We recently launched our newest feature; Team Chat to help users keep connected with their team mates.
This latest updates allows team members to chat within their own team to help keep each other motivated, inspired and talking about their daily activity.
This was one of our most requested features so we're really excited to see it roll out to our platform.
While something as simple as walking can have huge benefits to your physical and mental wellbeing, it's not the only option for people wanting to stay active. It's not even the easiest!
We've now built our activity conversion chart right into our apps and website, allowing users to convert over 100 activities, such as Yoga, Gardenning, Basketball, Cycling and Aerobics into a comparible step count.
Creating a walking or running challenge is simple, easy, and to the point. You can create it and ask all of your participants to get up, move about during lunch, and track those steps along a virtual map. It's a fun and intuitive way to get people motivated, but what about those who have a lower activity level or mobility issues? The message of getting up and moving about might be daunting to them or physically unachieveable.
This is where we saw the benefits of the conversion chart and why we chose to develop this new feature. Not only does it open up a world of other activities to every user, but it brings the opportunity for those in wheelchairs, walking aids, or with mobility issues to do other activities and participate with the rest of their team.
So why not encourage some gardening at the weekends, some yoga at lunch, or some swimming in the morning?
Read our full help article here to learn exactly how the activity conversion feature works.
With the release of our latest app update we now connect with Samsung Health and many more devices and services than ever before.
Connecting Health Connect on Android to Big Team Challenge allows you to sync your steps from the following platforms:
Connecting Samsung Health or Google Fit to Big Team Challenge is a two-stage process:
Step One
Download Health Connect from Google Play here.
Open the Health Connect app and tap Get Started.
Select App permissions. You should see Samsung Health or Fit. If not, tap "Can't see all your apps?" at the bottom of the list, then "See all compatible apps" on the next screen. You should be able to select Samsung Health or Google Fit.
Now, select Samsung Health or Fit from the list (as per the screenshot above).
On the next screen, tap "Allow all" or select at least "Steps". You are finished connecting Samsung Health/Google Fit to Health Connect. Move on to Step Two.
Steps Two
Now you need to connect Big Team Challenge to Health Connection.
Open the Big Team Challenge app and go to Sync Device in the menu.
You should see "Health Connect" at the top of the list, Tap on "Connect", and then "Connect" again on the popup that appears.
Finally, you need to give Big Team Challenge permission to access Health Connect. Enable "Allow all" at the top of the list, then "Allow" at the bottom.
You should now be connected to Health Connect.
If you run into any errors, please take a note/screenshot of the message and contact our support team for more assistance.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.