Sizing Rewards for Challenge Programs
Purpose
Use this guide when planning how many rewards your challenge program needs, or when deciding whether a reward milestone is set too high or too low. It gives platform-wide participation rates for check-in challenges, aggregated across every Organization partner on OuterSpatial, so no single partner's data is exposed.
The numbers are a baseline from programs that offered no physical rewards. Treat them as the floor, not the forecast: a program with real rewards and real marketing should beat them, and your own projected enrollment is the other half of any sizing.
What the Platform Data Shows
Across the check-in challenges OuterSpatial has run for Organization partners of every size, a consistent pattern holds: a little under half of the people who join ever complete a task, and the share reaching each milestone falls by roughly half each time the count doubles. Challenge size changes who finishes, but barely changes who reaches 5, 10, or 20.
Required Tasks to Complete | Did 1+ | Reached 5 | Reached 10 | Reached 20 | Completed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
5 or fewer | 40–45% | 10–15% | 5–10% | — | 30–40% |
6–15 | 45–50% | 20–25% | 10–15% | 1–3% | 15–20% |
16–30 | 35–40% | 10–15% | 5–10% | 3–5% | 3–5% |
31 or more | 35–40% | 5–10% | 3–5% | 1–3% | under 1% |
Percentages are of everyone enrolled, aggregated across all Organization partners and rounded; no single program is identifiable. These programs offered no physical rewards.
For the largest challenges, the ones shaped like a statewide passport, the useful view is among people who actually started: of active participants, roughly a quarter to a third reach 5 check-ins, about one in six reach 10, around one in twenty reach 20 or 25, and about one in a hundred finish. The most committed one percent typically log 50 or more check-ins, so a finisher of a 50-plus-stop program is real but rare. Programs that have ended run higher at every step than ones still open, since open programs include recent joiners who haven't had time yet.
How to Read the Numbers
These are no-reward programs, so every rate above is a floor. Three things move it.
Rewards with real value raise the middle of the funnel more than the top. A discount worth having pulls someone from 3 check-ins to 5 or from 8 to 10; it does little for the person who joined and never opened the app again. Plan for the 5- and 10-task milestones to run above baseline and for enrollment-to-activation to stay near it.
Marketing changes enrollment, not conversion. A statewide campaign brings more joiners; the share of joiners who reach each rung stays close to the pattern above. Size rewards from your enrollment projection times these rates, then adjust upward for reward value.
Time matters. A program with no end date keeps accumulating finishers. Year-one quantities should be planned on year-one enrollment, and reviewed against actuals at the first renewal.
Planning Rules of Thumb
Start from projected year-one enrollment and apply these shares. Rates for the first rungs are lifted above the no-reward baseline to account for a reward worth earning; the top rung is held near baseline because a full-completion reward only ever reaches the most committed few.
Milestone | Plan For (Share of Enrollment) | Baseline (No Rewards) | Why the Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
First task / activation | 40–50% | 35–50% | Rewards don't move this much; marketing and onboarding do |
5 tasks | 15–25% | 5–25% | The first reward is where value shows up most |
10 tasks | 8–15% | 3–15% | Same lift, smaller base |
20 tasks | 3–6% | 2–4% | Committed participants; reward value matters less than habit |
25 tasks | 2–4% | 1–2% | |
Full completion (30+ stops) | 0.5–2% | under 1% | Rare under any design; never the budget driver |
Two guardrails. Cap every physical reward at the plan quantity and let the platform alert when inventory runs low; an uncapped top-tier t-shirt is an open liability, a capped one is a line item. And prefer discounts over goods for the upper rungs: a discount's cost is margin on a stay the visitor was going to book, so the quantity question mostly disappears.
Worked example at 10,000 year-one enrollments: 1,500–2,500 first-rung rewards, 800–1,500 second-rung, 300–600 third-rung, 50–200 full-completion rewards.
Fulfillment Paths
The platform tracks the entitlement from earned to delivered; goods and shipping are your organization's cost under every path. Pick a path per reward, not per program.
Path | Good For | How It Works | You Decide |
|---|---|---|---|
Discount or voucher code | Stays, dining, activities, retail at your own outlets | Your organization generates single-use codes in its reservation or POS system; platform delivers one per earner, tracks issued → redeemed, reminds before expiry; verified at your point of redemption | Code owner, discount value, expiry |
On-demand print and drop-ship | Stickers, apparel, drinkware, small printable items with no minimums | Visitor claims with size and address; item is produced and shipped per order; cost passed through per unit | Funding model (invoiced as incurred or pre-funded), artwork, size range |
Bulk production, held by your organization | Higher-quality apparel, anything not printable on demand, or anything handed over at a park | Produced in a run to your spec, shipped to you, held as inventory; platform issues a pickup reference and staff confirm handover | Vendor, quantity (use the planning table), where it's stocked |
On-demand suits low-value rewards where per-unit cost matters less than not holding stock. Bulk suits anything you want to control the quality of or distribute in person. Many programs use both: on-demand for the first rung, bulk and organization-held for the top.
What We Need From You to Size Your Program
Projected year-one enrollment, and the marketing plan behind it
The milestone ladder: what count unlocks each rung
The reward at each rung and whether it's a code, an on-demand item, or stock your organization holds
For items your organization holds: whether the quantity is capped and what happens when it runs out
For on-demand items: the funding model and artwork
For codes: who generates them and the expiry window
With those, the planning table turns into a quantity and a cost per rung in one pass.