The Love to Ride Blog

This February, we took our rider challenge framework and flipped it on its head - by challenging ourselves. We each set a goal for transportation trips on our Love to ride profiles and had the whole of February to see what we could achieve. Our grand prize? Donating a bike to World Bicycle Relief. 

With a goal set to which everyone was accountable, team Love to Ride became goal-getters for February and we unearthed some interesting findings along the way.

Our aims

We wanted to understand the impact of clear goals, making a commitment to a peer group and riding towards prizes for ourselves and others. It’s also important for us to see, from a rider’s perspective, how our challenges function and how we can deliver a smoother ride for everyone.

The team’s individual goals rolled up to create office goals for each country (the UK, US and Australia), and the sum of the office goals created one overall global goal - to complete 289 trips for transportation.

How did we do?

The results from the challenge were as follows:

What did we learn?

To gain further insight into the team’s experience and what they found the most motivating, we sent out a survey. 

• We gained insights into opportunities to add new and improved features to help individuals and workplaces motivate their co-workers to ride. The most recent changes we’ve made include a new information page for Champions and displaying badges that individuals have achieved on their workplace’s activity feed. 
• Our grand prize of donating a bike to World Bicycle Relief was the most motivating, which demonstrates that altruistic prizes could help us to further engage our riders through challenges. 

• We discovered that individual goals were the most motivating to our riders.

• We learned about the potential for behaviour change for all rider types. We discovered that even the most active riders (four or more riding days per week) were able to find opportunities to ride a bike more than they were doing previously.

Comments from the Love to Ride team

“I went to the office more than I probably would have otherwise. And I rode once to a social event in town that I normally would have taken the bus to.”

“I added in extra trips whenever I could where I would normally have used a car. I live a few miles from the nearest supermarket/place I would like to visit so I had to factor in extra time to make those journeys, however it did save me time in my workout routine. The additional bike rides meant I was getting more aerobic exercise than I previously had and I was getting more time outdoors - loads of boxes ticked (and time saved)!”

“As someone who doesn't commute It made me evaluate all of the unnecessary short journeys I undertake by car. Rather than 'justifying' car use it forced me to remove habitual short car journey behaviour.”

“I felt like I really needed to get out and ride to support our team effort. I started taking the dog on bike rides instead of walking her as I needed to increase my trips (and that was the closest thing I could do to a utilitarian or transport trip!). I also collected my son from nursery on a bike on a day that I would normally have deemed too cold and he thoroughly surprised me by being perfectly happy about it.”

This staff challenge gave us a unique insight into our organisation, the effectiveness of our platform and the motivators of riders of all levels. Our Behaviour Change and Insights Manager Fleur says: “It's been a valuable experience exploring the potential for behaviour change amongst the Love to Ride team. It's brought out a competitive attitude in each of us, which has been super interesting and encouraging to witness. 

I'm looking forward to more internal challenges in the future as they provide unique opportunities to pilot behavioural hypotheses and help us learn more about areas of improvement for our platform.”

Interested in how we can help you to encourage and support more people to switch from cars to handlebars? Drop us an email: hello@lovetoride.net