The kinship between wellness and the great outdoors is providing fertile soil for a new local collaboration between Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden and app developers. Recently, the Garden began offering its members an innovative tool—the budding Nudge app—to nurture healthy lifestyle choices.
Nudge provides an interactive environment where users can not only track and share daily habits, but assess their overall impact, according to Mac Gambill, one of the enterprise’s co-founders.
Gambill, who originally developed Nudge with co-founder Phil Bean as a resource for corporate wellness, says that their vision continues to grow. “Software’s such an incredible way to reach a large group of people, so that’s where we started. Since then—just through the evolutionary process—we’ve tweaked the user experience here and there, and now what we’ve actually created is a single metric to tell a person how healthy they’re living based on very, very simple input.”
Nudge’s assessment of an individual’s fitness level is informed, in part, by the activity-tracking function of the Moves application for smartphones. “It makes it incredibly easy for a person to just download us; we prompt you to download Moves, and all of that data gets kicked into Nudge,” he says. “It makes Nudge a lot more passive.”
While developing Nudge alongside his four partners, Gambill initially approached Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden to see if the Garden’s staff might be interested in giving their program a trial run. Their feedback, he says, has helped the team fine-tune the app to make users’ experience with the program as effortless and engaging as possible.
Beth Monroe, the Garden’s public relations and marketing director, reports that many employees have readily embraced it. “We found that there was good interest, and we had one staff member who said that it really had been life- changing. It really helped that person to be able to take a closer look at their daily activities and their habits, their hydration, and all of the things that Nudge tracks.”
As a result of the app’s success, the Garden began including Nudge among its membership benefits. Within a month, Monroe says, 110 members had downloaded the
software. Uniting people with a common interest—in this case gardening—provides an effective network through which likeminded individuals can encourage one another to incorporate wellness into their recreational pursuits.
“The social aspect of it is very key,” observes Monroe. “I think it’s a very engaging way for people to interact.”
Clubs that focus on activities ranging from walking to biking motivate Nudge users to take charge of their own collective health programs, Gambill explains. “When we sign up an organization like Lewis Ginter, for instance, we create a custom club for them as a way for all of their members or their staff to come together on one platform, to communicate and launch initiatives themselves.”
Offering yoga classes and organized walking trips in a lovely bucolic setting, the Garden cultivates a culture of wellness that fits well with Nudge’s mission. “I think Lewis Ginter is doing some amazing things that will just continue to improve as they keep trying to foster this environment of healthy living,” notes Gambill, adding, “Healthy living doesn’t necessarily have to happen at a gym. It’s not necessarily about calorie counting. It’s just general, sustainable healthy practices.”