Hy Local Guides,
As World Creative & Innovation Day is around the Corner (April 21st), I like to take a moment to talk about how to start an effective Challenge and Initiatives in our community.
We have seen effective challenges and initiatives by Local Guides in various months and days. Going through each of them, I conclude that it’s not what’s best, it’s always what’s effective and simple. There’s actually a list of local guides who have done absolutely good challenges for the community, but if you are looking to go through local guides challenge: I would recommend @TusharSuradkar. His way of engaging and starting a challenge is outstanding.
Let’s dive into what I came to know about how to engage and start a challenge or initiative.
Understanding Community. 
- Before starting a challenge or initiative, go through Connect Guidelines to make sure your challenges or initiative aligns with the guidelines.
- Knowing the community is important. Browse Connect to know more about the theme and conservation about the topics in your challenge or initiative.
Targeted Goal. 
You should have this question in your mind: “How do you think Local Guides contribute to your Challenge or Initiative?”.
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Your Challenge or Initiative should have something to contribute to Google Maps or to Connect. For example: if it’s a Nature Challenge or a type of flower Challenge or a Symbol or Sign Challenge, you can’t go and upload those themed photos in Google Maps & if it’s a Food Challenge, we can upload the photo and share the shop’s Maps location to the community right. So you have to specify what you want and where Local Guides have to contribute in your Challenge or Initiative to avoid accidental Spamming into Google Maps. Please check Make Maps Spam Free initiative by @Tejal and @NareshDarji.
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Your Challenges or Initiatives should always focus on Community Engagement and not just for solo participation by you.
Engaging Themes & Ideas. 
Your Challenges & Initiatives should have an attractive theme for Local Guides to participate in.
- Challenge ideas - Specific Food
Based, Photos of Museums 
, historical sites or Landmarks 
, Nature Related 
, Street Arts, culture, etc.. You can also include one or more themes into the Challenge. For example : @TusharSuradkar’s Chai Pe Charcha shows Tea culture, Local Guides over a Tea and Supports Local Businesses. - Initiative Ideas - Supporting Local Businesses
, Accessibility 
, LGBTQ+ 
related, etc.. Initiatives can be taken into Meetups also. You can check out How @TravellerG and @TusharSuradkar started Collaborative Meetup, a new Meetup Initiative.
Building up your Challenge/Initiative Post. 
- Create an attractive Cover Photo
and engaging Title - This is the first crucial step to have in a challenge or an initiative post. - What to do - State in your post what you want local guides to do and specific any contributions expected like reviews, photos, etc..
- Guidelines📓 - State any specific rules, themes, formats or criteria you want local guides to participate in.
- Duration
- Clearly state the duration of the Challenge, can be for a week, month or whole year. Initiatives may not have to put out the duration as it can stay active. - How to Participate
- clearly state how to participate in the challenge. Comment by a local guide can be also taken as a participation. Participation for Initiatives can be as a post or as a meet-up
Example Post for your Challenge/Initiative.
You should remember that you are the parent/author of your challenge or initiative, so you have to put out an example of how your challenge will look and show how effective it can be for the community as per the contributions on Google Maps or engagement in the Connect Community.
Using Hashtags. 
During the creation of the post, try to create a hashtag # with the title of your Challenge/initiative post. It helps in finding participating posts of other local guides. Adding or creating Hashtag is optional, might be useful if Participant didn’t add the challenge name as title of their post.
Engaging with Participants.
- Give interesting comments and acknowledge them for participating in your Challenge or Initiative.
- Check participating posts by searching by hashtags of your challenges/initiatives.
- Summarise Participating Posts in your original Challenge/Initiative Post and mention the Local Guides to acknowledge them.
- Conduct a meet-up to celebrate successful results of your Challenge/Initiative.
Be patient.
It would take time to have momentum for your challenge or initiate to get participation. This is when your own participation helps to gather up the community. Even if no one Participates in your challenge or initiative, you should always continue to make it a success.
Working Together.
If the theme or subject of a challenge or initiative is bigger or duration of challenges is above 3 months due to the theme, it’s wise to collaborate with Other Local Guides. It actually defines our community and What we are.
For example:
An Initiative has started or revived and a challenge has been put out as a sub part of that. If collaboration is there, there’s more advantage:
- Easy to Manage.
- Initiative and Challenge can be managed by each Local Guide.
- Have a high chance of having more participants.
You can also join with Local Guides to start a challenge, even if its one month challenge.
This is purely in my experiences, Feel free to share your thoughts on how to make Challenges and Initiatives effective in our community!
. Thanks for the suggestions and will look onto in upcoming challenges.