Setting a Challenge

A challenge prize is only as good as the question it sets.

Traditionally, a challenge prize sets a goal that is both measurable and very difficult to achieve. The Longitude Prize has set a challenge to reduce the use of antibiotics and the Google Lunar XPrize asks for technology that can land on the moon, travel around and transmit video back to earth.

Things are a bit different in the communities sector.

For the past six months we’ve been working with the Joseph Rowntree Foundation to build a challenge prize which can find ways to solve UK poverty.

We built the prize to hear from the community sector. We want to know what they see in their neighbourhoods: what are the daily injustices for people living in poverty? More than that, we want to know how grassroots organisations would solve these problems if they had the chance.

Make the question smaller

UK poverty is a big problem. It is too big for most governments, let alone a single community centre. To make the challenge work, we had to make the question smaller. We had to frame the question in language that would appeal to how community centres see themselves.

The community sector already offer financial help in all sorts of ways. They provide food banks, give people access to insulation for their homes and check that people are claiming the right benefits.

Poverty is — among other things — a lack of money and community centres are already working to save people money. We wanted the challenge prize to provoke more action in this space.

Here was our first attempt:

Inspire action

When we tested this idea, centres felt that it was convoluted. They didn’t understand it straight away and it didn’t inspire them.

The success of a challenge prize lies in the quality of the responses. For this reason, the question itself needed to be engaging. The question is designed to engage through inspiration. It should spark ideas in the people who read it and draw on their everyday motivation to help people.

With this is mind, we experimented by drawing on the policy context of the prize. The proportion of working-age adults in employment is at a record high and living costs are increasing.

Perhaps a call to action would provide the right kind of inspiration:

Make it tangible

It is rare for the community sector to be allowed to determine exactly how they can spend money. Often they are funded to deliver things in a particular way with a set number of people.

In these cases, a funder has already decided the problem that the project will address. The Community Challenge Prize is different, it asks community centres to define the problem, the solution, and how they are going to make it work.

Our next step was to make the prize question tangible. It should not only inspire centres, but it should also guide them to think about the scale of impact that they could have. We were concerned that an open question would create unfocused answers.

We wanted community centres to think about how they would spend the prize money. If they had a bundle of notes, would they buy equipment to make their idea happen, or would they run a short test to make their idea work better? Would they spend all of the money on Facebook ads, or give the money out in small grants?

Our hunch: that the right kind of specificity would create a diversity of responses. From this, we created our final question:

This question provoked 95 responses from the Online Centres Network and beyond. In June we will release the 10 best answers to this question. Each of the winners will receive £2000.