There's this Roald Dahl quote we love that reads, "If you are interested in something, no matter what it is, go at it at full speed ahead. Embrace it with both arms, hug it, love it and above all become passionate about it. Lukewarm is no good." As our UP health community embraces personal health with passion and enthusiasm, it seemed only appropriate for us to embrace it with the same force—and with open arms.
Our entry for the Shorty Awards is "Get UP. Together", a global campaign featuring authentic and inspiring stories from real members of the UP fitness band community.
From the beginning, our mission was to make the Jawbone brand human—make it real, make it meaningful. Lukewarm doesn't work. We thought, "Now's the time to flip the conversation and let Jawbone Ambassadors tell our story." Today you now see stories of real UP users on a journey to reach their goals—this was our first step in creating a global community and a destination of inspiration at jawbone.com.
Whether trying to lose weight, train for a marathon, manage a chronic illness or improve your sleep, the UP community inspires us all to stick with our commitments and make a change. Because we truly believe a healthier lifestyle is easier with support from friends and family.
Flashback with us on January 29, a Friday afternoon at the Jawbone office in San Francisco.
We're chatting with Brett Bullington, a long-time Silicon Valley advisor and angel-investor. He's not talking about which start-up he's investing in or who's disrupting which market. He was actually telling us how his UP tracker helped him recover from a serious bicycling accident and brain injury that disrupted his life more than three years ago. One of our other guests, Ashley Cramer, told us about how she ended her career in pharmaceutical sales to double down as the happy owner of a Barre Yoga Studio in Capitola, California. She wears her UP3 tracker everyday to stay motivated.
As our inaugural group of ambassadors, Brett and Ashley are two of the inspiring people we invited to our office to hear and capture their story through film and photography. Over the course of a single weekend, we met face-to-face many users who had transformed their life and health with an UP fitness tracker—pursuing their dreams, love and new activities with gusto. We met Errick Page, a 27-year-old dreamer who improved his sleep with an UP3 tracker, as well as Luis and Melissa, an engaged couple using UP to get in shape before their November wedding. They really support each other.
After inviting these inspiring ambassadors to the office (we had recruited them directly from the UP community), we set to work selecting the images that best would capture each story, and writing the stories themselves—which we crafted from the in person interviews. After a month planning period, the campaign launched on March 8 to our audiences old and new. Each week, we unveiled a new group of motivational stories to inspire our audience.
What makes this campaign absolutely unique is that these were real people, sourced directly from the community. These were people with real results, who had literally changed some aspect of their life as a direct result from owning an UP band. With this campaign, we harnessed their passion for living a healthy life and flipped the script and put real people in front of our audience, which is a vastly different visual and emotional experience when you compare it to many other health and fitness brands when seek to craft aspirational stories, rather than source them directly from the people who love the brand the most.
In addition to sharing these 20 inspirational stories featuring our UP Ambassadors, we also invited our audience to answer back with their own success stories, which we are now featuring on our website publicly so that even more people can read them, and find support from the UP community.
Since launching the campaign in March 2016, we've received 1K+ user-generated health stories, and secured a 20% open rate for our Get UP Together email campaign to our subscriber list of 1M+ people. With 10K in new followers, and over 100K social interactions—we believe this campaign really resonated with our audience externally. However, we were pleased that it resonated internally as well! The Jawbone team was deeply moved and inspired by this campaign—our product team has used these stories to better understand what aspects of the product are most inspiring to our community—our Customer Care team now uses the stories and content that we receive to train our agents in the field, and inspire even more empathy in our communities aims.
