Carrot Rewards app helping
Physical activity increased 29 per cent among least active users
Robyn Budgell signed up for Carrot Rewards, a smartphone app that rewards users for improving overall wellness, shortly after it launched in the province in the summer of 2016. In just over a year and a half, it’s helped Budgell and nearly 40,000 people in the province lead healthier lives.
App users can choose how they want to be rewarded by linking a loyalty points provider to the app, such as SCENE, Aeroplan, Drop, Petro, and More Rewards. Carrot Rewards founder Andreas Souvaliotis said there will be two more “huge” loyalty points providers coming on board this year.
Budgell, a 20-year-old student at MUN, collects SCENE points through the Carrot app.
“Being able to get those points and be able to check your phone to see how many more steps do I need today, it makes you walk a little bit extra,” she said.
The biggest impact since the provincial government invested $187,000 to launch the app in the province has been on sedentary users, those people who walked fewer than 5,000 steps daily when they first signed on. Those users have walked 29 per cent more steps in the past year than when they first signed up.
To date, the app has tracked over four billion steps among users in Newfoundland and Labrador.
“It’s an incentive,” said Budgell. “If I just do those extra couple of steps, then I’ll get a couple of Scene points, and you just kind of keep adding them up. I find once you get enough points to actually go to a free movie, it’s kind of addictive, like I have to keep going again just to get those points.”
Souvaliotis calls the physical activity results of the app’s approximately one million users “incredible.”
“Frankly, if someone had told us before we launched that we’d be able to raise the levels of physical activity of Canadians by one per cent, that alone would have been a huge win, when you think of what it takes to get an entire population to walk more every day.”
On average, over 72,000 points are issued to users in the province every day. Even though the
app is also available in Ontario and British Columbia, it is most popular in this province, where seven per cent of the total population is using the app.
“We haven’t seen this level of concentration anywhere else in the country,” said Souvaliotis. “My humble theory about it is because you guys are so wellconnected to each other, you’re such a tight society, that one person tells the next and before you know it, seven per cent of Newfoundland has this app.”
While the app has encouraged users to get more physical activity, it’s also helped people to improve overall wellness, such as cutting back smoking or eating healthier.
The app also gives financial advice, and advice on mental health, and follows it up with quizzes on the topics. Knowledge of those topics increased by 28 per cent among users in the province, according to data provided by Carrot Rewards.
“To do one of the little quizzes, it takes you no time at all, and it’s maybe between five to 10 little multiple-choice questions,”
said Budgell. “But it’s actually teaching you about smoking habits, mental health issues, nutrition, exercise, all kinds of different things, and about your province, too — it’s specific to Newfoundland and Labrador, for us here.”
The statistics are encouraging in a province that is known to have some of the highest rates of heart disease and obesity in the country.
Budgell said the app has helped her to maintain control of her overall health at a time when it is sometimes difficult.
“Since starting university, I find myself and many of my friends, our lifestyles have changed a lot. So sometimes you don’t really realize how often you’re eating out, or you’re just sitting at a desk all day. Having Carrot has been very helpful in being able to track how much you’re walking, making sure that you do actually get the exercise, and you’re eating properly and keeping your body healthy.”