Brands

Creating assets for your Sponsored Challenge: Part 2

Creating assets for your Sponsored Challenge: Part 2

Welcome back to our comprehensive guide to creating great assets for a Sponsored Challenge. Next up: imagery and creative.

Imagery

As the saying goes: “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Use and upload your own creative within your Challenge, so you can make your brand stand out from the crowd. Choose pictures that represent who you are and what you stand for.

From top to bottom, here are the images you need:

Images you'll need

Hero Image

This is the main banner for your Challenge. It appears at the top of the challenge page, as well as within the challenge gallery. The same image appears on both web and mobile versions of the Challenge page, and should be authentic, inspirational and make a subtle reference to the Challenge.

Hero image guidance

These images need to sum up your brand. It should be a photograph, without overlaid graphics, wordmarks, or logos. It should also not be a product shot on a plain or white background. We use dynamic scaling, meaning the top and bottom of the image will be cropped based on the width of the screen on which it is being viewed.

Almost no cropping occurs on mobile, but we want to ensure the image looks great on web, so please refrain from putting any key details at the very top or very bottom of the image.

Challenge Badge

This is the avatar of your Challenge so it should be simple, unique, engaging, and easy to associate with your company/organization. It should also refer specifically to the Challenge, and should not just be your brand’s logo. The challenge badge will be awarded to athletes once they have completed the Challenge, and will live in their Trophy Case on their profile forever!

Reward Image

This image lives on your Challenge page and is pulled into the completion email athletes receive when they reach the Challenge goal. It should illustrate your Challenge reward, and unlike the hero Image, it’s fine for this to be a product shot. You can feature text overlays as well if you wish, but this is not recommended if your Challenge is being translated as we can only serve one image to all markets.

Reward Image Guidance

If adding text, remember that the image will also be visible to athletes who haven't completed the challenge yet, so don't use "congratulations" messaging within the image itself.

The Nitty Gritty Technical Stuff

Filetypes

All images must be high-res PNG files

Size

No larger than 1.99MB

Resolution

No wider than 2000px

Progress Milestones

Within cumulative challenges we can call out athletes’ progress towards the goal using Milestone Badges that appear as part of their activity. This is optional, but we highly recommend it as it usually boosts engagement. If you’re interested in doing this, your Milestone Badges should mimic your challenge badge.

Here are the increments available

1 Milestone

50%

2 Milestones

33%, 67%

3 Milestones

25%, 50%, 75%

4 Milestones

20%, 40%, 60%, 80%

Completion Link

Once they have completed your challenge, athletes will be given the opportunity to click through onto a landing page of your creation, where they can redeem their reward.

Your completion link will be sent to athletes via push notification within the Strava app; it will appear as a pull notification on desktop; it will be sent as part of an in-app screen takeover and within a completion email. It can link out to any part of your site, but we strongly recommend you create a dedicated, simple landing page featuring a form that is easy and painless to complete.

Note: All participants of your challenge must opt into the challenge reward – Strava cannot automatically register athletes for your reward.

In order to create your completion badge, there are a few important notes to take into account:

Completion Badge Notes

Page specs

It must be a single-loaded page link and must have a secure SSL certificate (https://)

Single page

All completers can only be sent one page, regardless of their region – so please make sure your page is adaptable to all

Live page

Our team can only publish a Challenge when they have reviewed a live and functional completion page.

Metadata

Please be aware that we append our own metadata to this completion link, however this will not interfere with any geolocation or tracking tags that you choose to use.

Link shorteners and proxies

We do not support link shortening and similar tools.

Prize fulfilment

Strava cannot manage prize fulfillment for legal reasons. This includes determining the winner(s) or sharing email addresses.

Great landing page examples

Le Col

After several years of hosting sponsored challenges on Strava, Le Col’s landing page has been optimized to completely reduce the friction associated with redeeming a reward. All they ask for is an email address, and their page is very well optimized for mobile (we advise all partners to create a mobile-optimized landing page to maximize conversions.

Altra

Altra also keep things simple and clean. Ideal for email signups to later nurture into customers.

SunGod

SunGod's landing page does the simple things really well. It makes data capture incredibly easy for the user, showcases their products, and is built for relevance to a Strava user. We particularly like the "Chosen by Strava Completers" section.