Adding a custom activity

As a program administrator, you can manage and add custom activities to your community for different audiences. An activity could be visible to the company, or just a selected group or smart group. Published activities are seen by members in My Feed

A custom activity is different from polls, quick questions and quizzes because it can include several question types, including multiple-choice, answer ranking, image selection and more. Custom activities can have public responses so that members can see other members’ submissions (to encourage connection and collaboration), or they can be private so that only program administrators can see responses.

Permissions

Only program administrators can create a custom activity; group leaders cannot create custom activities for their groups.

Adding a custom activity

Program administrators can create an activity in one of two ways:

  1. Convert a concept in the Program Calendar.
  2. Add an activity to the Activities page. These steps are described below. 

Activity details

To add a custom activity go to Admin > Create > Activities > Add Activity, select Activity and complete the following details:

  • Title: visible to community members, so interesting titles are recommended.
  • Description: provide a concise explanation of what the user will be doing in the activity. It appears on the activity tile in the feed and on the main page of the activity.
  • Notes: visible to program administrators and can be used to provide instructions or information about the activity to others.
  • Tile Image and Header Image: The same image is recommended for the best user experience.
  • Access: settings for member visibility.
  • Liking enabled: enables community liking (thumbs up) on the activity.
  • Program Objective: assign the activity to a specific program objective.
  • Feed Section: leave as default.
  • Activity Label: labels appear on the activity tile. Common labels include survey, discussion, storytelling, or photo sharing.
  • Popup Display style: leave as default.
  • Response button text: provide text for the call-to-action button. Common choices include participate, sign up, share here, tell us, share your opinion, and answer now.
  • Track Completion: leave as default.
  • Show Summary to Members: leave as default.
  • Indicate Activity is Private: enable to display a lock on the image of the activity when viewed by members. This indicates that submissions are not visible to other members.
  • Advanced: leave as default.

Select Continue to move to the next section.

Building a custom activity form

Your activity is created by dragging and dropping components and inputs from the left-hand side.

Form structure

The activity form has a Page > Group > Input structure, allowing you to group questions and have multiple pages if required. A page must have at least one group, and a group must have at least one input type (question type). 

Select Form Structure on the left-hand side and drag and drop to add a new structure element into the main form. If your browser is too small to see the Form Structure menu, collapse Basic Inputs. Additional pages create new pages on the Activity, however, we recommend one page as long surveys can deter submissions.

Select Page or Group Options to include a title or body for the section. Include a body for additional context, or to link to other resources or reference materials.

 

Basic inputs

Drag and drop your desired inputs into the activity form. Inputs can be used once per activity and you can hover your cursor over inputs for a preview of the input type. 

The different types of basic inputs include:

  • Submission Title: Added to each new activity by default. We recommend this is required for public activities. If the activity is private, and participants can’t see each other’s responses, it is not necessary to include.
  • Description: Added to each new activity by default. We recommend this is required for public activities. Descriptions are displayed on the submission tile in feeds. A description is not required but makes engaging with others’ submissions more interesting.
  • Featured Images: Added to each new activity by default. We recommend this is required for public activities. It is recommended to add the featured image input whenever possible as it makes submission tiles more engaging. Members can upload up to 15 images in this field.
  • Tags: Allows participants to ‘tag’ their submissions, making it easier to search for submissions within the activity.
  • Multiple Choice: Participants can only choose one response from a list of options.
  • Checkboxes: Participants can choose more than one response. Program administrators can choose to apply randomization or make some responses exclusive.
  • Dropdown: Participants can only choose one response from a dropdown menu.
  • Short text: Participants can respond with a short answer.
  • Long text: Participants can respond with a longer descriptive answer. This is similar to the Description field, but the content is not displayed on the submission tile.
  • Slider: Participants move a slider from left to right to correspond with an answer to a question. Responses are reported on a scale from 1 - 100.
  • Rating: Participants rate something on a scale that can be from 1 - 10 options long. Choose the icon that best fits your community, or the question being asked.
  • Image Select: Multi-select images. For optimal display, provide 3, 6 or 9 images. Crop images using the pencil icon and provide a name for each image for reporting purposes. The name is not visible in the activity.
  • Image Upload: A field to upload image file types. These images are not featured on the submission tile.
  • Document Upload: Participants can upload documents, presentations and more to submissions.
  • Video Upload: Participants can upload videos to submissions.

Advanced inputs

Advanced inputs have their own group. You cannot move an advanced input into an existing group that contains basic inputs. The different types of advanced inputs include:

  • Simple Ranking: Members arrange and rank a list of items.
  • Choose and Rank: Members choose a number of items from a larger list of items and rank them.
  • Multiple Choice Grid: A number of questions are displayed in a grid format with the same answer set available for each question. There is a limit of 5 columns.
  • Photo Picker: Members can search a database of images from Unsplash to respond to the question. An optional Long Text field can be included to help a member explain why they chose the photo. It is recommended to include some messaging in the Help Text option with instructions as to how to respond to this question.

Input options

Select Options next to an input to configure additional question settings.

  • Help Text: Appears below the initial question to provide participants with more information.
  • Make this question required: Participants must complete this field to submit. It is recommended to enable this for inputs you wish to report on.
  • If setting a Checkbox input type as required, ensure you set the minimum and maximum number of answers to select. The minimum should be at least 1.
  • You cannot set a Simple Ranking input type as a required question. If members do not move the order of the ranking options presented, the order will remain the same in reports.
  • Flag field as private: The response to this question will only be visible to Program Administrators
  • Filter field in discover app: Leave unchecked; not currently available.
  • Restrict the length of the response: For text-based questions, restrict the length of the response.
  • Hide label on view page: The prompt question will not be shown to a member when submitting, only their response.
  • Set the min and max answers to select: For checkbox and image select inputs, users can be asked to choose a minimum and a maximum number of responses.
  • Randomize order of answers: To help reduce answer bias, certain question types allow you to randomize the order of possible answers. From user to user, randomization will be applied.
  • If you apply randomization but have some response options you would like to omit from being randomized, check the No Random box appearing on the same line. You can adjust where this response option will live in the ordering by dragging and dropping as you see fit.

Conditional logic [Advanced]

Conditional logic is the ability to reveal additional questions based on a previous response to a multiple-choice, checkbox, dropdown, or image-select question within an activity.

  1. Select the Options dropdown on the group that houses the follow-up question.
  2. Select Logic > Add Condition.
  3. Under the Question menu, choose the trigger input question. Only multiple-choice, checkbox, dropdown, or image-select questions can be used.
  4. Under the Answer menu, choose the answer that will lead to the upcoming follow-up questions.
  5. Drag and drop additional inputs to the group to add more follow-up questions.
    • If logic is applied to an advanced input type and you wish to ask multiple follow-up questions, add an additional group for the next question and re-apply the same logic. This is because advanced inputs must have their own group. 

After you have created your custom activity, test, schedule and publish it.

 

Was this article helpful?
0 out of 0 found this helpful

Articles in this section

See more
Announcements
Stay up-to-date on what's happening at Benevity.