It’s Walk to School Week
With the start of a new school year comes the opportunity to establish new, healthy routines. Many of our clients are keen to help people in their area do just that with Walk to School Week, which we are supporting in a variety of ways with our app and platform.
We will be delivering carefully tailored promotions, messages, rewards and incentives to reach and engage as many people as possible and help them discover healthier and more environmentally friendly ways for getting around.
City of York Council are using Walk to School Week to raise awareness of the UN Climate Change conference, COP 26, which is taking place in Glasgow next month.
It’s 210 miles between Glasgow and York, and the Council have challenged schools to ‘walk’ all the way there over the week. Schools will be recording pupils’ active and sustainable journeys on the BetterPoints platform, with each one being recorded as 1 mile towards the 210 mile target.
The BetterPoints York programme is supporting this fantastic initiative by incentivising adults to travel actively too. Every time app users walk, wheel, run, ride or take the bus between 7.30-9.15am and 3.00-4.30pm this week, they will go into the draw for a share of £26’s worth of BetterPoints each day and earn double points for their journeys. The intention is to incentivise parents to try doing the school run in more environmentally friendly ways and to broaden the reach and appeal of Walk to School Week’s aims to the whole adult population, not just those taking their children to school.
In Ebbsfleet, Walk to School Week is setting the scene for our Schools Challenge, which encourages parents and staff to travel actively and earn book tokens for their children’s schools. We’ll be giving away £600’s worth of book tokens – £200 to the school with the most active and sustainable journeys and up to £100 for each of the four participating schools if they reach the target of 200 sustainable journeys over the nine weeks of the event.
These are just two examples from current programmes of how the BetterPoints app and platform can support events like Walk to School Week to increase their behaviour change impact and reinforce councils’ wider public health, climate change and sustainable transport aims.
For a recent example of how BetterPoints programmes help people to unlock the benefits of active travel, see this recent case study from BetterPoints York.
