The Client

The Whole Life Challenge

The Challenge

Get more people into the game.

The Solution

CrossFit coaches Michael Stanwyck and Andy Petranek created the challenge in 2011 when they were trying to get their clients to keep behaving themselves once they left the gym. So they tasked a handful of early players with eating well, exercising, stretching and taking supplements every day for eight weeks.

About 150 people from one CrossFit gym played that first game, and that number grew into 10,000, but for reasons that baffled the owners the number of participants leveled off. When we first began the job of finding and fixing the problem we quickly realized that a vast majority of their participants were Crossfitters. Making the growth data even more misleading was that a large percentage of the existing participants playing more than once a year.

Having found the root cause of the flat numbers, in conjunction with the owners we agreed to create a new customer initiative to run alongside a new marketing strategy to reinvigorate the CrossFit community. Depending heavily on social media, both owners gift for good writing and lots of in-house video, the tide began to turn.

By the time we ended our engagement the participant numbers were consistently over 20,000 for each challenge. With Michael and Andy at the helm we await the day they break 100,000.