A Halloween Tale

From a community activation to a cross-department campaign.

Boohoo! My name is Elodie, Brand Community Manager at Freeletics; the #1 fitness app in Europe and leading provider of AI-based fitness and lifestyle coaching. Freeletics is more than a fitness app, but rather a lifestyle powered by one of the most passionate and dedicated communities in the world. This community is one that loves to come together to challenge themselves and others to become their greatest version. This year marks the closing of an incredible 3-year Halloween activation trilogy and to celebrate I’d like to share my story with you. And as with every good tale, everything started with a Slack message. (Wait, what?)

Part I: 2018 — Defeat the monsters 🕷

Once upon a time on September 25th, 2018, roughly one month before Halloween, the Community Management team thought: “let’s do something fun for the community for Halloween”. No more, no less. The three of us had a short brainstorming session and we came up with an idea of community’s activation: “Defeat the monsters”.

The concept? To invite our users to perform 1 of the 5 workouts and send us a photo.

• Arachne (a lot of spiderman pushups)
• Kyklops (a lot of pullups), Medusa (handstand pushup)
• Minotauros (several rounds of high knees, lunge walks, and burpees)
• Typhon (a cardio killer with its 80 squat jumps)

Although this fitness challenge was received very positively by our community members, many complained that 4 days was not enough time to complete it. Despite this issue, the feedback was encouraging and it was evident by the hundreds of photos we saw in the app, that they had a blast! Many were already asking: when the next challenge would be.

• 4 teams involved: Community, Blog, CRM, Localization.
• 4 assets: 1 teaser, 1 blog post, 1 visual to explain the challenge, 1 newsletter.

Part II: 2019 — Defeat the Darkness ⚡

In 2019, I directly applied the two planning learnings from the previous year. Unfortunately, I only had one month to get this off the ground. Regardless, I worked hard to level up the challenge and its visual identity. I briefed the concept to our creative team and they created outstanding assets that propelled the activation to new heights. The community atmosphere was even stronger and more original than in 2018. Game on.

The challenge itself followed the lines of the previous one, with this time 4 gods of darkness ready to challenge our different users.

• Erebos (very difficult and intense workout with pullups, split lunges, burpees and toes-to-bar)
• Hekate (technical workout with clapping pushups and pistol squats)
• Hades (a full-body workout with pullups, pushups, burpees and sprints)
• Nyx (an ab-burning workout with situps).

Once again, several hundred users performed these exercises. People loved it and now, we're ready to step up with a different kind of challenge with new exercises or maybe even a new god workout?

• 6 teams involved: Community, Blog, CRM, Localization, Creative, Social Media.
• 6 assets: 1 teaser, 1 blog post, 1 visual to explain the challenge, 1 newsletter, 1 push notification, and 1 post on Instagram.

Part III: 2020 — Defeat Empousa 🔥

This last part starts on April 9th (!), more than 6 months before Halloween. If we planned ahead, we could integrate our project directly into the product and maybe even create a new god. This never happened before in our editorial project calendar but I had to give it a shot.

During the brainstorming session, my colleague and Performance Marketing Manager, Friedrich had this brilliant idea to create “Empousa,” a god that users have to defeat by doing jackknives– an exercise that looks like a flame. His idea collected the majority of votes from the involved stakeholders and a few weeks later we set off to create Empousa as our Halloween god workout.

At this time, no god workouts had been created and added to the app since June 2018. Needless to say, this was a big milestone for us. Training Experience Manager, Thomas, developed a new workout that would offer, as he put it “a nice burning sensation with a local muscle burning in the legs and core.” Sounds fun, right? We involved employees and ambassadors to test the new workout to find the right balance. It had to be challenging enough for our active users and not too intimidating for new users. After the test round, the final version of this god workout was ready.

One more time, the Creative Team created an epic visual identity to support this campaign and as of today, thousands of users have defeated Empousa.

• 11 teams involved: Community, Blog, CRM, Localization, Creative, Social Media, User Acquisition, Essentials, Coach, Product & Engineering.
• 8 assets: 1 teaser, 1 blog post, 1 newsletter, 1 push notification, 1 post on Instagram, 1 youtube video, 1 design for a limited edition hoodie, and 1 new in-app god workout!

My Learnings

• Plan ahead. With a 1-month deadline, we were able to deliver a community activation involving 4 teams. However, with a 6-month deadline, you can create a cross-department campaign with the support of 11 teams.
• Ideas come from everywhere. Brainstorm with as many colleagues as possible, and ideally from different departments. Engage them from the very beginning and trust them to come up with innovative concepts, because they will.
• Keep it simple. In this precise case, Halloween is a light, seasonal activation. While this can be a good excuse to do something bigger than just what one would expect, make sure that the concept stays easy to understand.
• Inspire and lead. If you don’t believe in it, no one will. You might be the crazy person talking about Halloween in April during a worldwide lockdown but this is temporary. Time flies and the D day will arrive faster than what you expect.
• Be grateful. Every team has its own priorities and the time they allocate to join your brainstorming, to build the roadmap, to plan the activation, to create the assets is essential but do not take it for granted.
• Enjoy the journey. A journey is not linear and it includes ups and downs. What matters is to keep moving forward, no matter what. This 3-year activation has been a real and necessary journey for me that taught me how to constantly renew and improve. Today, I am glad to celebrate this happy ending, close this book, and prepare to start a new one! ✨