Health Initiatives

Getting healthy and motivated in 2024

2024 has begun and what better time to think about chnaging your daily habits for the rest of the year.

January can be a daunting period of time for everyone; with thoughts about jobs, family, healthy living, and how to shake off the winter blues occupying a lot of our brain power. A great way to help all of your employees find their focus and get motivated for the year ahead is to run an inclusive health and wellbeing initiative such as a corporate step challenge.

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The benefits of a winter step challenge

The darker nights and the colder days can be a real turn-off for a lot of people during the long winter months, which is why engaging in group activities can be a real benefit to your workforce. Encouraging a little firendly competition with team and individual leaderboards, activity-based achievements, and virtual maps can be a great way to motivate your employees to get moving when they otherwise might not. Team challenges are not only a great way to help get everyone active and moving, but can be a fantastic team building opportunity too, with users encouraging each other and building up lines of communication that might not have existed before.

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Creating your own step challenge

Creating your very own step challenge takes only a couple of minutes using our Set Up Wizard. Simply sign up for a free admin account at https://app.bigteamchallenge.com/signup-form and begin using our challenge creator to customise your challenge to your needs, find a virtual route that suits you, and publish whenever you are ready. You'll only ever be asked to pay when you are ready to launch your challenge, so play around and explore the options that we've built into our system.

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Looking to chat with someone?

We underdstand that it can be a little daunting to run a step challenge for the first time, which is why we offer a free call to go over the systems features and discuss your ideas. Drop us a mnessage today to book your call and learn more about our step challenge software.

We were delighted to have the opportunity to mark International Women’s Day 2023 in a practical way by running a challenge to help Scottish charity, Aid for Education, raise money for its microfinance project in Rwanda.

Using our One Big Challenge option coupled with a bespoke route complete with milestones which told the story of the Aid for Education’s inspirational work in Eastern Rwanda, the challenge participants raised £1,570 as they walked over 7,900 miles from Greenock, where the charity is based, to the heart of Africa.

The money raised will enable Aid for Education to help 15 women set up their own business which will provide each of them with the opportunity to earn money to pay for food, education and healthcare and give their children the chance of a more positive future.

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Planting new trees for our customers

Big Team Challenge are proud to announce that as of September 2022, we will be planting 1 tree for every 5 participants that join one of our customer's challenges.

As part of larger ongoing project to reduce our climate impact, we've partnered with Ecologi to help plant trees all around the world and help with biodiversity. We're hoping that with our contribution of 1 tree per 5 participants, as well as our own personal donations, that we'll be able to plant over 5,000 trees in our first year, which we hope will go a long way to creating a greener environment for our users all around the world.

Our new admin system will also be able to tell organisers exactly how many trees they will have helped plant by running their step challenge, helping to spread the good news.

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Reducing our impact further

As a technology company we benefit from having very few environmental impacts from our operation; with our teams being able to work remotely, no manufacturing considerations, and a purely electronic communication and marketing setup. However that's not to say we can't be doing better.

Moving to greener energy

One of our largest considerations is the data centres we use to run our systems and the energy consumption involved with powering these. We're currently researching alternatives to our current providers and looking at hosts who use 100% renewable energy. We believe this will help bring down our carbon footprint even further and provide a more sustainable option for us as a company in the long run.

Encouraging more from our participants

Our step challenges have always been focused on getting people more active in their daily lives to improve their long term health. But perhaps there is more we could be doing, such as encouraging users to swap their daily driving commute for public transport, or researching other ways in which they can stay active while also helping their wider community with green projects.

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We're really excited to announce this new step at Big Team Challenge, but it's just one of many we plan to make in the coming years as we grow as a company and we can't wait to announce more!

To get your employees moving and help make things a little greener, why not sign up for your own corporate step challenge and see how many trees you can help plant.

What is active travel?

Active Travel is a funding and information program set up by the UK government to support expenditure on cycling and walking infrastructure. This funding is available for local authorities in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, as well as private businesses.

Learn more about Active Travel

Active Travel Step Challenges

Changing peoples habits on travel can be a long journey and one that should be approached from a variety of different angles. A great first step can be introducing a fun health initiative to try and reprogram how your participants think about their daily activity. Step challenges can be a great way of helping people think about increasing their daily step count by introducing the idea of personal goals and achievements. Combining this with materials to help your users ditch the solo car journeys for a walk to the nearest bus, or hopping on the bike for the daily commute, can be a great way to boost healthy living habits.

