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Quick start guide

The fastest way to set up your first engagement strategy is the in-app onboarding wizard. It walks you through creating a site, a point, a behaviour, a reward and a user, then fires sample activities so you can watch the reward unlock in real time.

Open the wizard

The wizard is at /onboarding. New tenants are sent there automatically the first time they sign in (when no sites exist yet). If you've already created a site, you can navigate to the URL directly to walk through it again, for example to set up a fresh strategy in a new site.

The wizard is laid out in two columns: the active step on the left, and a preview card on the right that fills in as you complete each step.

Step 1: Site

Name your first site. The wizard suggests a name and URL based on your admin email domain. The site URL is the unique identifier used by the Activities APIs, so pick something short and memorable (lowercase letters, digits, dots, dashes and underscores only).

When you click Next, the site is created with the default JavaScript security and "no authentication" settings. You can change either of these later from the site's detail page.

Step 2: Point

Define the first point type for your strategy. Points are how Mambo tracks scoring; they can represent experience points, currency, leaderboard scores, or any other measurable metric.

The defaults are:

  • Name: Experience
  • Abbreviation: XP

The abbreviation is what end users see in widgets and notifications, so keep it short.

Step 3: Behaviour

Create a behaviour, an action you want users to perform. Each behaviour has:

  • A name that's shown to users.
  • A verb: a unique identifier used by the API to track the behaviour. The wizard derives this automatically from the name (e.g. "Complete a Course" → complete_a_course).
  • A point amount awarded each time the behaviour is performed. The default is 100.

This becomes the trackable action that drives the strategy.

Step 4: Reward

Create your first reward, an achievement that unlocks when the user performs the behaviour a certain number of times.

The defaults are:

  • Name: Course Champion
  • Times: 3 (perform the behaviour three times to unlock)

You can create more sophisticated rewards (levels, missions, gifts) later from the Rewards section.

Step 5: User

Create a test user. The wizard pre-fills the form with your own admin name and email; that's a fine starting point because it gives you a user you can later log in as if you set up user authentication.

The user's UUID is set to their email, and they're marked as a member of the engagement strategy.

Step 6: Simulate

The final step is the payoff: a "Fire activity" button that submits a behaviour activity for the test user each time you click it. After three clicks the reward unlocks, points are awarded, and the player card shows a celebration.

When the reward unlocks, click View player to jump straight to the user's details page. From there you can inspect every tab (Activity, Points, Rewards, KPIs, and so on) to see how the activities you fired affected the user's state.

Next steps

Now that you have a working strategy, explore the documentation for each building block:

  • Points: configure additional point types, redemption, expiry.
  • Behaviours: simple and flexible behaviour types.
  • Rewards: achievements, levels, gifts, missions.
  • Activities: how Mambo records what users do.
  • Users: search, filter and inspect users.
  • Widgets: embeddable UI components for your end-user surfaces.

To iterate on your strategy without leaving the dashboard, use the Log activity panel on a user's details page. It's the manual equivalent of the integration that will eventually call the Activities API for real.