Motivating clients to make serious strides towards improving their health is no easy task. Working with clients individually allows nutrition professionals to understand their barriers to change and help them focus on the right goals. Running a periodic wellness challenge can be a great tool in motivating clients, increasing engagement and driving long-term habit changes. Wellness challenges typically run short-term (ie. 30 days or 6 weeks), have specific goals to meet (ie. workout 15 minutes each day or log all their meals for the month) and generally offer incentives for completion. Clients will be excited to participate in a challenge that runs short-term and feels achievable to them. Generally there is the added benefit of some group support element, like a group chat, that provides an added layer of support.

Healthie offers a cloud-based EHR and telehealth platform that is quick to implement while supporting compliance with HIPAA regulations — while being customizable to meet your business needs. The Healthie Programs feature allows providers to curate short term programs, or challenge, that work for their client base. Create all of the materials for your health challenge in advance, and schedule out the timely release of emails, videos and documents to keep your clients on track. With minimal oversight, an online wellness challenge can be offered to existing clients as an add-on service or used to attract new client sign-ups for your practice.

Follow these step-by-step instructions for creating a successful health challenge through Healthie:

1. Create a new program from the Healthie’s Program tool

From your Healthie provider dashboard, navigate to Programs.. You’ll be able to view all past programs, or you can create a new one. As you build out your wellness challenge, you’ll want to consider how you want clients to enroll:

• Run a challenge that has a clear start and end date (ie. clients must enroll by June 1st, program runs 4 weeks). With time-dependent challenges, you’ll be able to incorporate more group support features and heavily push for larger amounts of signups at one time. It can help drive new business for your practice.
• OR create a challenge that clients can enroll in at anytime (ie. client enrolls next month, and their 4 weeks starts the day they enroll). This type of evergreen program will allow you to continue to market, sell and generate passive income over time.

2. Fill in your wellness challenge details

Wellness challenges are meant to be motivating and invigorating for clients, pushing them start consistently building new habits. As you fill out your program details, be sure to speak to where clients are currently at and where this wellness challenge will help them be by the end.  

• Wellness challenge title (ie. 30 Day Wellness Challenge)
• Provide a description of your wellness challenge: give your program an edge by creating a description that will speak to your clients’ desired goals or transformation.
• List out the benefits: what will clients accomplish by the end of your challenge? What will they learn, or what goals will they achieve that will truly enhance their wellness journey? You may also want to list out how clients will achieve these goals.

As this is a challenge, clearly describe what you’ll expect your clients to accomplish. Some sample ways to challenge clients during the program:

• Log their food journals every day (photos for evidence)
• Log their water intake daily (set a goal)
• Link their fitbit and record their steps
• Complete a daily exercise goal
• Set specific nutrition-related goals, like eat a vegetable at dinner every day
• Log their body measurements, body fat, weights or other custom metrics that you’ve created

All of these features are included in our free Starter Plan. Click here to learn more or get started today.

3. Schedule out the content you’d like clients to receive

Run your challenge smartly by curating and scheduling out your content and messages in advance. Using the Programs tool, you can add modules which are essentially a form, email, document or video that you want to send to enrolled participants. Receiving your curated content consistently will help clients maintain their focus and motivation throughout the duration of the wellness challenge.

Add as many modules as you’d like, keeping in mind that even a small touch-point every day can make all the difference in client motivation. Creating an email within the Healthie Programs is a quick and effective way to provide that client support. Although you’re creating the emails within Healthie, they will automatically send to the client’s inbox.

4. Enroll existing clients in your new wellness challenge

Your wellness challenge is complete, and now it’s time to enroll participants. For existing clients you can add them to the challenge by navigating to the “clients” tab. Add an individual client or a group. When you enroll clients in this manner, they will not be charged a fee. They’ll get a notification that they’ve been enrolled and will start receiving the modules you’ve scheduled out. Clients can even complete their challenge from their mobile device, so they’ll always be able to quickly access the content you’ve distributed for the day.

5. Add your challenge to a package, and charge a fee

Alternatively, if you’d like to charge a fee for your wellness challenge, you can add it to a Healthie Client Package. Any program that you’ve created can be added to an existing Client Package and bundled with other services like appointments or webinars. You can also create a new client package, and only include the wellness challenge program. You’ll be able to add a description, price and payment terms (one-time or recurring payment) for your package. To learn how you can try out all of our most sought after features with none of the risk, click here.

Once created, you can share your client package in several ways:

• Copy the EMBED code and add your package to your website for clients to purchase directly
• Copy the SHARE code and include the link in your emails, newsletters and social pages

Running a wellness challenge is an exciting and effective way to drum up business for your nutrition practice. Improve current client motivation and attract new clients to your business by periodically offering a wellness challenge. Many providers choose to run their programs when clients tend to really need the added support (ie. over the holidays) or use them as a marketing tool when clients are most eager to enroll (ie. summer challenges and January challenges). Choose the right structure, time-frame and content that will work best for your clients, to help them make significant steps towards healthier habits.