Executive Summary

The partnership between The Living Fuel and CorporateFitness.app allowed students and staff of The University of Southern California to participate in a unique and engaging step challenge. By utilizing various gamification and rewarding techniques we were able to motivate participants of this step challenge to focus on going out and moving more. We discovered more than 5% increase of daily steps between the first and last week of the challenge.

Key Figures

• Total Steps

  86,230,324

• Avg Daily Steps

  9,559

• Avg Likes per User

  13.4

• Avg Selfies per User

  4.1

The University of Southern California

The University of Southern California is a private research university in Los Angeles, California. Founded in 1880 by Robert Maclay Widney, it is the oldest private research university in California.

About The Living Fuel

	The Living Fuel is a wellness consulting business that is here to make health more attainable and digestible for you. We have been USC’s trusted partner for all things wellness for the past 4 years and have been able to help them double the engagement in their wellness programs and make massive improvements in the overall health and productivity of the 4,000+ workers in the Finance division.

Problem Statement

Through COVID, Californians saw a big hurdle in staying connected with each other and maintaining relationships with their peers. The purpose of the challenge was to bring people together in a way that was safe and beneficial for their health.

Solution

USC was looking for an engaging and easy to use platform to allow their staff and students to participate in an inclusive and friendly step challenge. Focus on this step challenge was on the social engagement and to motivate participants to contribute steps to their team.

Key Success Factors

Focus on engagement: The Living Fuel made use of several brand-new features on the CorporateFitness.app platform to drive engagement of the challenge. Participants were rewarded for sharing their stories by earning special bonus badges and bonus steps. Each week they could earn up to 10,000 bonus steps by sharing at least one selfie.

Integrations: By using CorporateFitness.app for their step challenge, students and staff of The University of Southern California can keep using their favorite wearables and fitness apps by connecting them with our app. All activities are automatically synced, and leaderboards are updated in real-time to reflect everyone’s activities.

Customization: As part of the onboarding process, we worked with The Living Fuel team to prepare brand assets to customize the look and feel of the CorporateFitness.app platform for students and staff of The University of Southern California.

Employee Engagement: To increase employee engagement in wellness while finding a healthy way for employees to connect and support each other.

Results

Over 65% of the participants were able to reach their daily target on most of the days during the challenge. 25% completed their target every single day of the challenge.

More fit and health: the gamification elements helped improve to increase the average daily steps by 5% when comparing the last week of the event with the first week. This is a clear indicator on how the use of the CorporateFitness.app platform helped the participants to focus on a healthy and active lifestyle.

Social Engagement: The focus of this event was to encourage participants to share their activities with the group. This resulted in an average of 4.1 selfie shared per participant and them receiving an average of 13.4 likes.

Exceeding Expectations: The challenge had the single largest amount of people this department has ever had participate in any event!

Challenges and Lessons Learned

As with any project with many different device integrations there are always a few users who have trouble connecting their device. Open communication channels and quick response times helped to get these resolved quickly. The CorporateFitness.app platform allows participants to backload their data, so even when a user has an issue connecting at the start, they were still able to participate without missing a mile of their hard work.

Overall, there was very positive feedback once the users were in the system and troubleshooting hurdles were addressed. The team is looking forward to using the platform in the next challenge!

Future Plans

Based on the positive uptake and feedback the next edition of the challenge is already scheduled. To allow a different group of participants to shine the next edition will use a different challenge mode and be based on active time instead of steps. This allows any activity to count, whether this is doing a yoga class, going for a ride, or doing a run. Every active minute counts towards the leaderboards!

Conclusion

The 2023 edition of the step challenge was able to crush all expectations and enabled students and staff from The University of Southern California to be more active and put in more steps than they would otherwise have. The partnership between The Living Fuel and CorporateFitness.app allowed the participants to enjoy a unique step challenge with a focus on sharing experiences and enjoy being more active.

Contact Information

Feel free to reach out to us at hello@corporatefitness.app with any inquiries or questions how we can help your organizations to move more. Ready to give us a try? Start a free trial at https://corporatefitness.app/start-trial