Yesterday, the Ad Council, Google and GSA’s Center for New Media & Citizen Engagement hosted a panel on Federal Government challenges.   Challenges can be a great way to promote open government and innovation and take many forms—idea suggestions, creation of logos, videos, games, mobile apps, etc.

Panelists from USDA, NASA, HHS and ChallengePost talked about the do’s and don’ts, how to get started, best practices, legalities, ROI, etc.

To start–GSA has created a great platform–www.challenge.gov—which allows agencies to post challenges. They’ve listed 40 different challenges and you can sort by time left, prize amount, agency of topic.  For a fact sheet on Challenge.gov and other resources provided by GSA, click here.

If you want the cliff notes version, here are some helpful tweets from the event:

• Challenges are a great way to tap into a community outside the beltway.
• Consider: Do you want challenge to engage large orgs or small/individuals? What resources will they need to compete?
• Challenges have big ROI in aggregate of submissions.
• Many challenges are half R&D, half marketing/awareness.
• Most difficult thing about Challenge? It’s the anxiety of not knowing what you will get at the end!
• Challenge winners should retain status & recognition.
• Value of Data or Apps challenges is in the totality of all the submissions and not only the winners
• Tech problems usually need hard $ incentive. A challenge about awareness may do fine w/ nonmonetary incentives
• High prizes may discourage community participation as it raises the appeal for professionals rather than do gooder’s
• What’s the right incentive/prize? Depends. People motivated by status, recognition, competition, not just $.
• Check out EPA “GameDay” challenge as way to do behavior change. Find it at http://challenge.gov/EPA
• 3 ways to do intellectual property in #challenges: submitter keeps rights, rights transferred to agency, creative commons.
• 90% of entries come in last 48 hours of a challenge.