How can I encourage more people to ride?

Encouraging more people to ride is what we’re all about at Love to Ride. There’s nothing better than helping someone new build their biking confidence and become a regular rider.

With more people on bikes, we reduce our carbon emissions, improve our moods, supercharge our health and fitness, and make the places we live more bike-friendly.

But how do you turn someone from a tentative rider to an enthusiastic bicyclist? It’s not as tricky as you’d think!

Start small; send someone a message

Reach out to someone with a quick message to share your love of bike riding. You could introduce them to Love to Ride, send them a link to a Quick Course or invite them to ride with you. There’s nothing like a personal message to get someone enthused about riding!

During challenges, such as Cycle September, we save you the hassle of writing messages to your friends, family and co-workers by providing you with lots of pre-written messages. You can find these on the resources page in the Promo Pack.

Use your unique link

Automatically be named as someone's encourager by using the unique link from your profile page. This is the quickest and easiest way to get more people riding and gain your encourager kudos. 

Copy, paste and send your link to a friend, family member or co-worker. If they click your link, register for a challenge and then log a ride, you'll be named as their encourager and automatically earn your encourager points or entry into the encourager prize drawing (if there is one). 

Manually add your encourager

During a challenge, you can add your encourager from the link beneath your photo on your profile page. Select your encourager from a list after you log your first challenge ride. You can find out more about encouraging in our FAQs.

Take a newbie for a ride

Some people might need a bit of help to begin their biking journey, but with a bit of support they’ll be pushing those pedals in no time! When taking someone new out for a ride make sure you:

🤔 Understand their current riding level

🚲 Make sure they own / can borrow a suitable bike  

😌 Take it slow - building confidence can take time and there’s no need to rush

🎓 Check out our Quick Course ‘How to take a newbie for a ride’

Plan a social ride

Riding with friends, family, neighbors, co-workers is a great way to combine your social time with a fun activity. Plan where you’d like to ride (apps such as Komoot are great for this) or guide people along your favourite route. Let everyone know where to meet, roughly how long the ride will be, and schedule a few snack stops along the way. 

If you get lots of new riders along who then name you as their encourager in a challenge, you’ll be piling up the points before you can say ‘bicycle.’

Use the Promo Pack

For each Love to Ride challenge, we put together a Promo Pack filled with pre-written messages, images, a poster and flyer, and social media posts that you can use. Share them with your friends, family, local groups, on social media, at work and anywhere else you can think of! 

Just before and during a challenge, you can download the Promo Pack from the Resources page in the Info section. 

Here’s an example of a social post and a share message from previous challenges:

What are the benefits of encouraging?

Click the stories below to discover the impact of encouragement!

If you’d like to make a positive impact through bike riding, then go forth and encourage! Encouraging someone to ride is the best way to score BIG points during a challenge; 50 points for an existing rider and 100 points for a new rider. Whilst the points are great, the real benefit of encouragement is helping more people to leave their cars at home and experience the joys that biking can bring - that’s a benefit that’s hard to beat!

Happy encouraging!