Starting a female cycling revolution with three words “Ride With Me”
British cycling culture is dominated by men, who account for 72% of all bike trips in the UK. Skoda wanted to use their sponsorship of the Tour de France Femmes to help change that.
We discovered that eight million women in the UK own bikes, but half of them don’t ride them. Our challenge was clear. How could we empower 4 million women to get back into cycling?
The answer was simple. We wouldn’t. They would. Our ambition was to turn the 4 million women that do cycle into advocates. If they could each get one friend to join them for a ride, we would double the numbers.
On the day the Tour de France Femmes started, so too did our campaign ;“Ride With Me”. We launched our movement with the help of Olympian Elinor Barker and TV presenter Angellica Bell. Together, they encouraged women to invite their friends out for a ride through a series of social-first films that were amplified across TikTok, Instagram and Strava. We ran a #RideWithMe Strava Challenge allowing participants to share their progress. We also gave our audiences the opportunity to participate in a ride out event through London.
Within a week we had over 37,000 participants joining our challenge, amassing 180,000 hours in the saddle and covering a collective total of 1.5 million miles.
