Participant engagement is crucial to the success of an effective year-round wellness program. You can build an engaging annual wellness program by combining challenges with our various built-in engagement features, outlined below. These engagement ideas can be used any time of the year in addition to your challenges to make your wellbeing programming more robust and fun, and to ensure you keep health & wellness at the forefront throughout the year.

These features allow your users to take charge of their own wellness journey, and choose how they want to engage depending on their personal interests and activity levels. Once enabled, no admin work is required for users to continue to engage with these features - a perfect opportunity to save time while fostering employee engagement and supporting your employee’s individual wellbeing goals!

Our monthly step goal feature enables your participants to work towards an individual goal that they choose for themselves. The feature empowers users to push themselves to consistently achieve their own desired activity outcomes throughout the year. There is very little admin management or user-input required to use monthly step goal, making this feature an easy and motivating addition to any wellness program. You can learn more about this feature here.

If you have both monthly step goal and chat enabled for your client account, then any participants who have a monthly step goal set will be able to chat with each other in a dedicated chat thread! This allows for a consistent in-app location for wellness related comms, where users can build community around reaching their goals and admins can share updates and engagement prompts. Learn more about accessing monthly step goal chat as an admin here.

Help your participants build connection with each other using our Friends feature. If you have friends enabled for your account, your participants will be able to search for & add each other as friends in the app. This will allow them to view a friend leaderboard of activity stats outside of challenges, maintaining a sense of social motivation even outside of challenges.

Users can also directly message their friends if chat is enabled, and 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.

You can designate an off-challenge period to encourage adding friends to build camaraderie and mutual motivation between participants. We recommend sending out an announcement encouraging participants to add friends using the template here. Learn how to enable this feature here.

User-created challenges give users the opportunity to tackle their own personal goals, whether those are activity related or about building new daily habits. Keep the momentum going in between larger challenges by encouraging your 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:

You can send out an announcement promoting user-created challenges using the template here. Learn how to enable this feature and adjust participant limits here.

The Explore feature gives your users on-demand access to mental, physical, and nutritional wellness content straight from the Wellbeing+ mobile app. The Explore tab offers a variety of videos, audio clips, and recipes that your users can engage with to support their wellbeing. With Explore, your participants can search for and engage with content that suits their individual needs, with no admin work required. You can learn more about this feature here.

There are a variety of communication tools available within the Wellbeing+ platform to help you share timely and relevant wellness information with your group! All of our communication tools can be accessed in the Communications tab of the Admin Center, with the exception of the Slack & Teams integrations which need to be managed from your account settings.

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.

Check out our Announcement Templates for General Wellness Engagement, Announcement Templates for User Stat Shoutouts, and Announcement Templates for Seasonal Events & Holidays for some 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 or alert them of any new features available for use.

The Wellbeing+ Wellbeing Calendar is a feature that allows you to create, display, and manage company events right in the Wellbeing+ app. Your participants will be able to view the calendar right from their app dashboard for maximum visibility. From the Admin Center, you’ll be able to add events across six event categories and manage attendee RSVPs. With the calendar, you can build excitement and promote wellbeing events throughout the year! Learn more about using this feature here.

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:

The Slack and Teams integrations allow you to send recurring Wellbeing+ notifications to a designated Slack and/or Teams channel. There are a variety of notifications that you can enable, from challenge updates to general user shoutouts that can send whether you have a challenge running or not. These notifications are automated and require no management once set up, making them an easy addition to an annual wellness program. Learn more about the integrations here.

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.

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!

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.