Early Women’s Rally Campaign
In 2021, only a couple of women signed up for the Torino-Nice bikepacking rally, a komoot-supported event, and we decided to change that. Over the next four years, we ran around two women’s-only rallies a year, multiple awareness campaigns, and provided support and education to help get women and non-binary riders into long-distance cycling. Since we began the komoot Women’s Rally events, we’ve seen a marked shift in women taking part even in non-komoot bikepacking rallies, including many who first gained the confidence at a komoot Women’s Rally.
Challenges
This particular 2023 campaign was at a time when we were really ramping up our efforts to bring more women into bikepacking, including women who had never ridden a multi-day route before. Unusually for our newsletters, this one was long and comprehensive as we had a lot of education and inspiration to get across. It was a good challenge to try to keep the reader interested for the entirety.
An additional challenge we faced was audience targeting. The komoot Women’s Rally events are, obviously, only for women (and non-binary riders), which made us risk the newsletter feeling irrelevant to our majority-male audience of around 20 million at the time. I strongly believed that we should send it to the entire audience however, because a huge part of increasing female participation in sport is to get men onboard with women’s participation as well.
To achieve relevance to everyone, I angled the newsletter in a way that implored the reader for their help. We asked them to get involved with increasing women’s participation by either applying (if relevant) or by sharing it with the women in their lives. This helped create greater relevance for our male readership.
Social
We ran this newsletter alongside Instagram posts and reels advertising the rally.
Results
The newsletter open rate was over 36% to an audience of 20 million across 8 languages (we excluded our non-European languages as the next rally would be in Slovenia). The campaign was so successful we had many hundreds more applications that we’d had for prior rallies and the awareness generated spurred each subsequent rally to see more applications. As a result of the Women’s Rally campaigns in general, we’ve now seen the prior participants, as well as women who didn’t get a slot, create meet-up groups and go on bikepacking adventures together. It honestly makes me cry to see how phenomenally successful this campaign and the whole Women’s Rally initiative has been.
