Collective Upside
Health and Wellbeing
Three years ago, Dairne “Daz” Burns started hosting workouts in her garage with six friends to help keep each other motivated and accountable, while making working-out a fun way to catch up at the same time. Through word of mouth, what started out as a handful of friends turned into 120 women in only three months.
Designed for and by real Mamas, Hey Mama Movement is a wellness technology that is fun, flexible and fresh every week. Daz wanted to make the exercise experience social and fun in order to maintain motivation, create accountability and help build positive and lasting habits for women.
Hey Mama Movement has since re-branded to 'Collective Upside' to be more inclusive of all wāhine and their crew.
Vision and Challenge
Daz was inspired by the number of women that started to join in her workouts, just from word-of-mouth. As well as hosting home workouts, Daz was also managing two netball teams and as demands started to eat into her time, it became necessary to turn some attendees away. Saying goodbye to women that had become such good friends through exercise was incredibly tough for Daz, and yet the demand for what she was doing continued to grow.
Daz began to think about how she could evolve her idea to continue to help as many women as possible. After doing a tonne of her own research, she approached Enlighten with an idea. Together we went through a discovery phase around her concept and clearly defined the functionality an app could deliver. From there, our team provided technical recommendations for the best approach.
Shortly afterwards, the global pandemic COVID-19 hit, throwing the country into a mandatory 4-week lockdown. This spanner in the works produced some new challenges, however the concept of Hey Mama Movement was now more valuable than ever. Determined to get the Hey Mama app up and running to help women all over the country (and the world!), Daz, her team and Enlighten powered forward - full steam ahead!
Solution
Enlighten worked quickly to produce a ‘minimum viable product’ web app to get Hey Mama on the market as soon as possible; their model was a perfect fit for the rapidly changing ‘new way of life’. The web app, built and hosted on Microsoft's Azure with Umbraco website, is a platform offering the capability for people to engage online using video conferencing technology Agora as a mechanism to talk and work out at the same time.
Users can book virtual workouts around their schedules and can then invite friends along to do the sessions together to keep one another accountable. This is where Agora works it's magic and allows the pre-recorded workout to be replayed into the live video conference.
You can see and hear each other, keep one another motivated and have a good gossip session from the comfort of your own home! Fresh new workouts are added regularly to keep things interesting, along with delicious recipes from a registered dietitian and blog updates from other like-minded Mamas.
We put together several technologies – pieces of a puzzle that work together – they [Enlighten] managed to pull those pieces together, and that is going to do a lot of good in the world
Outcome
Within the first week they had grown 500 followers on their social media accounts, and though only focusing on New Zealand, they had registrations from 10 different countries. The Hey Mama Movement team had created so much buzz they featured on several national television shows, including 7 Sharp.
A few weeks after launch they reached out to their customers to introduce themselves, thank everyone for their support and ask if there was any feedback to improve the experience. A rewarding piece of feedback that really struck the team was that customers would regularly continue to catch up with friends in the lobbies even after the workout had finished. Creating a supportive environment for customers to spend time with the people special to them, create that accountability and have a purpose to catch up has been the standout in all of this.
After all, Hey Mama Movement isn’t ‘just’ a website that you tune into every other day for a workout - it’s a community.
Hey Mama is a way to connect with others, to know we are not alone… to know that though hard, one foot in front of the other every day is going to keep us moving. The journey is so much easier when you have people around you to take those steps
In November 2020, Hey Mama Movement officially re-branded to be Collective Upside to make their brand more inclusive of all wāhine. While Collective Upside still has a strong focus on women, they also wanted to make their community a feel-good space where dads, lads and partners also felt welcome to join in.
The mission of Collective Upside is to make working out with friends easier – because it feels better. They want everyone to be able to laugh, smile, talk and support each other. All while exercising with Collective Upside’s on-demand workouts put together by professionals in the industry. Anywhere. Anytime.