The American Heart Association recommends that a person should walk 10,000 steps a day and what is better than walking to promote health, hence our efforts found a focal point to begin with. We brought to life the One Billion Steps Challenge as a self-managed program to safeguard a healthier future of the Saudi Community. The idea is simple, we wanted to motivate people to personally achieve 10,000 steps per day and contribute to the society so the total steps taken by participants reaches a billion. Since the idea is to accompany people throughout the day, we added to Al Nahdi application a pedometer extension that allows people to track their step count, the whole community step count, and the award scheme of the steps taken.

Our objective was to drive change and we needed to share our vision with people so they pledge to our journey. We wanted people to engage with us so we spread our communication around their most consumed media. We utilized the evolving habit of multi-screening and launched with a video copy on three major screens, TVs, Mobiles and Desktops though a TV and a digital campaign across Social media and True View. Social media consumption in Saudi is amongst the highest globally, so we rode on social conversations and launched a social campaign to encourage the Billion Steps app installs and usage. We didn’t stop there, we also accompanied our audience as they were on the move with strong out of home media presence and adequate radio commercial presence. We even went the extra mile and conducted 3 huge walking events in the 3 major cities.

The results achieved by our initiative were flabbergasting. With more than 66,000 active users of our pedometer feature, amidst our campaign, we had to raise the challenge from 1 Billion nationwide steps to 3.5 Billion. People tremendously engaged with us, more than 20 local influences adopted our cause, took the challenge and shared our vision with their followers. And by the end of our campaign, we have over achieved our new target by almost 100,000 steps. Everyone was excited about our campaign and highly believed in it. Multiple leading media in the country repeatedly engaged with us and covered our events with plenty of releases. And finally we conducted an event whereby we thanked people for their belief in us and launched our CSR vision.