Whether you’re running challenges, offering rewards, or simply tracking commuting behavior, it’s important that participation reflects real activity and serves your intended audience.

CommuteHub provides a range of tools to help you manage access, guide participation, and ensure your program remains aligned with your organization’s goals — without adding unnecessary complexity.

Controlling Access to Your Platform

The first step in ensuring integrity is controlling who can join.

Manual approval
Admins review and approve each user before they can access the platform. This approach offers the highest level of control and is best suited for smaller organizations.

Email domain restriction
For larger organizations, manual approval may not be practical. Instead, you can restrict registration to users with a company email domain (e.g., @yourcompany.com). This ensures that only members of your organization can sign up, while keeping the process simple and automated.

Managing Eligibility & Participation

Beyond general access, you may want to control who can participate in specific programs, challenges, or rewards.

Surveys or additional verification to access programs
Before launching a major challenge or incentive program, you can collect additional information from users — such as home location or commute habits. This helps ensure participants meet your intended criteria. Contact your Customer Success Manager, for help to set this up.

Networks
Networks allow you to group users and control access more precisely.
For example, you can:

• Create a network for specific departments or employee groups
• Limit a challenge to only those users 
• Use hidden networks in the background to manage eligibility without affecting the user experience (e.g.,reward exclusion networks)

Challenge and program settings
You can further refine participation by defining rules such as:

• Minimum commute distance (e.g., only trips above 10 miles)
• Allowed commute types (e.g., sustainable modes only)
• Other custom eligibility criteria

Controlling Trip Data & Logging

To maintain accurate and realistic data, you can control how trips are recorded.

GPS-based tracking
Only allow automatically tracked trips. This reduces the risk of inaccurate entries.

Disable backlog logging
You can restrict users from logging trips retroactively. This means trips must be entered on the same day they occur, helping prevent bulk entries for past days.

☝️ Balancing flexibility and accuracy is important — stricter settings increase data reliability, while more flexible settings may improve participation.

Reward & Redemption Controls

You decide who can redeem rewards and whether to approve redemptions automatically. If you need to ensure strict auditing, you should use all available layers of control.

Admin approval for rewards
Require manual approval before rewards are issued. This allows you to review activity before confirming redemptions.

Limit reward redemptions
Set limits on how many rewards a user can redeem within a certain timeframe to discourage abuse.

Identifying Irregular Patterns

Regularly reviewing activity in your high-profile programs can help you better understand how they are being used and spot suspicious activity.

Look for patterns such as:

• Unusually high activity levels (e.g., trips logged every day of the week)
• Repetitive or unrealistic commute behavior

If something stands out, start by reviewing:

• The user’s profile
• Their trip history over time

Focus on identifying consistent patterns, such as regular weekend trips, by reviewing User Insights. 

Taking Action When Needed

If you notice activity that doesn’t align with your program guidelines, you can take a structured approach:

1. Review the data carefully
   Use User Insights to identify consistent patterns before taking action.
2. Adjust participation using networks
   You can group specific users into a dedicated network and adjust your program settings so that this network is not eligible for certain programs.
3. Refine eligibility settings
   Introduce additional validation steps such as surveys or apply requirements like minimum commute distance to better control who can participate.
4. Temporarily restrict access (if necessary)
   As a last resort, users can be blocked or removed from the program.
5. Re-enable after clarification
   In many cases, a quick conversation can resolve misunderstandings

If you need help setting up access controls or want guidance for your specific program, our support team is always happy to help.