Blog - Team Step Count Challenge

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Engaging with your workforce while driving your teams to be both healthy and motivated is a tough line to tow.

Online Team Building

More and more human relation departments are looking towards the digital world to help solve their problems. Online games such as Game Night for the apple TV are a great way for small groups to get together and participate in some friendly competition with an easy to use interface.

However when it comes to getting staff active and moving in the real world you need to look at different solutions.

Now available in Australia and New Zealand

Global workplaces

Workplaces are constantly evolving, growing and changing, and it's important to make sure that we grow with them. This is why we've strived to make our system as open and available to everyone around the world as we can.
A wonderful example of this our ever growing client list in Australia and New Zealand. Despite being half a world away, and an entire 13 time zones out of sync, we are able to help these customers thrive and create astonishing results with their virtual activity challenges.

Workplaces, communities and local councils can create their own challenges to connect with their audiences no matter how far around the world they are. Countries such as Australia can even span multiple time zones and have workers that are more remote than others that are simply in another country. This is why it's important for us to create a system that allows users from anywhere in the world to join up in a team together and actively work together to earn achievements and unlock milestones.

Our web based platform allows participants from any country to join, while our accompanying iPhone and Android apps allow users with smart devices to keep up to date while out and about.

Creating your own workplace step challenge takes only a few minutes to set up, so why not start today. Signup for your free account and get a feel for how the system works.

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Are you based in Australia or New Zealand?

Check our our new Australia and New Zealand page to learn more about running a challenge from there and get an instant quote.

What is a step challenge and how do you run one?

Running A Step Challenge

A step challenge is an online exercise initiative run by a company or organisation that encourages participants to get active in their daily lives. Users connect their smart phones or wearable devices to the challenge app and track their daily step counts against a virtual map around the world; the more the users walk, the more they explore!

Challenges can vary in how they are set up, with some pushing for individuals to participate by themselves and others encouraging teams to combine their effort and keep each other motivated.

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Creating your own step challenge

Below we will go over some of the steps you need to consider before creating your first step challenge.

‍Individuals or team challenges?

Are you looking to create an exercise challenge that is focused on an individual trying to complete the challenge, or are you looking to motivate a group of users to work together? Both options have their merits, however the team option can have added benefits of allowing for friendly competition and team building.
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Big Team Challenge also has two modes of competition, Teams vs Teams and One Big Challenge. You can read more about these challenge modes or get in touch to learn more.

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Choosing a virtual route

It's always fun to choose an exciting idea such as "walk around the world" or "walk to the moon and back", but these goals can often be overwhelming for users.
You should first consider how many users are on each team and what distance each user can comfortably be expected to do each day.

As a simple estimate you can use the following calculation:

Number of users per team x Number of days the challenge lasts x daily step goal = Route length

For example - 5 people per team, over 42 days, each trying to do 7500 steps a day = 1086km (each step is 0.69m)

Big Team Challenge has over 250 virtual routes to choose from, so there's something in there for everyone, regardless of their fitness levels.

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Get the word out there

Before you can get walking around the countryside of France, or island hopping around the Caribbean, you first have to let everyone know the challenge is even happening.

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Communication with your audience is key part to the success of any step challenge. You will find that your level of involvement directly relates to how much engagement you can expect from your challenge participants.

Some ideas to keep users engaged:

• Weekly or twice weekly email updates to let everyone know of the challenge progress.

• Encourage users to post their progress or achievements on social media using your challenge hashtag

• Run friendly competitions

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Big Team Challenge offers challenge organisers their own admin area, where they can create their challenge, launch a user registration page and even keep in communication with all of the users.

To learn more about our system, watch the video below or get in touch for a personalised demo.

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Million step challenge

Walking a million steps

A million is still one of the those wonderfully ambitious numbers that still draws us in, which is why it's not surprising that a lot of our customers use this number as a bench mark for their walking challenge. Getting a group of your employees or friends together and into teams to try and collectively walk a million steps together is such a fun goal to strive for and one that lends itself so easily to good marketing. Using our step challenge apps and website, users can easily track their own steps and automatically add them to their team's total.

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Team Step Challenges

Let's break down the number and see what sorts of challenges you could run that would end up with a million steps.

A walk for teams of 4 over 4 weeks.

A million steps would lends itself great to a 4 week challenge, for teams of 4. Over the course of this time an average team would collectively walk around 1,00,000 steps together. We have a number of routes that would perfectly for this, such as Brittany, Sri Lanka and the Golden Triangle. You can see some information about these below.

