Fourth Elevate Arena Event will be biggest and best

Elevate is the UK’s largest physical activity trade show. Despite only being in it’s fourth year, it is now the go-to event for the UK Fitness Industry. Held at the Excel in London on 8-9 May, the show combines a thought leaders conference, packed seminar streams, exhibition, and great networking opportunities.

There will be over 300 inspirational and expert speakers at the conference, and the exhibition boasts more than 350 exhibitors with 1000+ products. Click the link below to get your free tickets.

Here are the seminar sessions we’re looking forward to the most:

LetsMove - what's next? Ideas for your April Challenge

LetsMove 2019 has been the most successful Technogym Global Challenge to date. Keep up the momentum at your club with one of these follow-up challenges:

Quick Option: 

Easter Burnie

Type – Calories burned
Winners – Everyone who…

This is a quick challenge that you can run to boost your member’s activity over the Easter period. It’s a great follow-up to LetsMove as anyone can enter and everyone should be able to complete it.

LetsMove 2019 Review - Member Engagement key to successful challenge

Let’s Move 2019 has been another massive success for Technogym clubs all over the world. The annual global challenge has become a movement in the fight against inactivity, which now reaches out beyond the club walls.
We’ve interviewed the top 10 UK clubs; read on to learn how they did so well, and to find out how you should be celebrating, and what kind of challenges to do next.

Lets Move For A Better World works like this… Clubs participate by getting their members to pledge to donate their MOVEs to the cause. Each club has a leaderboard of members, there’s also a leaderboard of all the clubs in your country, and finally, a country leaderboard. Technogym provide equipment to winning clubs, which is then donated to a local school or charity. But for most, it’s a fun, way to engage more with members, guests, and the local community, and to promote activity.

Ex-member communications under PECR & GDPR

We're looking at how member communications and processes have changed since the GDPR 'change'.

GDPR and PECR combined (?) should help to focus membership organisations when it comes to ex-member communications. It adds a level of urgency to messaging, as you have a window of, say, 2 years to contact ex-members after they cancel their membership. If there is no interaction over this period, you should stop communication. Looking at this practically, if a member has not re-joined (or interacted*) 2 years after leaving, it’s a good point to stop contacting them, as you’re probably wasting time and energy anyway.

How to handle member comms post GDPR

We have heard a lot of post GDPR change horror stories: some clubs struggle with getting new members to opt-in to communications, others have asked all existing members to opt back into member communications, only to reduce email permission to below 5% of membership. On the plus side, NPS has increased, but it’s now only based on 5% of members (unsurprising, as it’s the really engaged ones!) One mid-sized trust that we spoke to this week lost around 15% of their total members in June 2018 after emailing all members asking them to opt into communications. Of course, sleeping members were reminded that they were still paying, and cancelled their membership.

The General Data Protection Regulation is designed to protect the personal information of individuals and give them more control over their information. It is important to state that GDPR is not designed to hinder business.  Too many clubs are missing out on sending important member communications following advice from GDPR consultants and lawyers. It is typical of the fitness industry to ask for advice, and then follow that advice without thinking of the consequences, rather than challenging or setting out a strategy and then having the GDPR experts check it for issues. GDPR consultants are providing an important service, but their default policy or process will be watertight and restrictive to the business, and frankly, will help neither memberships sales nor retention.

Evidence Concludes: eGym Users Workout More and Stay Longer (Gym Owner Monthly)

A study conducted by an experienced independent retention specialist has highlighted the significant positive impact the eGym training solution has on member usage and member retention. 

Over a period of 3 months, Guy Griffiths, Founder of GGFit, worked in close collaboration with four operators to interrogate the attendance and usage data of more than 10,000 members. Sites selected to participate in the study were: Crook Log Leisure Centre managed by Parkwood Leisure; the Waterfront Leisure Complex, managed by Inverclyde Leisure; King’s School, an independent, dual use school facility and ESPH a private gym and physiotherapy facility.

Fitness industry future tech leaders at ActiveLab 2019 launch event

It was great to be at the launch of ActiveLab 2019 yesterday at Bird and Bird in London.

Having attended the first ActiveLab in 2017, then being involved judging and mentoring the 2018 contingent, it was an honour to be invited to attend the 2019 launch event, to meet the new cohort of start-ups and to network with ukactive and other industry luminaries.

Steve Ward introduced the evening’s line-up, followed by a warm welcome from Emma Green of Bird and Bird. Charles-Emmanuel Nelis from Decathlon spoke about making sport accessible through innovation, digitisation, and coding. Adrian Nash of LifeFitness (formerly Google) concluded the warm-up before a brief panel debate, then we got into the pitches.

Three Quick Retention Tips for ClubRight customers

In the same way that low-cost gyms have transformed the health club marketplace, solutions like ClubRight are helping to modernise the way fitness businesses are run. With their “built for gym owners by gym owners” mantra, we’ve been fans of their under-complicated approach, and ability to adapt to a club’s way of working, rather than the club having to change their operations to fit the software.

More developments are on the way from ClubRight, particularly in the member engagement space. In the meantime, here’s three simple ways you can monitor and improve your member retention with the ClubRight system.

January Gym-bashing backlash!

Liz Terry of Leisure Media has called for the annual gym-bashing to stop. With the rise of social media, constant content and fake news, there seem to be more stories of how evil the fitness industry is, with everyone from the Guardian to the Sunday Times saying how people should do without the gym.

The January rush story is never going to go away, but it’s worth talking about what we can do to combat this bad press. Here’s what we do when talking to friends and family, or taking the battle online…

• Debunking the myth that everybody joins in January, and is ‘gone’ by March

How do you get people to use the system?

Any system is only as good as the people using it. Data is critical (rubbish in = rubbish out), but the key to success for any system is the operators or users of the system. Here’s how you get people to use a system.

Many systems are purchased as a management decision without need for the users buy-in. A key part of the successful implementation is therefore selling it to the staff who will be operating the system. This is a big part of what I’ve done for a lot of my working life, from banking systems to exercise management systems.