New member engagement: challenges

Terry Woods, VP of Sales, joined Club Solutions to talk through three key strategies for engaging members and retaining staff – two key problems seen in the industry.  

Strategy 3: Challenges

Challenge your members.

How to incentivize consistent activity with regular challenges.

There are many different ways to create challenges, but why should you invest time in running them? Challenges allow you to establish a target for members, supporting their motivation and helping them create social connections. They fuel competition and provide tangible rewards.

You can run individual or team challenges, you can set a six-week weight loss challenge or give new members a goal to achieve in their first month. Whatever it is, by creating that challenge, you are giving people a target to keep them engaged and motivated. The more relevant to the individual and/or group of individuals the better. But it’s not just about ensuring the challenge suits your members, think about what you want to accomplish at the end of the challenge as well as what you want every individual to achieve.

Kevin Scott of Anytime Fitness, LA Porte, says challenges are a regular feature of the club.

“We like to do challenges every month or every other month. I don’t really think that there’s a wrong way you can put on a challenge - the capabilities are really endless. The more creativity you’ve got, the better your contests are.”

The second thing a challenge does, is create social connections, as everyone is collectively seeking a common goal.

Through successful club challenges we’ve learned that a successful challenge must be:

• Short - two, four or six weeks
• Structured - Have a beginning and an end
• Inclusive - so everyone can compete and complete at their level - you never want to run something that only the top 2% of membership can win.
• Incentivized - both mentally and physically through social engagement or physical prizes

Challenges have been tremendously successful for Myzone customers, they’re a vehicle for them to work with and get support from local businesses e.g. with donations to prize pots, and also giving them new prospects.

A challenge strategy example that engages local businesses and increases your prospect pool:

1. Use your existing sales force to go after community businesses and explain that you are running a local activity challenge to get the community more active.
2. Set a dollar amount, say $50 for the prize pot, and co-market the challenge with all businesses which donate this fee.
   • The donation creates eligibility for all employees to the challenge.
3. Sell the product (eg. MZ Switch) to the business.
   • In return, every employee they purchase a fitness tracker for gets free access to your facility for the duration of the challenge.
4. Utilize technology to track who completes the most activity during the challenge.

Overall - this solution gives your sales team something more to speak to local businesses about than a $10 discount. And it’s efficient and fun!

Keen to hear more? Take a read of strategy one, Creating connection, and strategy two, Accountability.