Skip to content

Why aren’t the participants of free summer exercises continuing in the autumn? Customer research and insights for the Friskis & Svettis sports club.

Illustartion of the Friskis & Svettis insights (answering to the question "What is Friskis & Svettis").

Summer 2018

Freelance project in collaboration with the volunteers at Friskis & Svettis Helsinki

Customer research for the volunteer-based sports club

Friskis & Svettis is a Swedish based gymnastic club relying on volunteer workers. In Helsinki, they offer weekly indoor gymnastic lessons in several locations and outdoor training such as jogging and hiking.

My work with Friskis & Svettis was focused on finding insights about the participants of the free outdoor park gymnastic exercises, and why they don’t return as paying customers.

My approach to this project was to start from basics and consider Friskis & Svettis from different perspectives and open-minded — not only this one service.

Methods

Kick-off workshop for the volunteers carried the theme: what does Friskis mean to you? It included q short presentation about the upcoming project, design methods and conversation stimulated with inspiring pictures.

Diaries included several questions. Diaries were targeted to volunteers and those located at the sports hall where they work. Volunteers were able to answer anonymously.

Interviews were carried out on the field with the participants of the free park exercises. The target group was occasional visitors who might come in the summertime but not buying a subscription. The actual outcomes were mostly based on these findings.

Customer inquiry & field observation was made to understand the current state of F&S.

The results were reported in a visual form

Toimijoille tärkeää Friskiksessä on: mut ihmiset, hyvinvointi, saa tehdä hyvää ja yhteishenki
Emmi Putkonen

The report included concrete improvement ideas, mostly regarding visibility and services. The findings were focusing on customer understanding and built on personas based on the interviews and observations.

The purpose of the report was also to strengthen and give ideas to the unique brand of F&S Helsinki: what makes F&S the best sports club in Helsinki? In addition to the service analysis, I also collected a light business and competitor analysis.

Feedback

My work got excellent feedback from Friskis & Svettis. They had struggled to find common goals and a voice as a community. As an outsider, it was easy for me to find out what people inside and outside Friskis think about Friskis & Svettis. These insights were a valuable base for further strategic development and service guidelines.

The insights I made weren’t maybe anything extraordinary. But those were the very basic things that they were missing. By visualising the struggle points, it was easy to communicate and understand them. As I understood, this project opened even some volunteers’ eyes to think about Friskis & Svettis from different perspectives.

Scroll Up