Features

Making it easier to track your daily activities

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.

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Greater levels of participation

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.

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We now connect with Samsung Health

With the release of our latest app update we now connect with Samsung Health and many more devices and services than ever before.

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How to connect Samsung Health to the step challenge

Connecting Health Connect on Android to Big Team Challenge allows you to sync your steps from the following platforms:

• Google Fit
• Samsung Health
• MyFitnessPal
• And others as more providers join the Health Connect platform

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Connecting Samsung Health or Google Fit to Big Team Challenge is a two-stage process:

1. Connect Samsung Health/Google Fit to Health Connect
2. Connect Health Connect to Big Team Challenge

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.

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Big Team Challenge as an alternative to Movespring

Movespring is a great platform aimed at providing activity challenges for large corporate brands. As a consequence it comes with a hefty price tag, with options starting at $2000 for 100 users, and even more if you want some fairly standard options included such as your branding incoroprated.
At Big Team Challenge we understand that sometimes you just want to run a simple and fun step challenge to engage your colleagues and friends. That's why our system can have your challenge up and running in a matter of minutes and our costs are much lower.
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Running a step challenge with Big Team Challenge is easy, fun and comes with a whole host of included features:

• Your company logo in the challenge website and app
• Free iPhone and Android apps for your users to enjoy
• Syncing with Fitbit, Garmin, Apple Health and Google Fit
• Creat teams, invite colleagues and compete on leaderboards
• Advanced team segments for locations, departments and other criteria.
• Earn achievements

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Learn how we differ from Movespring

Step Challenge Conversion Charts

Step challenges can be a great way to motivate your workforce or community group, but they can also be quite exclusionary.
For participants with low mobility, a step challenge that simply encourages walking or running more can feel a little daunting. For this reason we introduced our Activity Conversion Chart as an optional addition to challenges.

Creating a more inclusive experience for your employees

By enabling this feature, users can convert minutes of activities such as Yoga, Gardening and Housework into a numerical step count. By enabling low impact activities, as well as a varied list of other intensity sports, your step challenge can suddenly become a more open and inclusive space for your employees.

View the online activity conversion chart

If you're running a challenge with us, we can display this activity conversion chart as a link directly on your challenge dashboard. Simply get in touch to request this and we will be happyto do this free of charge. If you are running your own step challenge manually, please feel free to use our chart, which you can find online for free at: https://www.bigteamchallenge.com/resources/activity-conversion-chart

Download the activity conversion chart

You can download a PDF version of our activity conversion chart to print out at home or share around the office. Download the PDF here

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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.