- Organizers and mission
- Partners of the 2024 edition in Romania
- Period
- Competition location
- Competition mechanics
- Registrations
- Formation of teams
- Prizes
- Walking Month Companies Cup
- Health of competitors
- Withdrawal from the competition and non-participation
- Fair-play
- Copyrights
- Force majeure
- Final regulations
The Walking Month sporting event ( „the competition”, „WM” or „the contest”) is organized by Betfair Romania Development, as a charitable event through which funds are raised for a social cause selected by organizers and implemented by a partner NGO or association of NGOs.
As organizer, Betfair Romania Development creates the Walking Month app, as a framework for the competition, and acts as a facilitator, mobilising resources from the community in the favour of the partner NGO.
Walking Month’s objectives are:
- To create the fundraising framework for a social cause, in the favour of a non-profit or association of legally registered non-profits;
- To offer visibility and notoriety to the partner non-profit;
- To promote movement (walking) and an active, healthy lifestyle, for a large segment of the population, contributing to the general health of the population;
- To reduce the number of cars in traffic in the cities where Walking Month is taking place.
To reach these purposes, organizers may become associated with other legally registered entities which thus become programme partners or supporters.
By participating in Walking Month, every contestant is agreeing to respect and act according to these official rules, as well as the Personal data use policy.
This regulation is freely available to anyone interested at the organizers’ legal headquarters and on WalkingMonth.ro.
Contestants must also agree to respect all indications and instructions received from organizers through official communications channels, like the website or Facebook page mentioned below.
The 2024 edition is organized in partnership with Banca Transilvania, which provides through donations, logistic support and promotional campaigns.
The 2024 edition of Walking Month aims to ensure the financing of the project “Our steps, their step forward”, implemented by the Dog Assist, through which we aim to cover costs for 3,000 specialized therapy hours for neurodivergent children and their families.
The project is managed by:
- Dog Assist association, headquartered in Cluj-Napoca, 16 Măceșului Str, fiscal identification code 32020359, bank account RO03BTRLRONCRT0217324805 opened at Banca Transilvania.
Donations made through the Walking Month app are made directly in the bank account RO03BTRLRONCRT0217324805 opened with Banca Transilvania by Dog Assist.
With the exception of explicit exemptions, these Official Rules govern the competition, all teams and contestants, regardless of territory.
The 2024 edition of Walking Month will take place from September 23 to October 22, 2024. Prizes and names of winners will be announced in November 2024.
The competition is open to people regardless of residence and/or the place where they are located during the competition. During the competition, competitors will need a smartphone compatible with the Walking Month app and an internet connection to register data.
Contestants understand that, although presence or residence in Cluj-Napoca is not required to participate, some prizes might only be used or claimed at the headquarters’ of the partners offering them, in Cluj-Napoca.
Teams of max. 4 people compete by trying to take as many steps (by walking) in the period designated as Walking Month. The number of steps can be taken into consideration only if recorded by a device, such as:
- Smartphone with iOS or Android, if it has an included step counter, and the operating system version is compatible with Walking Month;
- Any fitness tracker available on the market and whose software does not allow manual editing of steps.
The Walking Month app reads the number of steps exclusively from Apple Health for iPhones and from Google Fit for Android.
- Participants whose fitness trackers sync data automatically with Google Fit or Apple health will see their steps automatically appear in the WM app, should they grant the necessary permissions;
- Participants whose fitness trackers do not communicate with Google Fit or Apple Health will manually input the values (number of daily steps) in the Walking Month app, as reported by their tracker app.
After the competition starts, all competitors may edit manually the number of steps for each day. They can input or edit, only once, each of the values corresponding to the last three fully completed calendar days. Manually inputted values will overwrite values obtained through automatic sync, if both methods are used. Competitors will input values as reported by their trackers, as data will be validated at the end of the competition before a prize can be offered.
At the end of the competition, a ranking of teams is published, in decreasing order of the total number of steps taken by each team. Prizes are awarded through a raffle, at the decision of the organizers, according to resources offered by partners. The number of steps for competitors eligible for prizes will be validated by organizers before prizes are confirmed.
Optionally, competitors may choose to undergo the competition by themselves or in incomplete teams of 2 or 3 people. These competitors understand they will compete against larger teams in the same ranking and under the same conditions, as the ranking is calculated according to total team steps.
The organizer may choose to award prizes to teams of 2 and 3 contestants. This is not an obligation.
Registration for Walking Month is done individually by downloading the official app on a compatible smartphone, and going through the Activation Guide. The registration is considered complete only once a donation for the NGO has been confirmed. The donation can be made through Walking Month channels (like site or app) or on other channels, as long as it is designated for Walking Month.
Registering for Walking Month does not involve any financial obligation of competitiors towards the organizers.
Participation in Walking Month and the possibility of winning prizes offered by partners are rewards offered by the organizers to people wishing to support the activity of the NGO partner and who make a donation towards that NGO. Organizers are responsible with creating the framework of this fundraising effort, by offering the registration mechanism and a way to donate, through a specialized third-party e-payments processor, who is responsible for transaction security. Organizers do not have acces to the data of cards used for payment nor to the amounts thus donated. Payments, as donations to the partner NGO, go directly to the NGO’s account.
