Skylab Win Big Chip!

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Manchester based innovation studio Skylab are celebrating the win of their second Big Chip Award.

The Big Chip 2011 ‘Best Not for Profit’ Award was awarded to Skylab for the Swimfit project.

The Swimfit website and web app were developed for British Swimming as an extension to the swimming.org site. Offering a free online coaching tool for swimmers of varying abilities the project is designed to increase participation in swimming by providing a structured approach to maintaining health, shaping up, improving fitness and developing competitive swimming skills.

Big Chip judges were impressed by the project’s simplicity, ease of use and quality of its content all of which have been endorsed by the strength of response the project has generated from its target audience.

Commenting on the dramatic success that Swimfit has achieved, British Swimming’s Web Manager, Barry Wade said,

“Over the previous two years before we moved Swimfit to the website and Skylab’s Web App, the total number of members to Swimfit was around 9,000. The fall out rate was also high with the website gaining about 15,000 page views a month.

In the first four months of Skylab’s Web App going live we gained 9,000 new members, as many as the previous 2 years and the website now gains over 150,000 page views a month as people log swims and keep track of their progress. This is a ten-fold rise in traffic giving us concrete results in our drive to get Britain healthier as people engage with swimming.”

Speaking after the awards, Skylab Managing Director Nigel Collier congratulated his team,

‘We are especially pleased to have won the award given the tough competition but hopefully this demonstrates Skylab’s ability to deliver industry acclaimed success for not-for-profit organisations, as well as commercial clients.

The award highlights the fact that innovation is at the very heart of what Skylab is all about and it also underlines Skylab’s digital expertise in websites, apps and social media within the sports sector.

The team worked incredibly hard on the project and have a strong commitment both to British Swimming and British Gas. The team are the real heroes and the award is a great success that they can be rightly proud of for a very long time to come.”

This is the second time Skylab have been recognised for their work by Big Chip, they were previously awarded the prestigious Anthony Wilson ‘Modern Original’ award in 2008.

Check out the Swimfit website or get involved and sign-up for the Swimfit web app!

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