Make Your Comeback

Regular physical activity plays a key role in improving physical and mental health, with the NHS reporting that people who exercise regularly have a lower risk of developing many long-term conditions, such as heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and stroke.

However, women face a range of emotional, practical and structural barriers which mean that fewer take part in regular activity than men.

In fact, 4 in 10 women are not active enough to ensure they get the full health benefits.
And this was exacerbated by Covid-19, with gyms shutting and exercise classes and team sports being cancelled.

Activity became solitary, and for many, staying active at all became a struggle.
As the pandemic eased, we saw the impact: one in three (7 million) women reported that they were taking a break from exercise.

Since it’s launch in 2015 Sport England’s This Girl Can campaign has celebrated a realistic vision of women being active to tackle the gender activity gap, helping 3 million women get active in the process.

But in the post-Covid landscape, where habits had been broken, our challenge was to provide women who had taken a break from exercise with a joyful way back into being active – in whichever way worked for them.

Challenge

Regular physical activity plays a key role in improving physical and mental health, with the NHS reporting that people who exercise regularly have a lower risk of developing many long-term conditions, such as heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and stroke.

However, women face a range of emotional, practical and structural barriers which mean that fewer take part in regular activity than men.

In fact, 4 in 10 women are not active enough to ensure they get the full health benefits.
And this was exacerbated by Covid-19, with gyms shutting and exercise classes and team sports being cancelled.

Activity became solitary, and for many, staying active at all became a struggle.
As the pandemic eased, we saw the impact: one in three (7 million) women reported that they were taking a break from exercise.

Since it’s launch in 2015 Sport England’s This Girl Can campaign has celebrated a realistic vision of women being active to tackle the gender activity gap, helping 3 million women get active in the process.

But in the post-Covid landscape, where habits had been broken, our challenge was to provide women who had taken a break from exercise with a joyful way back into being active – in whichever way worked for them.

Strategy

Our strategy had three key phases:
Normalise, Mobilise and Maintain.

1. Normalise helped women see that those around them had taken breaks from activity too and drove awareness that this wasn’t uncommon. We challenged the notion that it was too late to start again and showed that comebacks could happen at any time.

2. Mobilise provided women with the tools to get active through the launch of an inclusive new community for women and a motivating challenge on Strava.
3. Maintain encouraged women to keep going, with inspiring content driving women to support and recognise one another’s’ achievements.

‘Make Your Comeback’ acted as a call to arms, and elevated the campaign into something more compelling and emotive – making getting active again feel less of a chore or an instruction, and more of a journey. To help women make their comeback we knew that we needed to go beyond just telling them what to do and take positive actions to set the conditions they needed to get back in to activity. To do this we created a brand-new community on Strava – the This Girl Can Club – which provided women with a supportive, safe space where they could inspire each other and celebrate their achievements, no matter how big or small.

1.8 million women (9% of our total audience) aware of the campaign.

In just seven weeks, over 18,500 individuals joined the This Girl Can Club, sharing more than 30,000 supportive comments and Kudos to inspire other women in the group and celebrate their achievements. Members logged 254,000 activities on Strava during the campaign period 8.

The Make Your Comeback Challenge went global with 155,000 people signing up, demonstrating the strength of the campaign. Of the 39,000 UK women who took part in the challenge (KPI – 30K), 34,000 completed it, a completion rate of 89%, showing the strategy helped to drive action across the 4-week period.

Attitudinal research demonstrated the campaign had a significant impact on attitudes with 4 out of 5 women reporting that they think it is ok to take breaks in activity10.

And most importantly it led to action, with women doing more physical activity. 4 out of 5 women who recognised the partnership were motivated to do more activity. And 69% of women who took part in the campaign told us they were now doing more exercise than they did before the campaign, a significant increase on the control group, of which only 34% were doing more exercise.