Understanding and Setting Goals

Understanding and Setting Goals

Goals provide a clear path for user participation, giving you the ability to transform user obligations, projects, learning objectives, and more into obtainable goals. Both users and Admins can view a user’s progress, and completion of goals, making it easy for everyone to track, and especially beneficial for impact reporting.

Things to Know

Here are some things to know before you start.

  • Goals are a home screen block: The goals block is displayed on the home screen of your app, if there are no goals available for a user the block will disappear from the user’s view. Click here to learn more about home screen blocks.

  • Goals are point-based: Users earn points towards a goal based on the point value assigned to an activity that counts towards that specific goal, currently the only activities that can be associated with a goal are actions, events, places, and surveys.

  • Goals are linked to categories: The activities you would like to link to a goal must all reside within one category. 

  • Goals are prioritized: Goals that have an expiration date will always appear ahead of goals without an expiration date, all other goals will be organized by ‘starts at’ date.

How Users Achieve Goals

When a user opens up your app, they will see their goals on the home screen. You can give different goals to different types of users based on their user group, team, or segments. A user will be able to see their top three goals on their home screen, all other goals are accessible through the ‘view all goals’ button, and users can see any completed goals on their profile.

When a user opens a specific goal they will see all the details about that goal, including a list of activities they need to complete to earn points towards the goal. The activity types that can be included are places to visit, events to attend, actions to do, or surveys to submit. These activities are categorized by their activity type for your convenience. Once a user completes all their goals the block will disappear from the home screen and only rest on their profile.

 
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Creating SMART goals

We suggest if you have multiple types of users interacting with your app to just pick a specific group for this exercise. Once you have completed this and added the goals into your app then feel free to complete this as much as you would like.

Step 1: Make sure your goals cover all program components

The first step to setting goals for your users is to write down all the main components of your program. Does your program involve your participants to improve a specific skill? Give back to their community? Something else? Or all of the above? Below are some component areas to get you started.

Demonstrated competency

Would you like your users to learn a specific skill or set of skills by the time they ‘graduate’ from using your app or as a requirement to participate in your program in the first place? Can you break these skills down into smaller more obtainable goals? Below are some areas you might consider building goals around:

  • Developing STEM + Art Skills: Science, technology, engineering, math, art

  • Developing Social Skills: Interaction, communication, relationship management

  • Developing Life Skills: Financial literacy, civic literacy, physical health, emotional health, resume creation, outdoor exploration

Community improvement components

Would you like your users to interact with their peers or a different sector of their community? How often should they be interacting? Are there deadlines?

  • Volunteering: Can they volunteer their time or skills? Set a period of hours overtime.

  • Civic Engagement: What can they do to improve their city, their state, their nation, or their world through political engagement?

  • Teaching others: Are they supposed to raise awareness or share information with others that would be helpful?

  • Interacting with others: Are they supposed to share the app or knowledge learned on the app with others?

Other components

  • Orientation: Do they have to file any paperwork to get started?

  • Attending meetings: Do they have to attend a certain amount of meetings per quarter?

  • Performing a task: Did they sign up for a task or duty that is performed on a regular basis or should be tracked?

  • Submitting reflections: Do they need to reflect on their experiences?

Step 2: Transforming program components into SMART goals

Now that you have written down all the components of your program it’s time to break them down into SMART goals. Now that your team has a general consensus on what types of goals your users should be working towards now start writing down the SPECIFIC goals you want to set in place for users and organizing them by when they should be completed.

  • Specific (simple, sensible, significant): Why is this goal important? Are there any known barriers?

  • Measurable (meaningful, motivating): Does a user have to complete all of the activities, how many is deemed acceptable to proceed? Does the user complete the same activity over and over again?

  • Achievable (agreed, attainable): List out the activities a user would have to do to complete this goal.

  • Relevant (reasonable, realistic, and resourced, results-based): What is the level of difficulty? Should a user complete other goals first?

  • Time-bound (time-based, time-limited, time/cost limited, timely, time-sensitive).

Timely

Will you give a set of goals to your users each quarter, semester, year? Do users download the app and complete goals at their own pace? Do you have goals organized so that users can start with easy goals, and work up into intermediate and advanced goals?

Well Balanced

Based on the types of goals you identified above are your users seeing a handful of goals related to each type that are easy to accomplish, intermediate, and advanced?

Actionable/Specific

Can you list out the specific behaviors a user would have to do to fulfill this goal? If not please make your goals a little more specific, remember you can track actions (reading something, learning something, downloading something), events attendance (volunteering & meetings) location check-ins, and survey responses (reflections, journals, behavior tracking, task documentation) within our system.

 

 

 

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