Virgin Pulse Expands Award-Winning Wellbeing Solution Suite; Extends Market Leadership with the Launch of Virgin Pulse Ignite

FRAMINGHAM, MA--(Marketwired - January 10, 2017) - Virgin Pulse, the leading global provider of technology-enabled wellness and wellbeing solutions, today announced Virgin Pulse Ignite, the latest addition to Virgin Pulse's rapidly expanding suite of wellbeing solutions. Ignite is a social wellness platform designed to help organizations cultivate healthy cultures and positive workplaces by engaging users on a daily basis in gamified, team-based experiences that help individuals and organizations achieve specific health goals and outcomes.

With recent research revealing a strong connection between employee wellbeing and business performance, organizations are recognizing that engaging employees across all aspects of the wellness spectrum -- from clinical wellness, to social wellness and wellbeing, to strategic wellbeing -- is driving top and bottom line business benefits.

Virgin Pulse Ignite is purpose-built for organizations looking to increase employee wellbeing and workplace culture through team based challenges that span a range of activities, from destination challenges, to healthy habit challenges, to values challenges, to history challenges, to challenges that build culture directly into an employee's onboarding experience.

Team challenges have also been clinically proven to inspire significant health outcomes, like weight loss and BMI reduction. As individual employees improve their health, organizational outcomes like productivity, engagement, and culture often follow. Built on the company's feature-rich platform, which sees the highest daily and weekly engagement rates in the industry, Virgin Pulse Ignite provides HR and benefits managers with a unique opportunity to create customized, team-based challenges highlighting company locations, culture, values, and history. While team challenges have historically been used as a tool to motivate physical activity and personal wellbeing, Ignite's flexible framework can also be extended for use in training, onboarding, and culture-building.

"Wellbeing challenges are popular for good reason: they're fun, they're competitive, they inspire teamwork, they get people moving, and they provide a common goal for colleagues across organizations. With Virgin Pulse Ignite, we're taking them to the next level," said Ron Hildebrandt, SVP of Products, Virgin Pulse. "Virgin Pulse Ignite is the result of more than 34 years of collective experience deploying social wellness, and it unites the most engaging features, content, and experiences with best-in-class software and mobile technology. With Virgin Pulse Ignite, employers are able to offer their employees an exciting social wellbeing experience while impacting the bottom line through better productivity, engagement, and culture."

With more than 2,200 clients and 2.4 million users, Virgin Pulse has amassed the largest pool of user data and insights into the effective design of team challenges, which directly informed the design of Ignite's content-rich, user-centric challenge programming, including:

• Apple TV App: Progress, chats, and team accomplishments can be broadcasted to the entire office through the Apple TV challenge dashboard.
• Mobile-first design: All of Ignite's features are available through the Virgin Pulse app, allowing workers to participate and engage with the program on-the-go.
• Team Rivals: Members may choose to compete directly with select teams, upping the level of friendly competition.
• Captains: Members that choose to lead a team are given tools for extra motivation and communication with team members.
• Chat and Emoticons: Members may share progress and successes through text and/or image posts, which may elicit a high-five, like, or other emoticon response.

In addition to a library of off-the shelf challenges, Virgin Pulse Ignite's integrated challenge admin tool allows HR and benefits managers to develop and deploy targeted challenges based on location, business unit, or demographics, extending the power of social, team challenges through personalization and segmentation. Likewise, local wellness champions and individual employees are empowered to create their own challenges, spreading wellbeing amongst their colleagues.

Virgin Pulse Ignite is available immediately for employers around the globe. The solution is fully integrated with Virgin Pulse Hub, engagement technology that unifies employee programs and resources while providing personalized program recommendations, segmentation and targeted communications tools, and real-time analytics. Virgin Pulse Ignite's challenge features are combined with year-round engagement and behavior change programming in Virgin Pulse Engage, a total wellbeing solution that strengthens workforce cultures, productivity, and employee engagement. For more information about Virgin Pulse's suite of wellbeing solutions, visit www.virginpulse.com.

About Virgin Pulse
Virgin Pulse, the leading provider of technology solutions that promote employee engagement and wellbeing and part of Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Group, helps employers create workforces that are happier, healthier and ultimately more productive. The company's modern, mobile first platform delivers a personalized user experience that utilizes gamification to engage users in building habits that inspire meaningful and measurable change across individuals and the businesses they serve. By helping employees thrive at work and in all aspects of life, Virgin Pulse is helping change lives and businesses around the world for good. More than 2,200 global organizations representing many of the Fortune 500 and Best Places to Work, have selected Virgin Pulse's solutions to engage their workforces and drive their businesses forward.