Step beyond challenges with our Monthly Step Goal feature

“How do we encourage our people to get up and moving more often?”

“What can we do in between challenges to keep the excitement going?”

“How can I reward employees for consistent healthy habits?”

We’re introducing a new feature called Monthly Step Goals, aimed to help answer all of the above questions.

Allow users to set and track progress toward their own monthly goals to promote consistent movement – with no admin work required!

This feature was designed to save you time while bringing significant value to your users. It requires no admin set up and enables you to support your users in tracking consistent movement beyond challenges.

Consistency is one of the most effective ways to encourage healthy behaviors over time, so this feature is designed to be a game-changer for helping your group build healthier, longer-lasting movement habits.

A grassroots feature

When we created our own internal wellness program for Reward Gateway employees, we wanted everyone to be able to opt-in to movement goals that worked for them on an individual level. To achieve this, we started tracking an average step goal manually each month.

When we surveyed our group on the program, this was one of the best-received parts of our program; everyone appreciated that it was easy to set and personalized to their own movement goals – and motivating. The obvious question from there was “How do we build this into our app?”

We wanted to grow the seed of an idea into something easy to access, while also making it a fun and gamified experience. This was the start of our new Monthly Step Goal feature!

What is a monthly step goal?

With monthly step goals, an individual can set a personal step goal to work towards over the course of a month, each month of the year. When setting a goal, users provide a daily average that they want to work toward, and the feature automatically calculates a total monthly step goal based on the daily average provided.

It’s right on the MoveSpring dashboard, making it easy to find, and the progress bar and daily completion stats views offer motivating and engaging progress updates.

Prioritizing user privacy and accessibility

We’ve seen some clients use repeating monthly challenges to solve for consistent movement goals in the past, and while this has been successful, we think Monthly Step Goals solves some key issues:

First, it’s automated – admins don’t have to do any management work beyond simply enabling the feature.

Second, only the user can see the goal that they have set for themself, although they must choose their average goal from within the minimum and maximum provided range. Every individual’s wellness journey is unique to them, and we want to honor that by putting control into a participant’s hands to keep their goals and data personal to them.

When we designed this feature, we wanted to focus on rewarding consistent healthy behaviors and on creating an equitable experience for anyone using our app. Someone with mobility issues or a more sedentary job gets less opportunity to earn or compete compared to people who are more able-bodied, have greater access to resources such as a gym, or simply have more opportunities to move during the day.

Our goal as a company from day one has been to make fitness fun for everyone, and we built Monthly Step Goals to be inclusive and accessible to everyone.

What’s so great about Monthly Step Goals?

Buckle up, this list is a long one! This feature is:

• Automated: It reduces the work account admins have to do in managing and creating engaging programming — once the feature is enabled for an organization, users can begin setting goals and tracking progress all from their own end.
• Individualized: Each individual sets their own goals, so you as an admin don’t have to try to come up with a one-size-fits-all solution.
• Gamified: The engaging mobile app experience easily lets users set their goals and track their daily, monthly, and yearly progress.
• Flexible: Scored on monthly averages instead of daily values, it allows for rest days, days where you absolutely crush it, and everything in between.
• Ongoing: Once a user has set a goal, that goal will transfer to the next month (unless they choose to change it).
• Year-round: Your group probably moves more in the sunny summer months than in the winter, and that’s okay! With this feature, users can change their goal each month as needed to keep it challenging but attainable.
• Focused on consistency: We want to help people build habits that last and encourage them to move at their own pace.
• Motivating: Users who are motivated by seeing their goal completion month after month in the app will find the feature is an effective accountability tool to keep moving and strive for 100% goal completion.
• Rewardable: Build a reward program based on participant goal progress, using our reporting feature to view completion each month.

Start using Monthly Step Goals today!

This feature is available to all MoveSpring annual plans. If you are on an annual plan, you can enable the feature right from the MoveSpring Admin Center. Once it is on, all users* will be able to opt in to the feature by setting a goal and getting stepping!

*This feature is currently only available on our mobile application.

Looking for new challenge ideas? Try out our Team Face-Off for Charity challenge! And to learn more about how Reward Gateway can help boost your employee wellbeing in 2024, schedule a brief demo call with one of our friendly employee engagement experts to get started.