How the ‘Parkour Aunties’ got national media attention (And a shoutout from PM Lee!)
Medium · Health, Fitness & Body · 2018 · 1.5k words
Visa tells how two older women practicing parkour gained national media attention and a shoutout from Singapore's Prime Minister.
How the ‘Parkour Aunties’ got national media attention (And a shoutout from PM Lee!)
Behind the story: How the ‘Parkour Aunties’ got national media attention (And a shoutout from PM Lee!)
It took many different people’s efforts to bring this inspiring story to light. This is a post about their story — and how you could help other such stories come to light.
Have you heard of the ‘Parkour Aunties’?
In January this year, Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong shared an article from The Straits Times about the ‘Parkour Aunties’: two Singaporean women aged 58 and 64 who have been practicing parkour with MOVE Academy.
The story begins with Ms. Tham — a 64-year-old retiree who was having trouble walking without support—and MOVE Academy.
Desmond, from the CandyBar product team, started doing parkour with MOVE Academy back in late 2016. I spoke with him to learn more about Ms. Tham and the parkour crew.
Desmond: In November last year, the parkour students and coaches were having supper after a training session — when Ms. Tham approached us out of curiosity. (Coach Shie Boon had ordered a very large serving of food, and she was curious to know how he was able to eat so much and still look so fit!)
We told her about parkour and its benefits. She was initially hesitant, because it seemed daunting— but by the end of the conversation, she decided that she wanted to give it a try.
Desmond: Ms. Tham made incredible progress in a single month. She went from being shaky and uncertain, to confident in her steps.
Upon witnessing this, her coach Shie Boon felt compelled to expand the program. He wanted to have more seniors come in and benefit from it. Desmond wanted to help.
Desmond: When I joined MOVE Academy, I quickly fell in love with the whole experience. The coaches, the community, the course, the sense of personal growth.
And yet, while I was having such a good experience, I learned that MOVE Academy wasn’t growing nearly as quickly as they wanted. This is a challenge that we work on every day at ReferralCandy and CandyBar, so I was confident that we could help make an impact.
Coincidentally, around this time, the CandyBar team had begun thinking about doing a Corporate Social Responsibility program (CSR).
Desmond suggested we start with MOVE Academy — and we thought it would be a great fit.
Desmond: I spoke to Dinesh, our CEO, who thought it was a good idea. We roped in the help of other colleagues from product and marketing. Our goal, broadly, was to use our team’s skills to help a deserving small business achieve their goals.
“Our company’s mission is to help every SME build a better business. We mainly do this by making great software like ReferralCandy and CandyBar. But we want to do more. We’ve developed some knowledge about how to improve business processes. We want to share this knowledge with the community. We remember how hard it was when we were starting out. Now that we’re a little more established, we’d like to give back. ” — Dinesh Raju, CEO
How did CandyBar help MOVE Academy? We helped improve their processes, their website, marketing, and more.
It was the sum of many efforts, and MOVE’s coaches and students contributed substantially. To summarize a much more comprehensive post, we helped MOVE with…
- Weekly reviews — making sure that MOVE had a proper system to manage everything else they were working on (see above!)
- User research — helping MOVE better understand their potential students’ core motivations
- Marketing funnel tracking— making sure MOVE could track and measure the success of their marketing efforts
- Website update — Making the site as compelling as possible to new visitors (see below!)
- Marketing & SEO — making sure people heard about MOVE and could find them easily
Here’s what MOVE’s website looks like after the update:
As part of #5, Desmond interviewed Ms. Tham, along with Mdm. Chai, to share their experiences doing parkour with MOVE Academy.
The goal was to share their story with the wider community; to demonstrate that parkour doesn’t have to be dangerous, or for the young.
For those unfamiliar with videography, this is an elaborate, complicated process — interviewing, filming, hours of editing, publishing and then distributing it afterwards.
He had 55 minutes of footage, which he painstakingly edited down to 5. Then he shared with everyone he knew, often messaging people individually to talk to them about it.
Over the next few days, Ms. Tham’s story started to go viral.
The parkour crew had shared the video amongst themselves, and with their friends on Facebook. Other parkour communities from around the world (New Mexico, Italy, Germany) also shared the video.
Thousands of people around the world learned about the inspiring story of Ms. Tham and her parkour family.
A couple of days later, The Straits Times reached out to do an interview of their own. Mothership did an article about it.
SGAG even turned it into a meme. 😂
And then PM Lee shared it, bringing it to a wider audience than any of us could’ve anticipated.
On retrospect, it makes sense. It fit perfectly with the nation’s efforts and message of active aging, building community spirit and so on.
And at the heart of it all is a great story — about facing one’s fears, with the support of others, and learning and growing in the process.
What was the impact of all of these efforts? 5x more trial signups!
“I never expected that the media coverage would be so extensive, and the amazingly positive feedback from everyone has been highly encouraging for us. […] If I were to describe the whole experience with one word, it will be this — ‘Finally!’, with a huge sigh of relief — but of course, never being complacent.” — Shie Boon, Ms. Tham’s coach at MOVE Academy
Desmond: The media attention has definitely brought a lot more trial signups for MOVE Academy — We got 5x more new people in Jan than we usually do. Many of them are seniors.
We’ve also gotten interest from radio stations, TV stations, magazines, government agencies — we’ve gotten requests for all sorts of collaborations. The signal boost from PM Lee has helped us get a lot of exposure.
Our goal now is to continue to create a better experience for our students, so that we can fulfil our promise of making movement accessible to everyone — and create more good stories in the process.
What’s next for CandyBar’s CSR program? We’re looking to help other deserving small businesses achieve their goals.
Desmond: Our main goal is to keep using our skills to help small businesses with great products and great stories achieve their goals.
Right now, that means getting in touch with more businesses like MOVE Academy — getting to know them, their challenges, their stories.
We will continue to help MOVE how we can, and we’re currently scanning the horizon, looking for other businesses with great stories that we can help. If you know anybody who could use the assistance, let us know!
On hindsight: it’s heartening to witness how many people pitched in to help tell this story.
- First, Ms. Tham took the risk of approaching a group of young strangers to talk to them about what they were doing.
- Shie Boon (the coach) took the risk of deciding to teach parkour to senior folks (when it might have been dangerous or difficult).
- The ‘parkour aunties’ showed up week after week to progress with their training.
- The entire parkour community made the effort to welcome and support them.
- Desmond decided to take the risk of investing time and energy into making the video.
- The ‘Parkour Aunties’ decided to be willing to endure public scrutiny and comments to share their story.
- The Straits Times recognized the value of the story when they saw it.
- PM Lee did, too.
Stories like these are all around us if we pay attention, and if we make the effort to tell them. And they can be so inspiring. They bring people together, and encourage the best in all of us.
We want to help create more inspiring stories like this.
Do you know any small businesses with great stories, that could use some help achieving their goals? Let us know!
How the ‘Parkour Aunties’ got national media attention (And a shoutout from PM Lee!) was originally published in Bytes of Candy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Originally published at https://bytes.referralcandy.com/parkour-aunties-2561a0b6ae9.