Which Wellness Solutions products do you use at Willows Health & Lifestyle Centre?
Within our product offering, we have the Move content and we also have the Mind content – and within the Move content we also use the Silver, the lower intensity exercise program which then allows us to cover our whole membership demographic.
How do you use the Move & Mind content for your members?
When we talk about being the ‘one-stop-shop’, a very big hole in our offering was the ability to connect with our members outside that face to face membership.
It’s one thing to give hard copy programs or some access to simple weights delivered resistance training programs, but being able to deliver education in a well formatted clinical way is really tough to produce yourself.
Content is a lot of work and to keep that content up to date, fresh and backed by experts, Wellness Solutions offered that one solution for us. That’s in regards to the education piece and then on top of that being able to supplement our face to face services with great Move content such as the Breathe, Meditation, Yoga, Cardio, Strength it just covered all of those aspects.
The members can use it as just a digital membership if they just want to be a Digital Member, but it really supplements our face to face services too. From being able to do a stretch using their own device (once they finish a Personal Training session) or being able to use our app with the Wellness Solutions content when they’re at work if they want to transition between a difficult meeting and their next phone call, they’ve got Willows there with the Breathe series.
We really use the content to allow us to become part of the everyday life of our members, not just when they’re in the Centre.
What has been the response from your members?
We started our journey just before Covid hit so it certainly was a life saver with regards to being able to provide such a great service to our members during that Covid Shutdown Period. We still produced our own content, but the ability to supplement what we do with the mountains of content that Wellness Solutions provides was just amazing.
The feedback from the solution we were able to offer to the Willows family in partnership with Wellness Solutions was amazing. It allowed our members to alleviate stress, using the education with their whole family, not just with the member that is attached to Willows, and also it had a real impact in the community where people were talking about how we were using the content and how we were digitally connecting everyone during that time.
Now that we are back and have members in the Centre it really fast tracked the education for our members on how to use the content well. I think we’re all facing this as (face to face) service providers, our membership base and our communities have changed - they understand digital a whole lot more and they expect more, so the ability Wellness Solutions gives us to be able to meet that expectation is massive for us.
It has been so pleasing and the engagement levels have been really high – we track everything and we are able to have 650 members on our Digital membership during the Covid shutdown and they were paying a membership fee during that period, so that was a real lifesaver for us during that period. Some have continued to stay on their Digital membership even though we have opened up, so I think we have got about 350 that are choosing just to use their digital membership.
What would you say to companies considering using Wellness Solutions content?
I think it is looking closely at your product offering and the membership offerings that you have and how content, quality content, can really increase your ability to connect with more members but also increase what the membership value is.
Everyone is talking about value in regards to what they can bring, and there is an array of digital offerings out there. As an owner I want to be part of that conversation, I don’t want my members walking around with other products on their phones and their connection is to the device not to our fitness centre.
If a cheaper price comes up at another face to face facility or it is very easy to leave because their connection is with whatever digital offering they’ve got on that phone – we want to be that digital offering on the phone that they’re walking around with, as well as providing great face to face services.
Another aspect is bringing that content to life for our members. We use the Wellness Solutions content as part of our Wellbeing Campaigns every 30 days. We take pieces of the content and provide that to our members in our Wellbeing Campaign whether that’s around Mental Health, whether it’s around Nutrition, whether it’s around greater Movement – bringing to life the different aspects of the content to allow our members to connect with it each day.
