Runna is Building the First Centralized Runners’ Community

Runna is used by a group of passionate and engaged runners eager to improve their running abilities. Guided by accomplished coaches, Runna has created a personalized running experience for each user, no matter their athletic ability.

Runna took its product value a step further by introducing a supportive community. Their global community connects runners of all levels, provides resources and information, and brings its members closer to the Runna Team.

Bettermode Platform gives Runna exactly what they need to build a customized community embedded directly into their app. Now the community enables Runna to support and educate its users, close the communication gap, and encourage fellow runners to uplift and help one another.

Building the first global runners’ community

Everyone knows that running is better with friends. The Runna team sought to build a community of like-minded people to hold one another accountable. With Runna’s co-founder, Ben Parker’s running background, he recognized the lack of a centralized global runners’ community. There was no single source for runners to ask questions and connect. The Runna team saw an opportunity to build a global community for runners.

The Runna team also recognized they could increase their product value by hosting this community in their app. They knew it had to be customizable with a personalized touch to match their training plans.

Runna turned to Bettermode for its customizability and embeddability. Runners now easily access a global runner’s community but still enjoy a tailored experience.

Why Runna built the community with Bettermode

Dom Maskel came across Bettermode after extensive Google research. Bettermode stood out as a customizable community platform that comes with a robust set of tools for in-app embeddability!

"We had big requirements for our community as it’s a large focal point of our app – we needed something highly customizable by us, but most importantly, it needed to be embeddable as part of our existing mobile app – something that no other company offered."

Especially, with the help of React SDK, it became quite straightforward to integrate the community into the app. The SDK handles everything from creating new members and setting their profile details to adding them to Spaces and triggering particular actions based on community usage. The Runna team has also systems set up to trigger push and in-app notifications for the users.

Apart from the SDK, they love how Bettermode's easy-to-use JWT SSO authentication helps with seamless community access. Bettermode has also made it easy for Runna to moderate their community and personalize the experience for each member.

Runna has invested in a long-term relationship with Bettermode's team and intends to suggest improvements to Bettermode on future platform features.

All-in-all, Bettermode delivers for Runna. Dom says, “Honestly, Bettermode has solved everything we need from a community platform – from post moderation to image support and leaderboards.”

How Bettermode supported Runna

Bettermode's team created a flawless onboarding experience to set Runna’s community up for success. For Dom, working with Bettermode's expert team makes the whole experience much more enjoyable.

"Lovlyn, our customer success manager, has been absolutely fantastic to work with – she deeply understands our business requirements while having a good understanding of the technical implementation. It’s great to have a single point of contact for any questions and work with someone so responsive over email."

Through Bettermode's analytics dashboard, Runna can track their community usage and tailor their user experience. Additionally, Runna can also highlight the community in their app and keep it centrally organized and easy to access.

Having an in-app community not only improves the overall user experience but also reduces the support overheads. For example, runners post questions in the community, and often other users answer the questions even before the Runna team.

The community is also acting as a channel to directly engage with the audiences, particularly subsections of it. For example, there is a dedicated Space for all marathon runners and members get automatically added when they sign up for a Marathon plan. This helps the Runna team communicate with those people directly where needed.

Bettermode's responsive team, combined with its robust technology, has given Runna all the tools they need to build an engaging community.

The results

Runna has built a supportive community to enhance its customer value and bring global runners together. Dom himself has been surprised by the level of engagement within the community.

"We were shocked that users would take time out of their day to help each other’s questions, but I guess people like helping others, and it’s clear that people are happy to take the time!"

Their community is a wonderful asset for their members to communicate with one another, ask questions, and find resources for everything about running. As per Dom, Runna currently has people checking the community 3-4 times per week on average, with 2,500 community members at the moment!

Bettermode empowers Runna to take the best out of its product and grow it into a centralized community for every runner in their journey.

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