Our Goals

Overview

We recently did a deep dive into the statistics of Big Team Challenge and discovered a lot of surprising facts about our walking challenges.
These include: how our customers run their own step count challenges, how many users are web versus mobile apps, and just how many steps we're tallying each day!

You can find these on our newly created statistics page, which we'll be updating regularly moving forward.

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New Year, New Step Count Challenges

Our year has had an incredible start so far, with more people creating walking challenges than ever before!
So far in 2021, on average, we've seen 101 new registrations every single day! That's incredible and just goes to show that even in the cold winter months, people are creating new exercise challenges for their friends, family and employees to get them moving!

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New Virtual Walks

We've been busy in the digital workshop building new virtual routes all around the world for you to use for free.
You can find all of these by signing up to your own free admin account and creating as many draft exercise challenges as you like.
You can sign up at https://app.bigteamchallenge.com/signup-form with no obligation to pay. You will only ever be asked for payment details when you want to publish a challenge and make it live.

Introducing the new iPhone widget

When iOS 14 was launched earlier in the year our team went into their usual high gear whenever a new operating system is announced, ensuring our app would continue to work uninterrupted. This latest iOS release also meant that our design and development team also got a fun new opportunity to plan and build a whole new feature: the homescreen widget.

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What's a widget?

Apples new widget feature allows developers to build small little apps that run on your phones homescreen and pull in small pieces of information from within the main app. In our case we decided the most fun and helpful feature would be to pull in your step count and team progress straight into the widget. Therefore users at a glance can see exactly how they're doing that day without having to open the app.

Adding to our list of wearable smart devices

At Big Team Challenge our long term goal is always to build a system which utilises as many technologies and devices as possible so that our users can have the best possible experience.

When participants sign up to join a walking challenge on our system they currently have the option to connect to either their Fitbit account to track their smart pedometers activity, or to sync up with their Apple and Android smart phone apps (Apple Health and Google Fit respectively). This is fantastic for the majority of our users as this allows them to track their progress seamlessly by automatically pulling in their steps from their devices and adding it to their team's total. This leaves them more time to focus on maintaining motivation and pushing their team mates to be more active.

Moving forward with Garmin

Garmin smart watches and GPS tracking devices are an incredibly popular device with runners and outdoor enthusiasts around the globe. This is why it only makes sense for us to bring that functionality into our step count and exercise challenges. We're working closely with the Garmin development team to help enable this feature for future challenges. When we've completed this feature and done sufficient testing, it will be great to launch it and see the response from our participants around the world.

Strava and other exercise apps

While we don't currently have integration with Strava and other activity apps, we do have them on our development road map and will always strive to be as connected as possible to such services in the future.

If you have any ideas or requests, please let us know as we're always looking at ways to make our system better.

Supporting company-wide distances

Up until recently Big Team Challenge worked as a way of motivating smaller teams into friendly competition with each other. However with an ever evolving working life and with restrictions on personal connections, we opted to make a new feature available on Big Team Challenge.

Instead of teams raking up their own individual distances and following their own progress on the virtual map, every team's distance can now be collated and used to progress the whole company along a single map.

This is a function that can be turned on or off when creating the challenge so it's entirely up to you whether or not you would want to implement this in your own challenge.

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Friendly competition is still available

We still believe that a little friendly competition is a good way of engaging with your employees, so teams can still see how others are faring on the leaderboards and encourage each other to walk, run or cycle a little further each week.

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Achievements and other features are still around

Nothing else about how Big Team Challenge has been changed. User's can still get achievements based on personal and team distances, connect to Fitbit, Apple Health Kit and Google Fit, as well as invite users, receive messages from the organisers and track their daily activity.

We're walking to the moon and back again (and then there and back.... yet again).

We reached another exciting goal at Big Team Challenge this week: we reached over 7 billion steps walked together with all of our partners and their participants.

That means that we've collectively walked, cycled, ran, swam, rolled and jazzercised our way to the moon and back again... in fact we're on our return journey for the second time!

We would like to thank our clients for joining us and returning to us year after year and making this big milestone possible.

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An average step count of around 10,000 steps per participant

We always hear that number passed around a lot as a good target for everyone to achieve for their daily exercise goal. However, after pouring over our anonymised statistics, we actually found that our participants on average were exceeding this!

This is wonderful news for both us and our challenge organisers. It helps illustrate that Big Team Challenge can help build lasting change in participants, and even help maintain healthy attitudes to pushing yourself further.