What is Active Giving?
Active Giving is a social fitness platform for good, which enables individuals to improve their personal wellbeing while contributing to the wellbeing of our planet. With the Active Giving fitness app, users can log their fitness and sport activities to support social and environmental projects.
By rewarding calories burned or kilometers covered with trees planted, Active Giving creates a sense of stewardship towards oneself and towards the planet, while promoting forward-thinking companies that seek to create positive brand awareness through sustainability-related marketing campaigns.
Active Giving wants to inspire people to live active and eco-conscious lives, engaging them in physical activities that not only benefit their own health but also the health of our planet, as these two are fundamentally linked.
Where did the idea come from?
Back in summer 2018, I organised my third solo cycling tour through Europe, and this time I wanted to raise awareness and money for a social project. I realised that it was quite difficult to manage such a campaign while cycling and to engage people in giving money for a cause they perhaps didn’t feel connected to, or didn’t have the financial resources to support.
While on my bike – I was cycling around 150kms a day – I thought, what if I could ask my community to cycle (or be active) with me from any place in the world, so that their activity, rather than a financial donation, could contribute to a cause. That’s when the idea of creating Active Giving came to me – to create a platform where physical activities can be turned into funding to support causes.
And how did you turn this idea into a reality?
As a sport and fitness enthusiast, I have always been amazed by the power of sport to unite and bring communities together. I’ve created different communities in the running and fitness scene in Berlin, Germany. So I started to organise events such as Urban Art Run, where we were collecting kilometers or calories burned and exchanging them into funds for different charitable organisations with the support of brand and corporate partners.
I also created a campaign on Instagram in summer 2019, which, for every fitness activity result shared in an IG story with the tag @active.giving, I would plant a certain number of trees. This went viral in Germany and some other countries – and after presenting the idea and winning during a Techstar Sustainable Start-up weekend, I realised it had the potential to become more. Then I gathered a team and we started to work on what became the Active Giving app, which was launched in 2020.
Tell us about the financial model
The Active Giving app is free for the users and works as a marketing platform for forward-thinking brands and companies who wish to support the active lifestyle of our users, while contributing to green projects.
Our app offers brand and logo placement to companies when a user starts and completes an activity in-app. Part of the revenues that Active Giving generates through logo placement is then invested into different social and environmental projects. The other part is invested into the company’s operations.
Apart from helping to fund environmental projects, what are the benefits for users?
Users can choose from six different projects to fund with their activities. Meanwhile, our Team functionality allows users to create their own team and challenges – this a tool that is aimed at creating more awareness about our planet and the importance of maintaining good health within a specific community.
By joining Active Giving, users have access to our network of #activators – our ambassadors – and can take part in Active Giving virtual classes and events as well as receiving affiliate benefits from our partners.
Our amazing community of users has now passed the bar of 225 million calories burned, and has helped to plant more than 500,000 trees with their fitness activities.
Do you plan to add more features or to upgrade?
Yes, it’s in our DNA to improve our services and product. We are planning to enable more interactions between users on the app, connecting users from all around the world. We’ll onboard new not-for-profit partners and allow users to financially support the projects they choose. We will also allow more integrations for our partners’ offers as well as integration with other fitness trackers.
What are your future goals for the app?
Our goals for the app are to become the daily companion of every individual wanting to maintain good health and have a positive impact on the world. We would love for the app to be integrated with worldwide sport competitions and organisations. The future of sports and fitness are dependent on the climate and the conditions of our living environments. Our goal is to positively influence the future of our planet by instilling a global vision of wellbeing and a sense of collective action.