Accessibility and inclusion

At Big Team Challenge we take accessibility seriously and believe that exercise challenges should be as open and inclusive as possible to all users, regardless of their physical or mobility levels. To help make our steps challenges as inclusive as possible, we introduced our "activity conversion chart" to help users convert a variety of different physical activities into a comparable step count. These activities include yoga, aerobics, wheeling (wheelchair), pilates and much more.

Chat with one of our team members

Would you like to talk to one of our team members at Big Team Challenge about your own Active Travel initiative? Get in touch today

Get your employees moving with a step count challenge

Getting a workplace's employees active, healthy and happy is an incredibly important part of any responsible employer, but finding out where to start is often as hard as actually doing it!

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Make it simple and choose walking

Walking is one of the most easily accessible ways of keeping fit. It doesn't require any specialist equipment, you can do it alone or in groups, and you can even do it in your own house if you want! There are numerous studies showing the benefits of walking on both physical and mental well being, but the important take away is that it is gentle on the body. This is great when you are trying to be inclusive of a large workforce with differing levels of mobility and physical fitness.

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The ease of a step count

One of the biggest benefits of running a step count challenge is that you can simply increase your daily step count as you get more confident with your walking. Participants in a walking challenge are in charge of their own goals and can use their daily step count as a metric to push themselves as the weeks go on.

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Build your own challenge

Big Team Challenge allows you to build your own walking challenge.

• Choose from over 200 virtual routes
• Set team sizes
• choose when it starts and ends
• upload your logo
• create and edit teams
• and much more

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Sign up for free

You can sign up for your free account today and try out our challenge creator. You'll only ever need to pay if you want to publish your challenge.
Sign Up

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Get an instant quote

Use our online step count challenge pricing form to get an instant quote, or chat with in person with an advisor

Group Walking Challenge

With summer fast approaching, now is a great time to start a team walking challenge with your friends, family or community group. With lockdown still restricting our activity choices at the moment, walking is great alternative that is free to do, accessible anywhere and has a very low impact on joints. Read more about what the UK NHS has to say on the matter: https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/exercise/walking-for-health/

Creating a walking challenge on Big Team Challenge takes less than 5 minutes and you can instantly have your friends signing up online and setting up their own teams. This is a great way of building some friendly competition between teams as you all try to cover the same virtual route together.

Everyone participating in your challenge will have access to both our website version and the mobile apps too, allowing them to keep track of their and everyone else's progress while at home or on the go!

Challenge Features

• Private to only you and your participants
• Admin area to control and monitor your challenge
• Access to website and app
• Create or join teams
• Track your steps manually or use a smart watch like Fitbit, Garmin or Apple Watch.
• Earn achievements
• Teams Leaderboard

Read more about our step challenge features

Walking Fundraiser

We've had a lot of charities using Big Team Challenge over the last 12 months and we've seen some incredible results.
The flexibility of Big Team Challenge's walking platform allows charities and fundraising groups to alter their approach to donations.

For the majority of our challenges, our customers use one of the following two options and have a lot of success in engaging with their audiences.

• Paid Access - You set an amount, such as £50 per team of 5, to gain access to the system. Once a user has paid for these via Just Giving or something similar, and given you the 5 emails of the users they want to add, you can then use your Big Team Challenge admin area to create their team and allocate those email addresses to that team. The system will then send out an invite to those emails and allow them to automatically get signed up and active. Some organisers also ask participants to set up their own fundraisers on top of this and donate what they make to the main campaign too.

• Open Challenge - You open up the challenge to anyone that wants to join and allow them to get registered and into teams themselves using our system. You can then use the landing page and our inter-system communication to send out regular emails and reminders urging people to set up their own fundraisers and donate to you at the end of the challenge. This option obviously requires a some goodwill from your participants not to simply use the system and not contribute, but from our experience this has not been an issue for our organisers.

