Challenge Info

What is the Uplift the Web Challenge?

The Uplift the Web Challenge brings academics and practitioners together in a collective effort to identify effective interventions to reduce depression in adults. With contributors’ help, we will gather promising short interventions. Then, we will rigorously evaluate them in one of the largest randomized experiments in the history of mental health research. While some existing depression interventions are in-person, time-intensive, and involve repeated exposure, we focus on short, scalable interventions that can reach millions of people.

You can watch this 12-minute video for more information: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9cSv_wenX4

What is an intervention?

Scientists often call an idea that has the potential to change how people think or behave an “intervention.” In the case of the Uplift the Web Challenge, an intervention is any idea that may reduce feelings of depression.

What kinds of interventions can you submit?

Interventions must take less than 10 minutes and aim to achieve a lasting reduction in feelings of depression. They can ask people to do one or a combination of the following (for examples of each, please see here):

Interventions must meet the following criteria:

• Ethical: Our Institutional Review Board approves that the intervention is ethical.
• Online: Interventions are deployable online.
• Scalable: Up to 200 people can engage with interventions at the same time, meaning interpersonal interactions are not likely to be feasible.
• Short: Interventions are no longer than 10 minutes.
• Comprehensible in English: Interventions are to be easily understood by an English-speaking audience.
• Costless: Interventions cannot pay participants anything extra.
• Aligned: No extra measures can be added to evaluate interventions besides those listed below in the Measures section.
• Fair: You can submit other people’s content (i.e., a video from YouTube) only if you have their written permission.
• Age: Submitters must be at least 13 years old

Why should people submit an idea?

Depression is a tremendous burden for people all over the world. Many people have ideas for how to address this problem, but there hasn’t been an opportunity to gather and rigorously test these ideas at the same time until now. 
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New ideas can help to address one of the most crucial issues facing the world today. Selected contributors will learn whether their idea worked, and will qualify to receive authorship and awards.

How will we measure and evaluate?

To identify the best interventions, we will conduct a large survey experiment. The experiment will involve 7,000 US adults from an online panel, who will be randomly assigned to participate in one of the interventions or a control condition. We will identify how much exposure to the interventions made a difference relative to the control group.

In the experiment, we will examine: depression, hope, agency, and acceptability of the intervention. For details on how we will collect these outcomes, please download our handbook

Who can submit?

Anyone around the world can submit ideas to the challenge. We are particularly interested in people who are not academics, but who have ideas about how to make a difference — practitioners, those with experience, and others. 

Who are the participants?

We will recruit participants from the United States aged 18 or older who speak English, experience moderate to severe depressive symptoms, and are enrolled in an online study recruitment platform. More details can be found in the handbook.