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Sport England has launched a campaign called Join the Movement #stayinworkout
As part of this campaign, Sport England is publishing a live timetable of curated virtual (live stream) classes on their website. Any fitness business that uses TeamUp can add their classes to the list for free. Their goal is to help people find fitness classes and businesses that work for them.
How do fitness businesses sign up to the Sport England campaign?
For your classes to part of this national campaign, you'll need to connect with OpenActive, a tool that takes your class schedule and shares it with Sport England. You can do this in the TeamUp dashboard by going to Integrations and turning on OpenActive:
Sport England anticipates high amounts of traffic to the timetable. This is a good opportunity to connect with new customers.
Once you connect with OpenActive, your classes can be shared with other campaigns, too. Classfinder.org.uk, for example, shares local fitness class listings. This doesn't cost anything for fitness businesses.
Why is Sport England doing this now?
According to Sport England, COVID-19 has led to unprecedented levels of inactivity. This is a health crisis waiting to happen, so they're launching a major campaign to inspire sport and movement.
The other reason? In general, governments struggle to measure preventative healthcare. There is a growing recognition that active populations have lower rates of hospitalisations, but it's hard to measure. This project will in part help Sport England measure - and then fund - the fitness industry as a healthcare priority. And, they're not alone. Companies, too, are keen to build their brand image by supporting sport and fitness initiatives.
What is OpenActive?
OpenActive is an open data project. It collects fitness schedules and then allows any platform to connect with its data. Open data projects are collective and cooperative. One of the ways this benefits you is their goal to improve the discoverability of fitness classes.
OpenActive is also a data standard campaign. Their goal is to make all activity data open-sourced (easily accessible) within the UK, in order to improve activity levels and public health.
To share your class data with OpenActive, you'll need to add a few pieces of information per class. This doesn't take long, and it helps people discover your business via location, type of fitness, pricing, etc.
Anything that could help our community do better and reach a wider audience, help their marketing overall, is exciting. If working with OA means that we help providers reach their communities in an easier way. It leads to more opportunities, more classes, employ more staff.
Read more about TeamUp integrations here.
