How Girls on the Go created a thriving event community
Started as a running club in October 2023, Girls on the Go has since become a thriving community and series of events all centred around a core mission: providing opportunities for women and girls to forge new friendships.
12 months, 3 cities, and hundreds of events later, we spoke with one of the co-founders Martin Mach about the rapid growth of the brand, their diverse event offering, and how FIXR has helped support the work that they do.
What is Girls on the Go?
Girls on the Go is a social enterprise designed to help women make friends. We do that by hosting weekly in-person events.
We average at least 10 events a week now, across a variety of different event types.
We started in Liverpool as a running club and have expanded to Birmingham and Manchester so far. Our mission is to make the UK a less lonely place for women.
How did it start, and how has it evolved?
When we started as a running club, we didn't have this grand vision of becoming what we are today.
We just wanted to create a running club to help women run in a safer environment. We did the running club for a few weeks and hosted our first events about a month after setting up.
Those first charity fundraising events sold out instantly each time, so we took a second and thought “Hang on: we could really turn this into something bigger”.
We bought a trademark within three weeks of setting up the running clubs. It was a massive gamble. I don't know what provoked us to do it, but as soon as we became a registered company, we got the vision of doing this in other cities around the UK.
What type of events does Girls on the Go organise?
The running club is still a core part of what we do. In Liverpool we have three different running clubs a week now: two beginner-friendly ones and an intermediate one.
We organise a lot of creative events - wine glass painting pottery painting, tote bag painting - as well as regular fitness events like weekly yoga and pilates, and social events like film nights, speed-friending and game nights.
We host special events like bingo - which we've humbly dubbed the UK's largest girl-only bingo, with over 400 guests - and the biggest fashion show in Liverpool which the Mayor of Liverpool came to. That was incredible for us.
We've also organised balls with over 700 guests, including our ‘Galloween’ ball at the end of October. It's all just really exciting.
What was your introduction to FIXR, and what were the main reasons for choosing the platform for your events?
What we wanted was analytical data. We were in talks with several companies, but we found that none of the other platforms could provide that to us (and some also wanted to charge us extra premiums for other things).
When we spoke to FIXR, we were really attracted to the customer demographics information.
That really stood out to us. We decided to try FIXR for a couple of months to see how it is, and we love the platform.
Before we had access to that information, we thought our demographic range was much wider than it actually is.
We had a suspicion that we had quite a wide age range of women attending our events - from 18 to 65. With all the information provided by FIXR, we've seen that actually 60% of our community is aged 18 to 35.
It has really helped us with how we speak to our audience.
How has FIXR's Ticket Shop integration worked for you?
It's been great. It's very useful to have a platform that means girls can just go on our website and see everything in one place.
Everyone can see what we do and why we do it, and they can get tickets for events all without leaving our website.
Because we direct all of our Instagram traffic to our website, we've also found it's helped to almost artificially boost our SEO. We publish blog posts to get a wider reach, but it's not that necessary because the traffic is coming directly to our site already.
If you search Girls on the Go and a location, our website will come up first because of the embedded ticket shop - which is great.
How have you found working with FIXR?
We love our account manager, she’s been amazing. Whenever we've had an issue or brought anything up it has been sorted straight away.
There was even an instance where someone had set up an account on FIXR called ‘Girls on Go London’. She reached out to us asking "Is this you guys?" but we had no idea about it, so she shut it down on our behalf straight away, which was great.
I like the ease of use of the master account and how we are able to see the dashboards and analytics for all three of our locations really easily.
We also love that you guys regularly roll out new features and improvements to the platform.
Get in touch to discover how FIXR can help you manage your events, boost ticket sales and build an engaged audience.