Digital staff get active for Leeds charities

Engage Interactive’s 26-strong team ran, swam, rowed, hiked and cycled to raise £7,137 for four Leeds charities in their intra-office ‘Elympics’ sports contest.

Collectively, the team completed 17,632 miles and spent a total of 2,041 hours - 85 days - exercising to raise the total in 365 days.

The money will be shared between Catch, a community hub in Harehills, ToastLoveCoffee, a pop-up community cafe, Lineham Farm, a rural break for disadvantaged children and Open Country which helps disabled people access the countryside.

Engage owner Alex Willcocks said: “Although working in digital is a fantastic way to spend your week, it’s not the most active. We can spend over six hours a day sat at our desk, but the proven benefits of an active lifestyle are too good to ignore - from improved performance at work, through to better sleep and increased confidence. 
“As a company, we wanted to encourage an increased level of activity in everyone’s lives, but in a more creative and rewarding way. Engage Elympics was born, and rather than line our own pockets we wanted to donate the funds to a number of small, worthy local causes where the donations would make a notable and measurable difference.”

For every mile the Engage team ran, swam, hiked, cycled or rowed, the company donated to the fund, as well as inviting people to make online donations towards the cause.

All activities were tracked using Strava and put into a monthly Elympics leaderboard, generating competition between team members.

Staff were also incentivised with an extra day off for hitting targets. 
Alex added: “We’ve raised over £7,100 in a year - that’s the equivalent of cycling 40,000 miles or nearly twice around the Earth. Couch potatoes have turned into runner beans, 16 of us ran the Abbey Dash and one team member even ran his first marathon. We’re really proud of the whole team, and will now continue the Elympics into 2017 based on the success of its first year.”