Month: December 2014

We’ve teamed up with CTC and Cyclescheme to invite 20,000 businesses to take part in the first National Workplace Cycle Challenge. The Love to Ride Challenge is a competition between organisations across the UK to see who can get the most staff to try riding a bike.

In 2015, the Challenge will run from 8-28 June and will be a major annual event in the cycling calendar. The aim is to get as many people as possible to ride a bike and log their trip during the Challenge period. Organisations will compete on local and national league tables to see who can get the highest proportion of their staff to ride for ten minutes; they will be able to compete between offices in different locations around the UK and against similarly sized companies.

It’s free for organisations and individuals to take part and there are six size categories for companies and a range of individual and team prizes to be won. Local Authorities can sign up to support and boost participation in their area, whatever budget they have to promote cycling.

We want every LA to be able to join in, so we’ve drawn up a range of options from fully bespoke programmes supported with local Challenge Managers, to a Freemium package with no frills.

Love to Ride, CTC and Cyclescheme together have 157 years’ experience of promoting cycling. CTC, the national cycling charity, has 67,000 members and was formed in 1878 when cycling was emerging as a mass mode of transport and leisure pursuit. We’ve run Workplace Cycle Challenges on three continents and engaged 110,000 people.

Over the last 12 years we have developed a unique behaviour change model and accompanying website and mobile app. Cyclescheme started 9 years ago and has provided over 450,000 bicycles to commuters through a tax-free benefit scheme. We recruit ‘Challenge Champions’ – regular cyclists who encourage their colleagues to try riding – to promote our Challenges in businesses and organisations.

John Cooper, Sony Mobile’s Champion for the London Cycle Challenge 2014, said, ‘It was fantastic to find a competition which wasn’t about riding marathon distances, but about participation and team effort’.

Phillip Darnton, Chair of the Cycle Rail Working Group, had this to say about the Love to Ride Challenge: ‘Cycling to work or to and from the station is quick, convenient, reliable, cheap, healthy, and helps with congestion and pollution. The hard part is getting started, which is why the National Cycle Challenge is such a great idea: it’s a fantastic way to get people on bikes with their friends and colleagues’.

From our partners

Laurence Boon, Marketing Manager for Cyclescheme: ‘We are very excited to be supporting Love to Ride. Their focus on behaviour change and encouraging a modal shift in commuting habits is very closely aligned to what we are trying to achieve here at Cyclescheme’.

CTC’s Marketing Director, Matt Mallinder: ‘We’re delighted to be joining Love to Ride and Cyclescheme in this initiative. We call on all of the UK to take to their bikes in 2015. Through this partnership and the Love to Ride Challenge, we hope to inspire and support thousands to realise the health, economic and wellbeing benefits of cycling’.

We’re thrilled to announce that Love to Ride has received a prestigious award from the Canadian organisation Tools of Change. Our unique behaviour change programme has been designated a Landmark Case Study in recognition of our success in getting more people cycling more often.

Landmark Case Study status is conferred by Tools of Change’s peer selection process and the panel – made up of academics and professionals from North America’s sustainability sector – were very impressed with Love to Ride’s website and our bespoke behaviour change programmes.

Over the last eight years we’ve been refining and developing our model and mastering the art (and science!) of getting more people riding bikes. Our sophisticated web platform and scalable Workplace Cycle Challenges have engaged over 113,000 people on three continents and we’ve used our wealth of experience to create the most effective behaviour change model on two wheels.

Our recently revamped, fun and user friendly website identifies the barriers and benefits individuals perceive to riding more often. We use this information to target our communications to suit individual members’ needs and map out the behaviour change journey that will help them to overcome their barriers and enjoy the benefits of riding a bike. The panel noted this in the citation, commending the sophistication of our online social marketing techniques and our ‘good use of electronic media to reach many people in a tailored way’.

The Landmark award also recognised our passion, commitment and expertise, praising Love to Ride for being ‘pragmatic, focused, innovative and creative’. These are the qualities that have pedal-powered our recent rebranding and helped us to master our craft over the last few years.

We’ve nailed it, now we’re going to scale it…

Building on these foundations, we’re geared up for 2015 to be our most exciting year yet. We’re launching the first Love to Ride Challenge, the UK’s National Cycle Challenge. Organisations are invited to compete against each other locally and nationally in a fun, free competition to see who can get the highest proportion of their staff riding bikes. As one of the Tools of Change peer selection panel remarked ‘Replicability and adaptability are sky high!’

The Landmark award recognises programmes and approaches considered to be among the most successful, innovative, replicable and adaptable in the world for fostering healthier and more sustainable choices and behaviours. We’re proud of our new status and would like to say thanks to Tools of Change for recognising the results of our hard work.

The sky high potential of our model and awards like this are why Love to Ride will roll on into 2015 looking to make it our best and most successful year yet. We’re launching the Love to Ride Challenge in the UK and seeking to run Workplace Cycle Challenges in ten US cities, as well as running major projects in Australia and New Zealand. We know that what we do works, wherever in the world we do it, and we can’t wait to adapt the Love to Ride model to spread the love as far and wide as possible!

*Tools of Change was launched in January 2000 as a collaborative effort between partners as diverse as the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, Health Canada, the International Institute for Sustainable Development, Environment Canada, and Canada’s National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy.

Tools of Change recognises, rewards and encourages methods for the promotion of health, safety and environmental citizenship and is founded on the principles of community-based social marketing. See the full citation here.