Reach Your Goals Together
We’re putting the “We” into WeAchieve with the launch of accountability groups.
One of the clearest lessons that we’ve learned over the past year diving deep into the world of goal setting is that involving other people in your journey is valuable but hard.
Valuable But Hard
Involving others is valuable because as many studies point out, you are more likely to achieve your goal if you share it selectively with people who you care about what they think. Turning a personal goal into a group goal can create that team spirit and drive that is almost impossible for any individual to find.
This is the challenge that we hope to solve with WeAchieve. And with our new groups feature, it’s the first step to make this happen. With groups, you can easily create small goal-focused communities. Within those communities, everyone can share the routines they are trying to establish, and chat to encourage, support, and develop the community.
And doing so is hard for a number of reasons: you may not have the people in your life that you have that kind of relationship or that share your interest. You may not have a good non-awkward way of sharing mundane but meaningful successes or bringing up challenges that you are having. Or maybe you want to find people you don’t know who are motivated in the same areas that you are.
We designed groups because we believe that traditional social media is failing us — creating divisive discussions and incentivizing inauthentic interactions. Groups turn this on its head. Instead of a public square, small communities. Instead of ad-driven feeds, private communities and data, only shared with the rest of your group. Instead of beautiful photos (which there’s obviously a place for), we share real progress and real struggles.
To start, we’re keeping the functionality simple, which we’ll detail below. But we will expand groups into a robust place where you can work with a small group to achieve more.
If you are tired of social media’s drawbacks, we hope you’ll give WeAchieve groups a try. Create a group, invite your friends and family, and get started achieving!
Some Ideas To Get You Started
Need some ideas to get started? Here are a few ways we’ve been using it so far:
- Start a digital run club — share your weekly distance goals and celebrate when everyone hits their target! Here are some other ideas for running goals to spice things up!
- Start a book club with your family — share your annual book reading goals and post quick summaries and recommendations as you finish each book!
- Get a Meditation Buddy — grab a friend and set weekly goals to meditate, and keep each other accountable if you fall off track!
- Learn a Language Together — track your progress in Duolingo, Memrise, or another app and include a few folks in your WeAchieve group!
Using WeAchieve Groups
You can create and use groups on the web or in our iOS app. To create a group in the app, just go to “Social” and click and it will default to the group tab where you can create a new group.
Creating a group is very quick: just give it a name — e.g. “Meditation Support Group,” choose an icon and a color if you want, and click go!
From there, you’ll be on the main group page — and you can define a group mission and set some daily inspiration to appear and invite friends or family to join you!
You’ll notice a few other tabs at the top: “Feed” is where you can chat and discuss how things are going. “Routines” is where everyone can add their goals that they are tracking, and the “Members” tab will show the list of members.
The last thing to do to get setup is to share one of your routines with the group. On the “Routines” tab you’ll be able to share one of your routines (e.g. Meditate 5 times per week) with the group — if you haven’t created any routines, you can go over to the “Goals” section of the app and create one.
And that’s the basics! Now you can get a group of up to 10 people together and encourage each other along with any of those goals that it is just hard to find the time for!
What’s Next?
We are incredibly excited about the potential for Groups to create new and better ways to connect with friends and family remotely, but also to meet new people who may share your goals. Some things that you can look forward to as we move forward:
- Games to Keep You Going — sticking to a routine can get old after a while. But there’s a ton of research and we have hundreds of ideas of ways that we can make it more fun for a small group to stay on track! Some of these you could play informally now (e.g. see who can get the longest streak), but we’ll be formalizing and expanding what you can do here.
- Find a Group — do you want to start waking up earlier & need someone to stay accountable to, but don’t know anyone else who wants to do it? We’re working on ways to help you find others who have similar goals and to build a community around it!
- Expert Groups — want to find an expert, coach, or mentors community that you can join to get involved in! We’re going to enable these experts to create communities that you can pay to join and participate in!
- All around improvements — even before we get to all that, we’re going to keep making the groups easier and smoother to use. And of course, any feedback you have on ’em will be helpful as we work to build a great place for you to achieve more together!
