Strava on Give as you Live Donate

In July we integrated Strava on Give as you Live Donate! Strava is a fitness app which is popular with runners and cyclists, and will already be well-known by your fitness fundraisers.

If you're new to virtual fundraising or fitness tracking, here's everything you need to know about how Strava can help boost your fundraising events, and help you to create exciting new virtual challenges.

What is Strava?

Strava is free of charge and allows walkers, runners, and cyclists to access everything they need for training, or just to record their activities. It's key features are:

Measure performance by recording times, speeds, and distances
Create routes
Record and track routes
Connect to compatible fitness devices or just record using your phone.
Connect with friends and share updates, a bit like social media.
Join a team or club

Why is Strava linked with Give as you Live Donate?

By integrating Strava to the Give as you Live Donate platform, your supporters can connect their Strava activity to their fundraising page, meaning their friends and family can see how their challenge is progressing and be inspired to donate at key moments.

Your fundraisers will be able to show maps of walks, runs, and cycle rides, as well as being able to display their times and speeds right on their Give as you Live Donate fundraising page.

How do our supporters link Strava to their fundraising page?

In 3 simple steps:

Step One: If your fundraiser doesn't already have a Strava account, they'll need to set this up. It's free, and they can do this by visiting the website or downloading the app to their mobile phone from their app store.
Step Two: Next, your fundraiser needs to log in to their fundraising page on Give as you Live Donate. They'll need to click 'Edit my page' and then scroll down where they will see the following option and just need to select 'Yes':

Step Three: Your fundraiser will then be prompted to link their Strava account. Once they've done this, their Strava updates will be shown on their fundraising page!

Why should we encourage fundraisers to use Strava?

It's great to be able to give fundraisers extra features to use on their fundraising pages, but what are the benefits to your charity?

Fundraisers who track their walk, run, or cycle activity on a fitness app and share the updates raise MORE money. It gives your supporter a reason to keep sharing their fundraising page on social media, which we know means more donations. Even better, by posting a Strava update the work is done for them; they don't need to take a great photo or think of a fun caption, just click share!
More people can get involved. By holding a virtual event, nobody is ruled out because of the date, time, or location - they can do it when and where it suits them. Strava already has millions of users, so there is a whole new audience of potential fitness fundraisers that you are able to reach.
It's slick and looks professional. Strava is instantly recognisable to fitness fundraisers, and being aligned with their respected brand will help supporters to buy into your event.
You can offer more incentives to take part. By tracking event step, mile covered, meter climbed and more, you could set new challenges to encourage more competition amongst your fundraisers.
Get to know your supporters. With Strava you can set up a club - i.e. an area of the app your supporters can join to get to know each other, keep up-to-date with event and fundraising updates, and find out more about the charity. You can also comment on your supporters' updates, meaning they'll feel more connected to you and you have a new way to engage!