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Step Challenge Pricing

To run one of our standard step challenges can be as little as £500 / €600 / $700 for up to 100 users. Why not check our pricing page to get an instant challenge quote and more information.

Workplace Walking Challenge

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

Team building exercise with a step challenge

Team Building Remotely

We are entering a new era for businesses around the world with more and more of the workforce moving to remote working. This is an exciting prospect and has an incredible amount of positive aspect for employees such as less commuting time, lower expenses and home comforts! But it also comes with its losses. A large one of these is the social aspects that a shared workplace brings to its employees.

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Connecting With Your Team

Creating team building exercises is a great way to engage with your workforce and build connections between your teams that you may have lost with everyone moving to remote working. Building these bonds between your teams is incredibly important for morale and employee motivation. The relatively low costs of these initiatives can bring in huge financial returns in the form of increased productivity, lower sick days and greater mental wellbeing.

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Create A Step Challenge To Help With Your Team Building

Big Team Challenge allows you to create your very own tailored step challenge online. Our system allows your users to register online or via the app, create or join an existing team and track their steps along a virtual map around the world. This is a fantastic way of not only contributing towards your employee wellbeing program and healthy working lives initiatives, but help build friendly competition between teams as they each track their steps and compete on the leaderboard.

Learn more about our corporate team building challenges

Or view our pricing to learn just how little it costs

Charity Fundraising Walk

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.

Walking Challenge: Rio to Tokyo

Challenge Description

To celebrate to the summer games in Tokyo this year, we have built a virtual route from the previous site in Rio de Janeiro to Tokyo, Japan! Get walking, running, cycling or swimming your way along this sporty challenge route.

The Benefits Of Running A Virtual Walking Challenge

Travel! Yes, we might all still be bound by travel restrictions and it looks like we might spend another summer in and around our homes... but that doesn't mean we can't visit some virtual travel spots! Getting your friends, family or colleagues out of the house and interacting with a walking challenge can help them build healthy exercise habits as well as boost their mental wellbeing.

Our virtual walking routes aim to be both physically challenging in terms of their length, but also engaging intellectually. We spend a lot of time and effort researching our routes and trying to take in as many of the wonders of the world as possible! Each route combines a mixture of urban and rural milestones and uses beautiful imagery to showcase these wonderful places. We then add as much information about the location as possible, to make the routes more engaging and educational.
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Virtual Route Details

Our walking route starts off in the heart of Brazil, Rio De Janeiro and sets off through several South American countries including Peru, Columbia and and Puerto Rico. Our journey then takes us further up through north America and onto the edge of the continent in Alaska, before hopping over the Bering Strait into Russia. From here we make our way down the coast through Russia, North Korea, South Korea and into Japan itself!

‍Step Count: 45,923,063

Kilometers: 31494km

Miles: 19569 miles

Milestones: 26

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Walk Scotland - National Walking Month

A Virtual Walk Of The Highlands

To celebrate National Walking Month in the UK, we have created 4 custom routes around each of the 4 countries that make up this wonderful island. The first of which is the epic and dramatic landscapes of Scotland.

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Step Count

At a modest 1564377 Steps (1072km / 666 miles), our virtual route around Scotland takes in 22 milestones and goes from the lowlands of the border counties to the coastal views of the Isle of Skye and back down to Edinburgh.

If you were looking to set up a month long challenge on this route, it would suit walking challenges for teams of 5 or 6 and would be a great way to get your teams motivated and engaged in a little sightseeing!

Learn more about the route here and how you can get started with your step challenge.

National Walking Month

Walking Together This May

We're ramping up to May 2021, when we will see the UK launch it's annual National Walking Month! That means shaking off our winter routines and embracing the new spring weather. Read more about National Walking Month

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Step Challenge

One of the easiest ways to get everyone involved this year is to run a walking challenge for your family, friends and community. Walking has so many wonderful health and mental wellbeing benefits, and is one of the easiest forms of exercise to get started with.

Creating your own challenge takes minutes with Big Team Challenge's 'Challenge Creator'. This allows you to choose how many participants can join, how long the challenge lasts for, what route you can walk and much more.

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Our New Virtual Walks

To celebrate the UK and National Walking Month, we have created 4 new routes, each specifically around ones of the 4 countries.

Walk Northern Ireland

Walk Scotland

Walk England

Walk Wales

Team Step Count Challenge