Promoting your virtual sessions during COVID-19

Many activity providers have now adapted to delivering virtual sessions. A big part of this has been encouraging and supporting existing participants to move online. Meanwhile, developers have been busy adapting activity finders to help you promote virtual sessions to new audiences too.

Local activity providers have shared a variety of reasons for moving sessions online:

• Maintaining relationships with participants and members to ease the transition after lockdown
• Providing a support network and social activity for those who could easily become isolated
• Generating income to cover ongoing costs

Why promote virtual sessions

Your reasons for moving online will influence whether you want to reach new participants or not. If you are undecided, here are a few reasons to give it a go:

• You can promote sessions for free.
• Attracting more people will help you recreate the lively and sociable atmosphere of your regular sessions.
• People are looking for new activities to improve their fitness, fill social gaps or control stress.
• Attracting new audiences could help fill short-term gaps in income.
• Growing attendance could make the effort you’re putting into virtual classes feel more worthwhile.
• You could come out of lockdown with more participants than ever before.

For a local provider’s perspective, take a look at Amanda from Move Momentum’s blog.

Promoting virtual sessions via Open Sessions

Over the past year, we have worked with London Sport to make Open Sessions and Get Active available to local activity providers.

Open Sessions is a free platform where you can upload your sessions and access thousands of potential customers. Once uploaded, your sessions are automatically promoted to the public on Get Active and other national activity finders.

London Sport has been working with its developers to adapt Open Sessions and Get Active to make it even easier to search for virtual classes. You can now promote your sessions in a few quick and simple steps:

• Go to Open Sessions and Register for a free account or Sign In.
• Once signed in, follow the simple steps in this blog from London Sport to confirm you have the relevant insurance and licensing.
• Follow the step-by-step process to upload your sessions.

Join the Movement 

Activities uploaded to Open Sessions will be submitted for inclusion in Sport England’s #JoinTheMovement campaign. You may have already seen or heard adverts for the campaign on social media, TV, or radio. Make sure you use the hashtag when sharing videos, photos and information about your sessions on social media.

We’re also busy collating local stories for our newsletters, social media channels and local media. If you’d like to share how you’re helping people to be active during lockdown get in touch with Georgia. And we’d love to capture participants’ stories too so let us know if any of your regulars would be happy to chat to us.