About Fit Kids

Fit Kids was founded in 2011 to address disparities in access to healthy physical activity among under-served children in the San Francisco Bay area. The initial goal was to bring sports programmes to low-income communities; however, Ashley Hunter, Founder and Executive Director, quickly found that the young children with whom she was working with lacked the hand-eye coordination, foot-eye coordination, speed, strength and agility that are essential for playing sports.

Unlike their peers in neighbouring higher-income communities, these children did not have safe parks to play in, meaningful physical education programmes in school or organised after-school sports programmes to help them develop fundamental movement skills.

To address this alarming opportunity gap, Ashley created a programme to empower children to adopt a physically active lifestyle. Initially, the Fit Kids curriculum was taught by coaches that were sent out to three schools. However, as the programme showed success, Fit Kids gained attention and was soon being requested by other school sites.

Managing Expansion

Director of Programmes, Navita Wilson, explained: “The Fit Kids curriculum became so popular that we created a new programme which included providing schools with our curriculum, a full set of necessary equipment, and training staff so that they can implement our curriculum within their own organisations.”

“To date, Fit Kids has partnered with over 100 schools and associations in several states to help children become more active. As we’ve grown, we have refined how we approach new schools with our programme. Many schools prefer to have a local reference before committing to a new programme. If we’re targeting a new area, we’ve found it beneficial to contact and build a relationship with the school network or district bodies first and then work with them to roll out Fit Kids.”

Navita continues: “Over time we found that our partner management had become more complex. We were using Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to manage all of our partner relationships, recording dates of last contact, what equipment they need, how far into the programme they were etc. This resulted in hundreds of columns where you’d have to scroll for ages to find the information you wanted, and it was easy to lose what you found!”

The team agreed that it was time to implement a real contact management solution.

Easy Contact Management

After researching various contact and relationship management systems, Fit Kids chose SpotlerCRM. Navita highlighted the reasons: “Initially we were worried that the software would be too sales-orientated to suit our needs. However, the account and contact management sections of SpotlerCRM were perfect for our needs.”

“If a team member needs to access the information of a partner all they need to do is login and they’ll be able to find what they want. This includes the contact details, account history, incoming tasks and everything else they might need, at the click of a button. Everything is right there when we need it – we love it! We’ve also been impressed by the CRM reporting features.”

Clarity Through Data Reports

Navita continued: “When we’re communicating with donors, we often need to answer advanced or complex questions. These questions are easy to answer using the CRM reporting feature. We’re able to narrow down and pull up data at the drop of a hat.”

“Reporting is also useful for organising our board meetings. We now use SpotlerCRM to help review key information on projects. Let’s say we have a meeting where we want to review a list of partner statuses. Using the CRM reports this is no problem. We can simply select the partners who have the “waiting list” status and then plan their onboarding process.”

A Simple CRM

Navita concluded: “Overall, the CRM is just easy! We have plans to rebuild our website to make the Fit Kids brand feel even more professional. But having implemented SpotlerCRM has already helped us immensely in this respect as it has drastically improved our organisation of partners”.

“SpotlerCRM has become our bible; it keeps our team structured and organised. We honestly couldn’t live without it, and I’m looking forward to using the CRM more as we continue to grow. Even if you’re only looking for a simple contact management system to help house your data, SpotlerCRM will help your organisation immensely.”