, gap to the person ahead, and countdown |
Mobile (/m/apps/contests) |
A real play surface, not just a viewer: live-contest list with your rank, standings detail (top 10 + you + your chaser) with freshness, one-tap join/withdraw, camera-first photo entry, one-tap voting and reporting, and prediction picks. Phone browsers are redirected automatically. Authoring and admin stay desktop-only |
User Roles & Permissions
| Role | Capabilities |
|---|---|
| Employee (member) | Browse and join individual contests, submit entries, vote, make prediction picks, comment, report entries, view standings, send and answer 1v1 challenges, see their own trophy case and full contest history; create own-team bragging-rights contests when the “everyone” tier is enabled (admin approval required) |
| Manager | Everything members can do, plus (when “managers and above” is enabled): create contests for their own team/location, fund points prizes from an admin-granted budget — always via the approval queue. Managers with reports in a contest can be excluded from competing against their own team |
| Contests Admin | Create anything for anyone with no approval step; approve/reject queue; grant/revoke prize budgets; run programs & seasons (including end/archive); enter manual scores; audited overrides (adjust score, DQ/reinstate, end early, cancel); analytics + CSV exports; settings; delete custom templates; moderate entries |
Two capabilities sit with admins or the contest’s own creator: entering manual scores, and ending/archiving a program or season they created.
How We Compare
See how MangoApps stacks up against dedicated gamification platforms:
| Feature | MangoApps | Spinify | SalesScreen | Centrical |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Real-time contest leaderboards | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Auto-scored from work systems | ✅ built-in activity ledger | ✅ via CRM | ✅ via CRM | ✅ |
| Built for frontline operations (shifts, safety, inspections) | ✅ | ❌ sales-team focus | ❌ sales-team focus | ⚡ CX/learning focus |
| Part of a full workforce platform (no integration project) | ✅ | 💰 separate product | 💰 separate product | 💰 separate product |
| Legend: ✅ Included | ❌ Not Available | 💰 Paid Add-on / separate purchase | ⚡ Limited |
Why MangoApps?
- 🔗 Unified Platform — Contests scores the work your team already does in Scheduling, Inspections, Training, and Recognition — no CRM connector or data pipeline to build
- 💰 Real prize economy — winners get points they can actually redeem, in the same rewards system as Recognition
- 🤖 AI-Native — an Ask AI agent that can check standings, join contests, and launch templates conversationally
Getting Started
For Employees
- Open Contests from the apps menu (or the Contests card on your home dashboard)
- Find a live or upcoming individual contest and tap Join — individual contests are always opt-in
- For submission contests, enter your photo/story; for prediction contests, lock in picks before each event closes
- Challenge a coworker to a duel from the Challenges tab if you want something head-to-head
- Watch your rank, the person you’re chasing, and the countdown — on desktop, mobile, the dashboard widget, and the Monday digest. Check My wins for your trophy case
For Managers
- Ask your admin to enable managers and above creation (and grant you a prize budget if you want to award points)
- Pick a template from the gallery — or build your own contest scoped to your team or location
- Submit; your contest goes to the admin approval queue and schedules automatically once approved
- If someone shouldn’t compete against their own team, use the exclude managers option when creating
For Administrators
- Enable the Contests app for your business, then open Admin → Settings to choose who can create contests and switch on the weekly digest, rank nudges, feed announcements, signage leaderboards, and the AI agent
- Launch your first contest from the 32-template gallery — start with a metric contest so there’s nothing to collect
- Grant prize budgets to managers you want funding their own prizes; review the Approvals queue as submissions arrive
- Group related contests into a Program, or set up a Season for a recurring series
- Check Analytics after your first contest — participation, engagement lift vs. control, and whether the behavior stuck after it ended. Export the standings or the rollup as CSV when you need it outside the app
Best Practices
- ✅ Start with a metric contest from a template — zero entry friction, nothing to moderate, and standings move on day one
- ✅ Use per-capita scoring for mixed-size teams — raw totals just crown the biggest location
- ✅ Rotate goal types — follow a highest-score contest with a most-improved one so different people get to win
- ✅ Keep contests short — the templates default to 1–4 weeks; a contest with no visible finish line stops being a contest
- ✅ Delegate prize budgets instead of making every prize yourself — managers know what motivates their own team, and the reserve/confirm accounting keeps spending inside the grant
- ✅ Name your judges before you launch a judge-panel contest — an unscored panel holds the contest in judging and can end with no winners at all
- ✅ Turn on the signage leaderboard for break rooms — frontline workers who never open a laptop still see the race
- ✅ Read the retention curve in Analytics — a contest that lifted behavior for 30 days after it ended is worth running again
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Can I be put on a contest leaderboard without agreeing to it?
A: Not in an individual contest — those are strictly opt-in, and you can withdraw. Team contests enroll every member of the participating locations/departments automatically, but the ranking is of teams, not individuals. Organizations can additionally enforce a policy — business-wide or for specific locations — that only allows team contests with cooperative goals, so no individual is ever publicly ranked (this also turns off 1v1 duels).
Q: Why can’t I edit my contest anymore?
A: It went live. At activation the rules — scoring, goal, window, audience, prize — freeze, because they’re the contract entrants joined under. (The prize section locks a little earlier, at approval, since the budget hold is already reserved.) If something genuinely needs correcting, an admin can apply an audited override — score adjustment, disqualification, early end, or cancellation — each with a mandatory reason.
Q: Can I run a contest on numbers that aren’t in MangoApps — like sales or steps?
A: Yes — that’s what a manual contest is for. You (as admin or the contest’s creator) enter scores from a dedicated score-entry page while the contest is live, either one participant at a time or by uploading a CSV of identifier + value. Only enrolled participants are accepted; anything else is reported as skipped. Note that most-improved isn’t available on manual contests, because there’s no automatic baseline to measure against.
Q: Where do prize points come from — can a manager just create points?
A: No. Points prizes on manager-created contests are funded exclusively from a prize budget an admin explicitly granted to that manager. The full prize table is reserved from the budget at approval, confirmed as winners are paid, and released if the contest is cancelled — a manager can never spend more than their grant.
Q: Why can’t my prediction contest award points?
A: Pick-the-winner contests are limited to badges and bragging rights by design — points prizes on prediction formats are gambling-adjacent in several jurisdictions, so the platform locks this at the product level with no per-tenant override.
Q: What happens if our judges never score the entries?
A: The contest doesn’t quietly close with no winners. When the judging window expires with zero scores, the platform holds the contest in judging for a bounded grace period and sends an urgent notice to the panel plus a heads-up to admins. If the grace runs out, no prizes are awarded, any reserved budget is released, and admins and the creator get a “no winners declared” notice explaining why — entrants still keep their participation credit.
Related Resources
- Recognition App Overview — The points economy contest prizes pay into, and the rewards redemption flow
- Digital Signage App Overview — Put live contest leaderboards on break-room screens
- Apps Overview — The full MangoApps app ecosystem
Give work a finish line — and let the standings do the motivating.