New Local Features and SparkAmerica Leader Board Launch

We love to see that our members are enjoying competing in our SparkAmerica Challenge. As you know, SparkAmerica is a health and fitness challenge designed to motivate Americans to improve their health by taking small consistent positive action steps. We have challenged each city to compete against each other to be at the top of the list on the “America’s Fittest City Leaderboards! We have launched a new feature this week that now allows you to see your city ranking based on size. Since bigger cities have more people, it can be easier for them to be at the top of the list and gain fitness minutes and SparkPoints faster than smaller cities. Our new leaderboard will now allow you to see how your city compares to others based on size in addition to overall numbers.

How it works is pretty simple. We took a look at the largest city, New York City, and gave other cities a multiplier based on their size compared to New York City. We then show the leaderboards based on overall numbers and “adjusted minutes” or the cities actual minutes times the multiplier. We hope this keeps the SparkAmerica Challenge interesting and is another opportunity to show how your city can help lead the way.

To help your city lead the way we created special pages with added functionality to help improve your health. Each city on the list has a special URL that takes you to your cities landing page filled with events and resources around your city. Here you can check out local parks, trails, restaurants, fitness centers and much much more. You can create teams within you local teams and hold SparkRallies. SparkRallies are meetings or events that provide an opportunity for team members to meet up with other SparkPeople members who live in your city. SparkRallies have added functionality and features such as RSVP, bring a guest and SparkMailing attendees.

We have launched a lot of great local features recently and hope you enjoy them. If you do not see your city on this list, do not worry, there is more coming for those not in these cities as well as those based outside the US!