Objective
The Fitness Campaign is a voluntary wellness event organised by Chemigate for its staff and partners each spring. The ultimate goal of the campaign is to serve as a source of well-being and joy from doing things together. As such, it provides energy and motivation to manage domestic and work responsibilities. Ideally, the campaign encourages people towards an athletic lifestyle and activates even those who have generally not had time for sports. Believe it or not, this has happened, and we are obviously always extremely happy and proud of such results.
The campaign has now been supplemented with the opportunity to generate benefits on a wider scale. Each year, Chemigate selects a charity for which all participating companies can, on a voluntary basis, collect funds based on the total number of exercise sessions. At the same time, we hope that the donations for a good cause will motivate our partners to take part and exercise even more than before.
2024 Campaign
- The campaign lasts for 10 weeks from 15 January to 24 March 2024.
- Registrations by 12 January 2024.
The goal is for every group member to earn at least two-and-a-half (2.5) fitness points per week. This means a minimum of 25 exercise sessions per person over 10 weeks.
All those groups in which each member maintains a two-and-a-half average for the whole period, that is, a minimum of 25 exercise sessions in 10 weeks, are the winners.
The Association of Friends of the University Children’s Hospitals (Kummit ry) aims to achieve the optimum care for children and young people in Finland. Kummit supports Finland’s five university children’s hospitals in Oulu, Kuopio, Tampere, Turku and Helsinki.
At the end of the campaign, we urge you to donate any funds raised through exercise to Kummit Ry: https://kummit.fi/yrityksille/tee-yrityslahjoitus/
Rules
- Form groups of your choice (group size 4–20 people) and come up with names for them.
- Each group appoints a captain to handle registration, the regular reporting of results and the distribution of communications from the head of the Chemigate campaign (Tuire).
- The goal is for every group member to gain at least two-and-a-half (2½) fitness points per week. This means a total minimum of 25 exercise sessions per person/10 weeks.
- A single continuous exercise session lasting at least 30 minutes grants one point.
- All participants can choose their respective sports freely. Any sport is fine, as long as it is sufficiently strenuous to raise your respiratory rate.
- You can only gain one point per day, which means that the absolute maximum for a week is 7 points.
- If you miss a week, you can compensate by being more active in the coming week, for example.
- It is not the intention of the campaign to encourage exercise when ill. If you happen to fall ill, the sick days will also be marked in the results table. This ensures that they can be considered in the calculation of the final average.
- All groups in which each member has a 2½-point average for the entire period (i.e., no less than 25 exercise sessions during the period) are winners.
- The “winner” is the team all of whose members stick to the goals and achieve the highest weighted average (points/person).
In its current form, the campaign also enables exercising for a good cause. Each group/company can determine its own charity contribution. Charity contributions are not compulsory. At the end of the campaign, we hope that any funds accumulated through fitness activities will be directed to the charity selected by Chemigate for the year.
If you have any questions, no matter how small, please do not hesitate to contact us. Depending on the matter at hand, the most convenient way to get help is to contact marketing@chemigate.fi. Any feedback and improvement suggestions are also more than welcome!
Registration
Once you have assembled your team and selected a captain, e-mail the team name, number of participants and the name of the captain to marketing@chemigate.fi. After registration, the team captain will receive an e-mail message containing the credentials required to access the team’s own page. The names of the team members must be entered here so that the results can be recorded.
Participation in the campaign is free, but if you decide to contribute to the donations, upon registration please indicate the sum per fitness point that your group is willing to donate. Please note that the donation sum cannot vary between team members.
That said, participation does not necessitate a donation; you are more than welcome to take part without donating.
Entry and availability of the results
Over the course of the campaign, results are recorded directly in the portal on the Chemigate website at http://kuntokampanja.chemigate.fi/. The same link also provides access to your own results and those of other teams without requiring you to log in.
Result reporting is primarily the responsibility of each team captain, unless otherwise agreed by the team. We hope that each team will record results in the portal at least once a week. This ensures that you can follow your own team’s progress in relation to the other teams and the contest remains exciting.
You can also use an Excel spreadsheet inside your team to monitor daily results. You can download the Excel spreadsheet here.
Tips for using the Excel spreadsheet:
- Enter the name of your team in the table and add the participants in separate rows.
- You can print out the spreadsheet and place it on your break room table or save it at an address where all team members can access it electronically.
- If you will be using the spreadsheet electronically, it is a good idea to indicate exercise sessions with a checkmark and sick days with the letter S. This ensures that the formula on the last row calculates the sums automatically.
- Add the results to Chemigate’s result portal at least once a week.
If necessary, do not hesitate to ask for help! The support persons for the portal are Tuire, Maisa and Tomppa. You can also request assistance by contacting marketing@chemigate.fi. The aim is to ensure that reporting is never a hurdle that discourages participation.
Real-time results will be available at the address http://kuntokampanja.chemigate.fi/. The order of the summarised results table will change as the competition progresses. The team in the lead will always be shown at the top. The ordering criteria are as follows:
- 1. all team members have reached the target
- 2. team average
- 3. number of team members (teams with more members first)
Background
Chemigate has been organising the campaign for ten years now, first internally and then on a wider scale under the company’s leadership. Some statistics are provided below.
However, the campaign itself is much older and dates back to the early 2000s. At that point, Raisio Chemicals and Rhodia established the joint venture Latexia and the amount of work exploded. As the number of sick days increased and the importance of exercise began to be forgotten, the people working on the second floor of the chemicals building developed a playful competition among those who usually got together for coffee breaks. The campaign was well received and seemed to motivate even those who had not been very physically active – and most importantly, everyone had fun!
Over the years, the campaign expanded, and challenges were presented to other teams, then to other departments and ultimately to partner companies. At its peak, the campaign has involved people from different locations and even different countries.
At Chemigate, the campaign first started in 2013. It was initially organised for in-house staff only and then with support from the company. In 2019, a decision was made to facilitate the result entry and monitoring by creating a separate result portal for the campaign. The charity theme was also introduced around this time.
In 2021, the campaign reached its best result ever with 100% of the participants achieving the goal of completing an average of 2½ exercise sessions a week.
The campaign has been fine-tuned slightly over the years, but the basic idea has remained the same: the event is about the shared joy of physical activity, spurring others on and finding day-to-day motivation. An indication of the campaign’s success is that it has survived for more than 20 years, during which it has mostly been organised by the staff.