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.
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.
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.
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.
Page 1 of the activity conversion chart.
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
Big Team Challenge is teaming up with Ecologi to help plant trees
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