Promotional / fundraising page

A new feature we are able to offer allows you to have your own public facing promotional page on our site. An example of this can be found at https://www.bigteamchallenge.com/step-challenge/demo-challenge and shows how you can talk about the challenge, show your teams progress and advertise your charity of choice at the bottom.

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Read some of our charity reviews

Learn how Aid For Education got on with their first ever Big Team Challenge.

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If you would like to learn more about our walking challenges please visit our information page or check our our pricing.

Running a virtual walking challenge

Whether it's for your employees, family or community group, a winter exercise challenge can be a great way of incentivising people to get moving in the darker months.
As the days grow shorter and the thermometer plummets, it can be easy to get into the habit of staying inside instead of going for a walk. So what can you do to help get yourself and others motivated and out the door?

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Big Team Challenge's Step Count Challenge

Setting yourself goals and trying to outdo yourself is a great place to start, but it's not a whole lot of fun by yourself. With Big Team Challenge you can not only get yourself moving, but you can encourage others to do so with a little friendly competition.
Participants are encouraged to get into teams of between 2 and 10 people, track all of their daily activity (including walking, running, cycling and more), and help their team move along a virtual route.

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Team Leaderboards

With our leaderboard feature, teams are able to keep track of one another and boost each other's motivation through friendly competition. As well as having a challenge wide leaderboard for all of your participants, you can have unique leaderboards for different groups such as locations (for example, Glasgow or New York) or departments within an organisation (like Accounting, Warehouse, and Management).

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Global participation with remote workers

With Big Team Challenge's digital system, participants can join from anywhere in the world. Our website and apps are available to anyone you want to join, so why not get those relatives in Florida to race against their Parisian counterparts, or get the accounting department in Detroit to challenge those in Edinburgh?

Creating motivation through friendly competition

After several years of data and hosting dozens of challenges for various councils, health boards, charities and private companies, we've come to learn a few things about building motivation.

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Teams Versus Teams

Big Team Challenge aside from being a simple step count challenge system, allows you to choose two forms of team building. The first–and arguably our most popular–is Teams Vs. Teams.
In this mode, all of your employees or participants get into teams ranging from 2 to 10 in members. Each team is then trying to complete the same virtual route as every other team in the challenge.
Teams are able to see other team's progress on the leaderboards, and can therefore build some friendly competition between each other.

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One Big Challenge

Our latest update is the new "One Big Challenge" mode. Much like Teams Vs Teams, everyone gets into a team of their own with their friends or family, and works together to increase their team's distance total. However the crucial difference here is that instead of each team working their solitary way across a virtual map, every team on the challenge contributes to pushing the whole challenge a long one single map. So while every team can still keep track of every other team and push motivation within their own, they are contributing to a firendlier version of the challenge where everyone is helping get the challenge completed.

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Giving out prizes

While everyone should be a winner simply for competing and engaging in some company fun, perhaps you want to hand out some prizes too to sweeten the pot.
We always discourage from giving a prize to the "number 1" on the leaderboard as it can be unfair on those that tried their very hardest but are perhaps older or have a reason they can't run 26 mile marathons every weekend.
This is why we built in detailed reporting so you can choose instead to reward anyone who perhaps added distance every day, or you could give prizes to three people at random who added 20000 steps over the course of a specific weekend.

Getting employees moving again

As we enter the eighth month of Covid restrictions it's easy to get into a comfortable pattern and lose motivation. With winter encroaching this is even more present as the nights draw in and the sun all but vanishes during the working day. So why wait another 2 months for the new year to set goals and get things in gear?

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Changing up the routine

They say it takes 30 days of a new habit for it to stick. That means that in a single month an individual can build lasting change to their physical and mental well being. This doesn't mean that everyone needs to jump in with both feet first, these changes can start off small. How about changing up a morning routine to get up just 20 minutes earlier to enjoy a short walk and a little more of the sunshine before work? Or swapping out the morning toast and jam for a healthier alternative like porridge...with a little jam as a treat.

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Creating a challenge to help

Big Team Challenge is built to help with these changes to participant's habits. Having a team behind you helps build motivation and encourages you to make sure you are contributing fairly. With our challenges running from 28 to 84 days long, we can help your employees or community stay active each day and build those connections. Our step count challenges allow users to see how many steps they have walked each day, compare that to their team mates, earn achievements and unlock milestones.