Activy vs Strava

Have you done a company challenge on Strava? That was a good start!

See how to increase engagement, create action not just for athletes and avoid problems! The spirit of sporting fun is already in your company. You feel the challenge helps integrate your employees and promotes a healthy lifestyle. A free, small-scale project using a popular sports app like Strava is a good start!

How do you develop such a campaign to make it interesting for a growing group? Free solutions are freely available, but in the perspective of a company challenge, they unfortunately have many limitations and dangerous pitfalls. What is good to know? The Strava app is not designed for challenges in a work environment. It's a social media app popular with athletes that monitors individual activity.In corporate sporting challenges, movement is often only one element of the overall programme, so it's worth looking more broadly at the benefits of employee activity and the goals you, as an organisation, can achieve through it.

In this article, you'll find an extensive comparison of organising a challenge in Strava (and the limitations associated with it) with the employer-dedicated Activy app. Strava can be a good idea for start-ups of up to 50-100 people in size. However, if you are inviting a larger group to take part, Activy will help avoid many problems (communication, activity verification) and ensure high employee engagement and satisfaction! Up to 95% of Activy challenge participants want to repeat their participation in the next edition.

Don't just measure kilometres - take care to motivate less athletic employees.

In popular sports apps, the choice is basically one - measure who covers more kilometres, does more activity or burns more calories. This leads to an undesirable situation - the fun after a short time becomes a fierce and often unhealthy competition between very athletic people. More often than not, this is a few people training for a triathlon or marathon. We don't mind! But as a result, the other people (who make up the majority of the company) with less ability to screw up the results quickly lose motivation to play.

At Activy you use a proprietary gamification system developed with employees for seven years now. With it, the idea of your company challenge will focus on scoring and rewarding not only for sporting achievements, but more importantly for commitment. More than once we've seen a marathon runner on the podium and a perky lady next to him a year before retirement.

In a challenge with Activy, you earn points for undertaking an activity, distance or time, and you can also rack up special bonuses for regularity, i.e. maintaining a good healthy exercise streak. In addition, certain daily limits are introduced to level the playing field and protect you from abuse of the game rules. Every month, you sum up the edition and the fun starts all over again, so that everyone can achieve their dream result, regardless of the circumstances (e.g. holidays, illness or joining during the challenge).

Avid athletes at the highest level will also find something for themselves - in Activy they will check extensive statistics, rankings on multiple dimensions (including kilometres) and compare themselves with other participants. They will also connect their sports devices to the app without any problems. So if employees don't want to part with their Strava stats, they can sync their account with Activy. This will automatically upload all activities to a dedicated company challenge.

Inclusivity in disciplines - not available in Strava

Every employee is different, with their own hobbies and their own idea of physical activity. Especially in a company environment, it's worth taking this into account. If you want to organise something for employees, don't limit the challenge to a narrow group of disciplines, as most often happens in Strava, which in practice amounts to promoting only running and cycling. In Activy you will benefit from almost a hundred disciplines grouped into three larger categories: 'on your feet', 'wheels' and 'exercise'.

Movement is not just about running and cycling. Create a virtual Olympics that will interest all employees! Opt for inclusivity. You may be interested to know that, unlike in many sports, women's participation in the Activy challenges exceeds 50%!

The first step is... steps - not available in Strava

For many people, the start of a physical activity adventure begins with walking and counting steps. This is the simplest, most accessible form. A feature that is not available in Strava, since 2023, is great for motivating Activy app users to move. In the company challenge in Activy, many employees will take their first step to better fitness by easily monitoring their daily step count using their phone or external sports devices. Daily points can be received for meeting a daily target of 6,000 steps, for example.

Organisation should not become your nightmare

The quality of the organisation determines the commitment and satisfaction of employees and, further, their rating of the company. We all understand that completing a sporting challenge is rarely the primary responsibility of an employee. And few want it to be. More than once during the season we have received calls from companies similar to: "Help! We've done a challenge in Strava (and once Endomondo) and we can't embrace it, and employees want a good time!"

By working with Activy, the organiser also has time for healthy exercise and fun. Verifying employee access to a closed challenge, validating activity, figuring out who is really who, limited communication options - this can be just the tip of the iceberg of problems.

In turn, companies which, seeing Strava's limitations, nevertheless try to make the challenge more interesting on their own by analysing and processing data from the app (e.g. in Excel) get lost in data inaccuracies, activity editing, unknowns about sync times from devices. The expansive needs of the business combined with a limited tool and the multitude of user data, can sometimes be overwhelming. The bigger the challenge, the bigger the mess that can arise. In Activy, these worries do not concern you, as all data is available in a single database that can be tracked in real time from the coordinator platform on your computer.

