Can an admin get access to participant emails?

The hard answer is no, Challenge Hound does not disclose participant emails to challenge admins.

Most platforms (Strava, Facebook, Instagram, etc) never disclose email addresses and for a good reason. Imagine Challenge Hound did disclose email addresses and a malicious challenge administrator sets up a challenge, gets a lot of participants and then sells, spams, or harasses the participants using their emails. This is referred to as email harvesting and is universally frowned upon. Challenge Hound would have zero recourse to remedy the situation and the participants would be furious with Challenge Hound. It would also go against most standard privacy policies, as well as Challenge Hound's privacy policy.

With that said, Challenge Hound does want challenge administrators to be able to reach out to participants. For this reason Challenge Hound provides both direct messaging capabilities as well as group feed announcements. Challenge administrators can post to the challenge feed and the message will be visible to all participants in the challenge feed. Challenge Hound also sends out email digests to all participants with all feed entries. In addition, challenge administrators can direct message participants. Direct messages get emailed to participants immediately and also get posted to the participants challenge feed. To direct message a participant head to the "participant" admin option within the challenge, find the participant, and click the envelope icon.

If you really need participant direct contact information, we suggest using either the challenge feed or direct messages to ask participants to send you their information. This creates an opt-in, voluntary situation for participants to share contact details, which is totally reasonable. Google forms or Mailchimp sign-ups can also be used within challenge feeds or direct messages.