👀 Increasing the visibility of your classes
Whichever live streaming solution you use, and whether or not you use a class management/booking system, you will definitely want to maximise the number of people finding out about your classes.
This is perhaps more important than ever, because an increasing number of people are searching online for classes that are suitable for them, so you need to give your classes as much visibility as possible.
OpenActive is here to support you to reach a wider audience. OpenActive is a Government-funded initiative designed to make it far easier for you to work with multiple partners to promote your classes to as many people as possible.
Put simply:
You have classes that you want in front of as many people as possible.
There are various for-profit and not-for-profit platforms out there that want to promote your classes to their collective user base.
OpenActive is the simple, standardised way for you to share live information about your upcoming classes with all of those platforms simultaneously.
Examples of the platforms that want to promote your classes are: classfinder, Decathlon, Sport England, Ordnance Survey, Public Health England and many more. Cumulatively, they have a reach of millions of users every month, and they want to put your classes in front of those users. In most cases, your classes are promoted for free and without any extra effort from you once you're setup.
The straightforward answer is that you need to do two things:
Use a class management/booking system to manage your classes; and
Ensure the system you use is "OpenActive enabled".
Find out more about using a system to manage your classes and in the next section of this guide.
Great question! 🤓 OpenActive is an enabler of these types of platforms. Instead of having to upload your class timetable information and keep it up to date in every fitness marketplace platform, you should be able to share that information directly from your existing booking system - minimal effort, maximum reward.
Some class management/booking systems (e.g. MindBody) have direct integrations with fitness marketplaces (e.g. ClassPass), so your timetables are shared directly. However, if you wanted to switch to using a new system or work seamlessly with multiple fitness marketplaces, you would only be able to make use of the marketplaces that your system has integrations with.
OpenActive standardises the way fitness marketplaces and class management/booking systems integrate with each other. This makes it easier for your chosen booking system to integrate with multiple fitness marketplaces, so you can access all of them without any additional effort.
This ultimately:
Gives you more choice in which booking system to use; and
Means that the booking system you choose should be able to seamlessly connect you to a wide range of fitness marketplaces.
