Participant engagement is crucial to the success of an effective year-round wellness program. While the challenges you run throughout the year are the star of the show, engagement shouldn't stop there. You'll get the most out of your Wellbeing+ subscription by taking advantage of our easy, built-in engagement features.

Utilize the resources below to get participants engaged in your wellness programming, even when you're not actively running a challenge. These engagement ideas can be used any time of the year in addition to your challenges to make your wellness programming more robust and fun! Aim to make contact with your participants at least once a month to keep health & wellness at the forefront throughout the year.

Announcements allow you to communicate important updates directly to your users throughout your program. 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.

You can easily choose the audience you want to send announcements to in the admin center, and you can also schedule announcements ahead of time for maximum convenience. To learn more about the announcements feature, click here.

If you're looking for a quick way to motivate and challenge your participants, run a one day event using announcements! Challenge participants 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.

For example, encourage participants to try to reach at least 10,000 steps on that particular day. Then, pull a user report to find all eligible users who completed the goal and enter them into a raffle to win an insulated water bottle!

Title: Get 10k steps on [DATE]!

Description:

Hey there, steppers. Ready to pull on your stepping shoes for a one-day event? We're challenging you to get 10,000 steps tomorrow, [DATE]. 🏃‍♀️

If you meet or exceed 10,000 steps on [DATE], you'll be entered into a raffle drawing for [PRIZE]. We'll draw a winner on [DATE & TIME], so make sure to sync before that time! ⏱

Let's do this and have some fun! 😎

Check out our Announcement Templates for General Wellness Engagement, Announcement Templates for User Stat Shoutouts, and Announcement Templates for Seasonal Events & Holidays for more examples of how to engage your users with announcements outside of challenges.

Check out our Announcement Templates for Challenge Updates and New Features article for templates to help you engage users during a challenge.

If you have enabled friends on your client account, send out an announcement encouraging participants to add friends! Learn how to enable this feature here.

Help your participants build connection with their colleagues on the Wellbeing+ app. You can designate an off-challenge period to encourage adding friends to build camaraderie and mutual motivation between participants.

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.

Use our announcement template below to announce a friend-a-thon campaign:

Title: Friend-a-thon! 🤝

Description: As we continue to make strides in our health & wellness, having some friends for accountability and cheerleading is key!

That's why with our friend-a-thon, we're encouraging you to add at least 5 friends from our organization. Pick someone from your team or department, or someone who motivates you!

By adding friends, you'll be able to more easily create your own user-created challenges and encourage one another to keep it going strong throughout the year. 💙

Call to action button text: Learn more

Call to action button link: https://help.wb.rewardgateway.com/en/articles/9451044-using-the-friends-feature-in-wellbeing

If you have enabled user-created challenges on your client account, send out an announcement promoting this feature! Learn how to enable this feature and adjust participant limits here.

User-created challenges encourage users to move at their own pace all year long. While you take the time to plan your next big challenge, you can still keep the momentum going and inspire employees to create and run their own custom challenges with colleagues or work buddies. Your participants can select from 5 different challenge modes: Streak, Leaderboard, Target, Daily Habit, and Virtual Race.

Wellbeing+ focuses on making health fun and social year-round, and user-created challenges give everyone a chance to interact with each other even if you don't have a company-wide challenge going!

Here are some fun ways to encourage users to create their own challenges:

Use our announcement template below to encourage participants to try it out:

Title: Create your own challenges!

Description: This month on Wellbeing+, try creating your own challenge! On the mobile app, you can create a challenge up to 31 days long. Set and track your own personal goal just for yourself, or invite up to [X] friends to join in on the fun! Choose between a Leaderboard, Daily Habit, Virtual Race, Streak, or Target challenge!

It's time to get creative. Now, go enjoy some friendly competition! 💪 ✨

Call to action button text: Learn more

Call to action button link: https://help.wb.rewardgateway.com/en/articles/9456934-how-to-create-and-delete-user-created-challenges

A content campaign allows you to upload articles, videos and posts to the mobile app dashboard. As an admin, you'll be able to share content with users even when they are not in a challenge.

Just like with challenge content, you can choose to make your content actionable so users can mark each post as complete. These content posts will remain static on the dashboard, and you can choose to add or remove posts at any time from the Wellbeing+ admin center. Learn more here.

Use content campaigns to motivate and educate your users any time of the year.

Here are a few ideas for utilizing content campaigns:

Beyond our in-app features, there are a few additional things you can do on an organizational level to make sure your participants are engaged with their health and wellness year-round. By implementing a few of these tips, you'll be setting yourself up for success to get the most out of your Wellbeing+ programming.

Invite members of your team or engaged employees from across your organization to help run your wellness programming. Create a wellness committee to have extra hands on deck to ensure your challenges run smoothly from beginning to end. The ideal wellness committee includes somewhere between 2-5 members.

Members of the committee can help spread the word about any upcoming Wellbeing+ challenges and cheerlead participants! You'll also have dedicated individuals who can help with challenge ideas, communications, and brainstorming prizes.

When company leadership is invested in a wellness program, your employees are likely to be too! Company leaders and challenge admins can do simple things like syncing regularly and posting in the chat to reinforce that wellness is a company value.

Tip - Get participants pumped! Get a quote from leadership about the program and post it as an announcement to promote your wellness initiative.

Give quick updates about upcoming challenges, challenge progress, and challenge results in company wide meetings, newsletters, and communications. When you make your Wellbeing+ programming front and center, participants will be more likely to engage and stay committed!

Ask your employees for input! You'll want to make sure you're on the mark with what their values and wellness goals are. Through surveying, you can ask them for challenge requests, what types of topics they are interested in, what has been working well, what kinds of rewards they care about, and more!

Tip - Looking for an easy, free way to send surveys? Try out Google Forms, SurveyMonkey, or JotForm.

You can shoutout more than just the top steppers or challenge achievements! Ask employees to share wellness tips, recipes, or favorite self-care tips. You can highlight their responses in announcements or content campaigns. Seeing your own contributions shared in the app will increase employee ownership in the program and will help to boost engagement.