On Poetic Earth Month, we sometimes get inspired in April to celebrate by participating in writing challenges like the 30 Days 30 Poems challenge & poetry on the menu. Sometimes, we also like to join ecochallenge!
The thing is, despite being both fun and worth doing, signing up on the ecochallenge website is far more trouble than it really ought to be! So here’s a little breakdown of how to navigate through their kind of confusing setup and get where you need to go.
step 1: whitelist the site’s emails
How to sign up for earth month ecochallenge? This is very ridiculous, I know, but for some reason emails from ecochallenge.org tend to go off into the great nowhere. The reason you should do this first is because they send you a verification email when you create an account, which uh… might not show up. What you need to do is whitelist support @ecochallenge.org and contact @ecochallenge.org. Since I didn’t do this first, I had to do it after, & sent support an email asking them to resend the email. Now why this should be so much trouble I really don’t know but… there it is.
step 2: go to ecochallenge.org.
If you’re joining, you can either join on you own & start your own team if you want, or you can join a team that already exists. For instance, have fun in our own very low-pressure group if you join here — or find a team already affiliated with your school or workplace, or make your own! You can click either the join this team button at the top or center of the page.
Or, if you’re going straight to the website, click the “join” button on the far right of the front page menu:
From here, you will be on a page with two boxes. You’ll have to click either “I have joined ecochallenge before (login)” or “I haven’t joined ecochallenge before (create an account).” You can create an account with email or through facebook or google+
step 3: navigate through your account
Once you create an account, a yellow banner will pop up at the top of your ecochallenge account page reminding you to validate your email address within 24 hours.
p.s. if you close and open this page again, it may look like you’re logged out, & be kind of baffling. But, click the box in the center of the page which says “earth month ecochallenge” & “enter” on it and you’ll be whisked back into your account. (It doesn’t always do this, but sometimes it does.)
The account settings on your profile can be reached by the icon at the far right on the very top of the page. The sidebar on the left shows the buttons “edit profile” and “manage actions” which is where you’re gonna want to go next. “Edit profile” has the usual stuff—you can add a logo and banner, change your tagline, add details & whatnot. “Manage actions” is how you get into the actions you’ve chosen…
If you sign up straight from ecochallenge’s homepage and join the April ecochallenge, it’ll bring you right to the “choose actions” page at some point; this might happen when you join a team, too! So, your actions are what ecochallenge is all about. Each one is based on the UN sustainable development goals.
step 4: choose actions
There are 5 action categories:
- 1. Climate & Ecosystems
- 2. Economy & Communities
- 3. Health & Equity
- 4. Education & Livelihood
- 5. Basic Needs & Security
Click on any of these boxes and you’ll be taken to sub-pages where you can click and choose actions you want to work on and take during earth month. Don’t worry, these can always be changed and edited from the “manage my actions” button in the sidebar on your account, so if you decide you want to different actions, or more, or less, you can easily make the switch at any time!
Some actions will be called “daily actions” and others “one-time actions.” It can sometimes be hard to tell which is which until you go back to your dashboard, where they helpfully sort it out.
By clicking on any one of the boxes you can “learn more” or “check in.” Checking in is easy! Just click the blue button and the box will flip around, say you did it, and ta-da! You’re done. But, you can also click the little button under “check-in” called “reflection question” where, if you do, it’ll bring up a small box with a one-sentence question related to the action. Then, if you like, you can type in a little answer and post it to your feed! So you can remember how you felt about doing the actions & what you were thinking of along the way too. But, you also don’t need to do that part if it’s too much trouble!
Now, as you complete actions, you will also see that in the left sidebar, you will also start to gain points! Some people get really competitive about this bit I think, but I just like to see the happy little numbers go up.
Now, if you scroll down all the way past your actions on your dashboard—past the daily actions and then the one-time actions— you will see a little posting box where you can type stuff in and have it show up in your feed. You can get to your feed through that header all the way at the top—if you’re on your dashboard, “dashboard” will show up blue and everything else will be in black letters. “Feed” is the 3rd one over going this way –> right after “impacts” where you can see the difference made by everyone who’s participating in ecochallenge (or change the dropdown to “my team” and “myself” to see those impacts). Super fun!
Well, I’m sure there’s plenty more to talk about here, but this should be a good start for how to sign up for earth month ecochallenge.
