From Chores to Awards

• A little introduction - How it started
  The "nagging" problem and how it all started
   
• Signup & Team Account
  Get up & running in 2 minutes.
   
• Quickview
  After login. Your daily status info
   
• Earn Points
  Earning Smiley Points in your team & your community - Your daily business
   
• Scores
  View the scores of all team & community members - See who leads the race
   
• Approving Completed Chores
  A little "quality control" of completed chores - Assigning Smiley Points & Recognition
   
• Community
  Your chore network - Joinin up with other teams & the message board

A little Introduction - How it started

Do things like daily arguments about doing chores and constant reminders of your family members to do their fair share sound familiar to you? Well, it certainly was in our family. In addition, I had just entered a new relationship in which I suddenly found myself as a new quasi "Dad" whose authority was new to the two young girls in the family. Tricky
 
So, seeing the discord and difficulty around the chores with a teenager and a pre-teen had me think about some way to entice not just our girls but everyone to work together!  And when I realized that ultimately it was all about recognition, about being noticed and being rewarded for a good deed, it seemed so clear and easy. We just converted the daily chores into a little fun competition where the winner would be rewared with something of value to him or her.
 
And in times where the Web has become so part of our daily routine (Email, Friends on Facebook, Shopping at Amazon, etc...) I thought maybe a webservice would be cool and easy to adopt. And so, Smiley Chores was born. Born out of a real problem with real kids in real life. And what can I tell you? It worked fantastically. Stuff is done... and we have fun! So, what can I do with Smiley Chores:

• Define the chores clearly and set the rewards for a job well done.
• Easily track all jobs and approve them. Completed chores are publically recognized and rewarded.
• Promote a healthy sense of competition between family members and offer meaningful rewards.
• Build Friendships and a community with expanded Chore Network with other families, e.g. your neighbors.
• Join and meet other families, trade success stories and even actual chores when you help other members of your community.
• And last, not least: Maybe even win some always appreciated prize money entering our frequent sweepstakes.

Team Account

Once you signed up you will land on the Team Account page. This is where you set up your team, your family members, your chores and ultimately your rewards. It's all here, on one single page. That makes it uncomplicated and you will be ready & set to go.

Team Info

You can choose any name for your team. Whether you give your team your actual family name or some funny, cool nick name is completely up to you. Remember that your team name is the only info that other teams in your community will see. Optionally, you can provide your address. We will keep it absolutely private and it will not be shared with any third party.

Team Members

This is where you set up the participants of your team (family). Once again, it is up to you to choose everybody's real names or to give them some fancy nicknames. Every team member has its own login consisting of their name and password which they will use to login and claim their points for having done their chores. Please note that the email address field is required. If a member does not have their own email address you can use your's, the administrator's one. The email address will only be used to send you for forgotten password upon your request and for the family finder feature which allows other members to find and connect with you. The Admin checkbox gives the member access to all adminstrator functions. Only administrator can edit team info data and approve chores.

Chores

Here you can set as many chores as you like and assign them a value in terms of Smiley Points. The Trade checkbox allows you to make a chore visible to other teams in your community so that they might offer to do them for you. Upon your approval of the completed "community" chore they would earn your Smiley Points for this chore. The Trade box only becomes available when you have at least one other team in your own community.

Rewards

And at last you have a place to define the rewards for the current month. This reward info will be visible for all team members as they check off their completed chores during the month.

Quickview

Once your team is signed up, you will always be presented the Quickview page upon login. It provides a quick overview over the most important things:

• The end of the current chore period
• The team member with the higest score
• How many chores await approval
• How many new messages have arrived
• What's the next sweepstake
• How many times you have entered
• Who won the last time
• Hall of Fame - winners of past months

Earn Points

The most important page. This is where team members claim their Smiley Points. All chores which you had set up before will be listed here. Those chores where you did not check the "Trade" checkbox will show as Team Chore. They can only be seen by members of your own team. Those chores which you had marked as "Trade" show up as Community Chore and are visible to all members of teams in your community.

So, this is where everybody claims their Smiley Points after they completed their chores for the day. Chores can be marked as completed multiple times every day. Smiley Chores will keep track of it. All claimed points will remain "pending" until they are approved by one of the team administrators.

In the case of the Community Chores you will see a blue info icon. When you hover your mouse over it, it will show you more info regarding that point.

Scores

Of course, your team members want to know how they stand and who is leading the score board. All team members are listed here with their respective scores of the selected month. By default, you will always see the current month.

Golden score bars show the total points for approved chores while silver bars indicate the points for chores that have not yet been approved. Silver scores become automatically golden once they are approved.

In the lower section of the screen you see the standings of teams that are in your community. All community members can see who does the most for the community.

Approval of Chores

The individual chores of each member can be viewed by clicking the icon next to the team member's name on the "Scores" page.

The chores are listed with their respective descriptions, values and approval status. The administrator of the team can approve or disapprove individual chores. Points are credited to the team member's account only after approval of the chore in question.

The same is true for all "Community Chores". These are the chores that were marked as "trade" and that may originate from a different team in your community. Everybody in the community can earn points through community chores of other teams.

Community

We always speak of community. So, what actually is a Smiley Chore comunnity? Your community are all the other teams out there which you have added to join you and form your community.

Let's say you know that your neighbors are also members of Smiley Chores and you would like the idea of sharing chores and news with them. So, you can add them to your community by typing their team ID into the little form field and hit "Add Team" . From that moment on your both teams will share the Community Chores which any member of your teams can do and earn Smiley Points for.

You can also communicate and exhange messages with them on the message board which allows to send messages to selected teams or to all teams in your community.

If you would like to form a community with friends or neighbors who are not yet members of Smiley Chores, send them an invite. We reward new referrals with great cash sweepstakes. You can win thousands of Dollars through out the year.

Please feel free to take a closer look at our
"Referrals" section which gives you detailed information.