Fair play - why it is important to have activity verification, which Strava does not offer

"We had a problem with fairness" - are reported by companies as often as organisational problems. Unfortunately, the bigger the organisation and the possibility to remain an 'anonymous player', the more the problems of recording cycling while travelling on the tram or declaring a sport when we actually watched it on TV grow ;)

Activy solves this problem for you. The app's algorithms, as well as the support team's staff, verify all activities, and all participants can report suspicious activities, which will pass even faster verification. Staff are informed exactly which photos can provide evidence of activity in non-GPS disciplines. These photos are also checked by Activy.

Unfair behaviour can result in a warning, removal of the activity or even exclusion of the player spoiling the fun for others. With access to challenge and data management, there is much less feeling of anonymity in Activy, compared to Strava. The challenge organiser (e.g. the HR department) can also be made aware of the activities of cheaters.

Few things can demotivate and anger employees as much as a sense of unfair play. So it's worth making sure that, as a company, you organise a challenge without cheating and don't worry about the suspicions of others.

Harness the integrative power of a challenge - you won't create teams in Strava

A company sports challenge is a great tool for integrating a company - healthy, motivating competition and unifying collaboration. "It's the first topic of conversation in the kitchen / on Teams / on Slack" is the most common opinion from employees.

Analysis of several hundred company projects shows that a key functionality for employee integration is team building. This is not available in Strava, which only focuses on individual competition. With Activy, you can create any number of groups of teams, such as divisions by office, department, city, company, etc.

In addition, employees themselves can also create teams and invite colleagues to join them. This is just the place for their creativity in choosing a team name and picture! There have already been 'Running Capybaras' or 'Doughnuts', and participants had nicknames like: marmalade, pudding, chocolate ;)

Engaging not only through competition. Enrich the challenge with missions, events, a prize shop....

You certainly want your challenge to be lived by a large part of the company. The theory of gamification and motivation distinguishes between several types of players, each with a different goal when they join the action.... That's why it's a good idea to put a variety of functions in your challenges. Create a project that combines sport with fun! Choose which functionalities from Activy's wide range of possibilities are of interest to you. Take advantage of the varied options that you would not introduce in Strava.

Create missions in the form of challenges with discoveries of interest every few kilometres, for example "Active May Day" with congratulations from the CEO for completing 100% of the target. You can also use ready-made scenarios from Activy and educate participants in the area of health or ecology.

Combine sporting fun with prizes! Showcase them in a personalised tab or include your shop in the app, where employees can exchange the points they earn for prizes of their choice (usually vouchers or sports gadgets).

Creating events and tracking their statistics will help those who are looking to connect with other people in sport. This way they can arrange to go on a bike ride or run together in the nearest park. And bonus points for reaching places in the area selected on the map (castle, monument, natural monument) will motivate adventurous seekers to move and explore the region more often.

ESG - charity and environmental #Bike2Work

The sports challenge in the Activy app is repeatedly mentioned by companies in ESG reports as one of the tools they have introduced into the organisation. As well as actively promoting wellbeing and healthy lifestyles, employers combine fun with charitable and environmental causes. In Activy you set and personalise your charity goal, the level of achievement of which you can see live in the app.

In Activy's corporate challenge, you can also comprehensively measure CO2 savings through your employees' active transport choices. A big advantage over Strava is also the ability to upload your office locations so that your bike rides to work are automatically tagged and convert to CO2 statistics and bonus points in the fun challenge.

Instant access to all data - coordinator platform and Activa reports

In Strava, it is difficult to track the live results of challenge participants. There are often a lot of inconsistencies in the rather limited data.

This problem is solved by Activy, which is designed from start to finish with corporate challenges in mind. On the coordinator's platform, from your computer, you can check all current rankings, statistics, additional challenge data and participant information. You will also quickly generate all reports and summaries, to PDF, graphics or Excel.

Not just an app - an A to Z solution and support service

The app is a digital tool to help you organise the challenge. A bit like the ball on the pitch - besides the ball, the whole system and rules of the game, promotion and communication, player support, additional activities, reporting are important. In Activy, you will get all this from us - an account manager, ready-made graphic and text materials, answers to questions, reports, statistics. From A to Z!

You will also avoid making the mistakes of many companies - we will share with you our experience from several hundred cooperations and several hundred thousand participants gathered over 7 years. We look forward to working with you :) We will be happy to advise you on how to create an engaging programme that everyone in the company will talk about!

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