What's next for GoodGym in 2022

Building on our learning from the last year GoodGym’s central team has now started work on some objectives for our new financial year. Ed Field, GoodGym’s Head of Growth and Partnerships, writes here about the highlights and how GoodGym intends to grow as we emerge from Covid-19.

This year's business plan has been heavily shaped by the events of the past 18 months. The pandemic impacted on every aspect of GoodGym’s operations and highlighted what is possible. Over the next 12 months we aim to continue our successes in supporting older people and carry on adapting our group sessions to be inclusive no matter when and how people want to combine getting fit with doing good.

Guiding Principles

This year we’ve agreed on some guiding principles to shape our decision making. These will keep us focused on choices which will have the greatest impact.

Focus our efforts where we can achieve a lot with a little We have wide-ranging ambitions and a profusion of ideas. At times resources can be stretched and we recognise that capacity within the central team will be limited. Trying to do too many things risks doing none of them well and so we aim to make clear decisions about what to focus on.

Support our community to create more positive social impact with existing resources We want to maximise the positive impact we can have with the resources that we have. To position ourselves to continue to grow and have a positive impact long into the future we will focus on working to enable more activity with our partners, community groups, area activators, TaskForces and run leaders.

Use our tech platform to drive positive behaviours Our website and online connection in our community one of our key strengths. We aim to use it to encourage more of the activity we want - such as getting runners to sessions, or better quality referrals - more effectively and at a greater scale.

Work to improve inclusion and diversity in everything we do For GoodGym to be effective in creating better connected communities it is crucial that we are representative of the communities in which we operate. We aim to improve inclusion and diversity within the GoodGym community, and this is reflected throughout the business plan.

Objectives

We have four key objectives for the year ahead. Each will impact both our financial sustainability and our social mission. The four objectives are:

Use technology to increase participation The GoodGym website is the main driver to get people to sessions. We aim to improve the functionality and user experience of the website to encourage more people to attend. This will be measured by a variety of metrics we know are important in determining long-term engagement.

Empower the community to do more As we emerge from the pandemic where we had over 12 months without group runs we aim to return to pre-covid levels of group session activity. A key factor in this will be our ability to offer more sessions to more people at different times, and supporting area activators, run leaders and TaskForce to deliver them.

We have a new role, the Group Sessions Operations Manager, focused on supporting area activators and run leaders. Alongside this, our Engagement Lead will work closely with TaskForce members, and improve the process for task owners to set up group sessions.

Focus the impact of our older people work The pandemic highlighted the essential need for GoodGym’s older people work. We had great success scaling up in some areas, and wish to replicate this across England and Wales.

This year we plan to focus our efforts on increasing older people work in areas where we have been specifically funded to deliver it, or where we have strong partnerships that have the potential to grow over the coming years. This will mean that some areas will continue to have more activity than others. Longer term we aim to target contracts in more areas, allowing us to scale sustainably and increase opportunities for more people.

Create successful brand partnerships Brand partnerships bring financial resources as well as added value such as marketing reach and membership growth. We aim to onboard further brand partners over the coming year while using these as an opportunity to grow our offer to partner employees and amplifying our message through joint communications.

Every member of GoodGym contributes to our mission. Area activators, TaskForce, run leaders and runners are the reason we are able to have such a huge impact on the areas in which we all live. This will always be the case and the pandemic has shown what we can do together. Over the next year the central team wants to support the community to do more and resource those activities that will make the biggest difference to the lives of older people and the community groups we support.