Thursday, September 20, 2012

Workout of the Day Calendar Management

Almost every affiliate displays their workout schedule in one way or another on their website. Many use wordpress and simply create a blog post each day that writes out the workout and description.

This works fine and has the benefit of simplicity and total website integration. It starts to fall apart a bit when you try to have member workouts displayed for reference or you'd like to have the ability to plan your calendar out well in advance.

To solve this - we've developed an integrated approach to WOD management.

1. create your collection of 'named' workouts using your custom activity within logsitall.
2. while logged into the admin account - add your workouts to the admin calendar page within logsitall.
3. embed the "WOD calendar" into your own website of blog.

This lets your members see the workout calendar - and also lets them see other entries for that workout to benchmark their own personal performance against others.

You can see the system in action here:

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Create your own affiliate ranking

Want to create your own athlete ranking for your affiliate or club? LogsItAll offers a free and easy way to embed honor boards into any website or blog.

To get started create a free account for yourself and then head to the rankings page to pull up a ranking for any logsitall event. You'll see that you can enter the name of your gym as a "filter" for the ranking.

The ranking results page will be blank (since no one has entered their times yet) but go ahead and save teh ranking anyway. Once you have saved at least one ranking you'll be able to embed your collection of saved rankings into your own website.

This video shows you how:


Once you have done this - simply have your members log their workout times for this activity into logsitall (no cost to anyone). The next morning when the LogsItAll rankings compile - your members' times will be displayed automatically. You can have rankings by age and gender group -and can do this for nearly anything - from swim times to be running times etc. Take a look at the side bar on this blog and you'll see my collection of rankings embedded right into this blog!

Want more info? Feel fee to get in touch at admin@logsitall.com

-bill

About the Author

I'm Bill Patton - creator of LogsItAll and former Marketing Director for Concept2 Rowing. Since 1997 I've created multiple online communities and member management platforms - starting with my first project for Black Diamond Equipment - the "product development dashboard". The online ranking and logbook I constructed for Concept2 grew to over 70,000 users from 90+ countries. In the last year I was managing the program - the online logbook recorded over 1.2billion meters of rowing workouts.


CrossFit Member Retention

In my 7 years with Concept2 I probably toured over 100 clubs  - from throughout the US and beyond. What I found time and time again was that I could tell in a matter of seconds if the club I was visiting was successful and was going to be around for the long term - or if they were headed into oblivion.

What were the indicators of success?

1. A welcoming front desk experience. The great clubs made you feel welcome from the moment you walked in the front door. The key here was that the truly great clubs didn't just do this by having someone nice manning the front desk - rather they installed a culture of acceptance among their members.

2. Bright and clean. Obvious right? If the club looks messy, disorganized and dark, most often they weren't going to be around the next time I went back to check on them.

3. Recognition of success. This is where I fit in... The great clubs had programming that allowed them to recognize personal performance - whether a 60 year old grandmother just swam the length of the pool or a 19 year old hot head just benched a club record - recognize and reward was a key to retention. The key principle behind logsitall was to give clubs the ability to put together easy programs to recognize performance among their members.

This blog is designed to give free ideas to CrossFit affiliates and health clubs in general (large and small) to motivate, inspire and retain their members using the combination of recognition and reward.