The challenges you run on MoveSpring are likely the star of the show in your wellness program. So what happens in between challenges? Picture engagement as the behind-the-scenes crew: it keeps things running smoothly year-round and sets the stage for what’s next in the spotlight.
Utilize our tips to keep employee engagement going strong year-round between challenges
With one or more successful challenges under your belt, it’s time to keep the spark going by learning how to use and promote MoveSpring’s engagement features. We’ve outlined the next steps you can take to encourage employee participation across the platform.
Get to know MoveSpring’s engagement features
In this blog post, we’ll be covering the engagement features and associated resources that we love to use in between challenges. Leverage these features to keep participants engaged in your wellness programming year-round.
As a general guideline, we recommend making contact with your employees at least once a month in between challenges to keep health & wellness at the forefront throughout the year.
For all communication templates provided, simply copy and paste the information into your desired channel and send!
Send announcements
Announcements allow you to communicate important updates directly to your users throughout your program. You can easily schedule announcements in-app ahead of time for convenience. In addition to displaying the most recent announcement directly on a user’s dashboard, we’ve also designed announcements to be paired with an optional push notification for increased visibility.
Announcements are the perfect tool to make your health & wellness communications direct, timely, and fun! We can’t stress enough how important it is for an admin to communicate with employees, especially in between challenges. Announcements can ensure that your voice is heard and employees are getting a consistent reminder to engage with their health & wellness.
Learn more about the announcements feature here.
We love announcements because of how customizable they are. We even wrote an entire blog post on how you can step up your announcement game! Here are a few of our favorite ways to use announcements in between challenges:
- Share company reminders - Announce open-enrollments, wellness events, or an upcoming challenge.
- Shout out employees - Show recognition for users that engage with their health, like the top stepper of the week or the most improved stepper.
- Educate employees - Share educational information on relevant wellness topics.
- Celebrate events and holidays - Share timely reminders about holidays or national health observances.
- Highlight new features - Encourage usage of a feature, or introduce a new feature that users might not be familiar with yet.
- Gather employee feedback - Use the call to action function to link to a survey that gathers wellness program feedback.
- Run a one day event - Motivate participants to move more by challenging them to reach a certain activity goal over the course of the day. Offer a small prize via raffle for all participants who complete the goal to further incentivize participation.
Highlight the friends feature
The friends tab allows users to view their MoveSpring friends in a Leaderboard style and toggle the viewing timeframe to filter activity leaderboard totals by day, week, month, or year. We encourage all clients to turn on the Friends feature, which is a great way to allow employees to build connections with their colleagues on the MoveSpring app.
Once a participant adds friends, it also makes it easier for them to create user-created challenges with those individuals, further boosting engagement and friendly competition. Designate an off-challenge period to encourage adding friends to build camaraderie and mutual motivation between colleagues.
Learn how to enable the friends feature here.
Use this announcement template to communicate a friend-a-thon using the announcements feature.
Have users create their own challenges
User-created challenges allow users to interact with each other even if you don’t have a company-wide challenge going! Encourage employees to create and run their own custom challenges with colleagues or work buddies.
There are lots of fun ways to incentivize users to create their own challenges. Below, you’ll find a few of our favorite ideas:
- Run a monthly raffle - one employee a month wins if they’ve created a user-created challenge
- Reward for most creative challenge title
- Reward users for joining a friend’s user-created challenge
You can easily track who’s created one using the reporting feature and pulling a user-created challenges report.
Use this announcement template to encourage usage of this feature.
Build a content campaign
A content campaign allows you to upload articles, videos and posts directly to the mobile app dashboard at any point in your program. You'll be able to share content with users even when they are not in a challenge. This is a great tool that you can use to motivate and educate your employees any time of the year.
Choose from our library of content or create content of your own! Just like with challenge content, you can choose to make your content actionable so users can mark each post as complete. This means that you can use this feature to create “tasks” for employees to complete, including viewing an educational video or article, getting an annual checkup, or completing a wellness survey.
You can pull a report to view the number of completions. This makes it easy to host a raffle for a few winners who completed all the actionable content in that period. These content posts will remain static on the dashboard, and you can choose to add or remove posts at any time from the MoveSpring admin center.
Learn more about the content campaign feature here.
Below, you’ll find some of our favorite ways to use content campaigns to educate and engage in the MoveSpring app.
- Announce company-wide initiatives - Post information about health initiatives that need maximum visibility like flu shots, HRAs, or open enrollment periods.
- Create actionable challenges - Share actionable challenges around different wellness activities that users can complete in under 10 minutes. Pro tip: Choose a monthly theme and promote actionable items for employees to complete before the end of the month. View our content collections, and choose a collection labeled with ‘actionable’ in the title. For example, our team focused on mental health for the month of May and our collection encouraged time for self-care and mindfulness.
- Educate on national health observances - Provide education about topics that matter to you and your employees. Check out our list of national health observances and use them to foster health awareness year-round. For example, post educational materials about heart health topics for National Heart Health month, or post a YouTube video on the long-term effects of stress for Stress Awareness month.
Encourage users to explore their profile
The Profile tab on MoveSpring is where users can access their activity history, challenge history, badges, and more. It’s a great place for users to see their average activity totals and keep track of progress over time. This tab can help to provide insight into a user’s own activity levels, patterns, and how the current week stacks up to past totals.
Inspire users to check out their profile by sending out this short announcement:
Title: Check out your profile 👀
Description:
Did you know that you can track your progress over time in the Profile tab on MoveSpring?
This is a great place to see all of your activity totals for the current week, month, or year. You can also compare your stats over time, and see how much progress you’ve made since you joined! 🏃🏃♀️
You’ll also find a list of every challenge you’ve participated in and any badges that you unlocked. Go check it out and see what you learn!
Become a MoveSpring pro
Now that you’ve seen some of MoveSpring’s engagement features in action, it’s time to put them to good use! There’s no wrong way to utilize these features and the timeline you choose is completely up to you. If you’re not sure where to start, we recommend highlighting both the friends and user-created challenges feature together.
Try using this announcement template below:
Title: Create your own challenge
Description:
Did you know that if you add colleagues as friends to your MoveSpring account, you’ll be able to invite them to personal challenges that you create?
It’s true! We challenge you to add some friends on the MoveSpring app and run your own user-created challenge. You can run challenges on physical activity or healthy habits - the choice is completely up to you!
So let’s challenge ourselves and fire up the friendly competition! 🔥
Call to action button text: Learn more
Call to action button link: http://help.movespring.com/en/articles/3186306-how-to-create-and-delete-user-created-challenges
Once you’ve highlighted friends and user-created challenges, you can try utilizing some of the other engagement tips and tricks we mentioned in this blog. Over the course of the year, you and your participants will become experts in all that MoveSpring has to offer.
So there you have it! MoveSpring’s engagement features are extremely valuable tools that can help you make the most out of your MoveSpring subscription. By promoting these features throughout the year, your employees will feel the care and thought that goes into building a company wellness program. While challenges may take the center stage, what you do to engage employees between challenges is what really makes the performance extra special.
To read more on the basics of engaging employees in your wellness program, check out this blog we wrote.
Looking for our programming experts to help you build an exciting and engaging wellness program on MoveSpring? Ask your client success rep about our Ultimate plan.