As a supplementary reward, organizers and the partner NGO may offer competitors various promotional materials, depending on the value of the donation made and available stocks, according to information updated in real-time in the Walking Month app. These are gifts that remain the property of the donor after the competition ends. These gifts do not represent a sale and are the jurisidiction of the legal framework governing gifts, not a sale of goods, services or products.
Since organizers are their partners support all costs with gifts in participation packages, 100% of donations made are contributions directly made to the partner NGO. While the payments processor does charge a transaction fee (not paid for by users), its value is covered by other donations made by organizers and partners.
Registrations are open from August 19 to September 20, 2024.
Once registered in the competition, competitors are free to create teams. Walking Month has been designed for teams of 4, a formula which gives the best chances for the final ranking.
- Individual participations (without team membership). For people willing to self‑motivate in adopting a more active lifestyle during Walking Month. They are eligible for prizes for which lots are drawn, as well as for the prize given to the person who individually took the most steps.
- Incomplete teams – 2 or 3 members. For competitors who only want to compete with 1 or 2 are people they know, mainly for their own health, with the understanding that they have a lower chance of winning any prizes alloted according to team results due to their competing with larger teams.
- Full teams, of 4 members. No team may have more than 4 members.
- Superwalkers:
- Contestants are automatically categorized as „Superwalkers” if they have an average of 25,000 steps per day, for a week. Once a contestant is categorized as Superwalker, they can no longer revert to their former status.
- Teams enter the „Superwalker” category if the 4 members, together, have an average of at least 80,000 steps per day, for a week. Once a team is categorized as Superwalker, it can no longer revert to its former status.
- After each calendar week of the competition, the Superwalker category will be updated to include contestants and people who met the criteria the previous week.
- A contestant may become a Superwalker even if his team does not fulfill the criteria to be categorized as a Superwalker team.
- Prizes are awarded both for contestants and for teams.
All competitors, regardless whether they are part of a team and regardless of the number of team members, are eligible for prizes for which lots are drawn individually and prizes offered by other criteria than team ranking.
Teams can be created from the moment of registration of all users and until a deadline announced on official channels, usually 48hrs before the start of the competition. To form teams, participants have the following options in the Walking Month app:
- To create a team, thus becoming its leader, and to send invites to the other people they want in their team, by knowing the others’ emails; the captain is responsible to invite the needed number of people; organizers will never add new members to an already created team.
- To join a team created by other contestant, accepting their invitation;
- To request to be alloted to a random team through the Walking Month app. In this case, the competitor will become part of a team of 4 randomly formed from all those who want to be alloted automatically. In this case, the competitors agree for the organizers to share their names and contact data with the rest of the team.
- To participate individually, case in which the competitors does not need to select any of the previous options in-app.
Teams cannnot be changed after the competition starts, with the exception of corrections done by organizers.
Competition prizes are offered by partner companies who choose to support the social cause promoted by Walking Month. Due to the specific of the competition, the number and value of prizes are not under the direct control of organizers, but are announced through official communications channels such as the Facebook page (fb.com/WalkingMonth) and website (WalkingMonth.ro).
Prizes will be offered to contestans designated as winners based on a raffle at the end of the competition; the raflle will be organized according to data reported by Walking Month and validated by the organizers. Organizers also reserve the right to set the criteria for certain prizes as confidential, if annoucing them would potentially skew the behaviour of users; the purpose of surprise prizes is to encourage individual progress for contestants who do not become champions, but improve their own results.
Some project partners may offer discounts, or free services and products, to WM contestants. Accepting such discounts, free services or products by the contestant implies accepting the partner’s Terms & Conditions. Any order of goods of services made to one of the competition’s partners in not under the organizers’ control and is governed by that partners’ Terms & Conditions.
Competitors who won a prizes are obliged to allow organizers to check the data they used to win, specifically the number of steps/day during the competition, offering for this purpose access to the device which counted the steps and the application, such as Mi Fit and Google Fit. Only steps declared in the Walking Month system as reported by a native app will be rewarded. The organizers’ decision in this regard is final and can not make the object of contestations. Partners will offer prizes directly to winners, but Walking Month will make reasonable efforts to facilitate the competitors’ claiming of prizes.
To claim prizes, competitors accept that a minimum amount of personal data needed for delivery of prizes will be sent to partners offering such prizes; such data includes name, phone and/or email for contant, delivery address etc. Partners manage personal data according to their own policies, and participants may choose to unsubscribe from any unwanted communications through channels offered by partners.
The Walking Month Companies’ Cup is dedicated to companies in Romania which choose to support the participation of their own employees in the general competition, by offering to the partner NGO, based on a sponsorship contract, a designated donation for Walking Month, and who contact organizer representatives to express their willingness to participate and their agreement about the company name being present in the ranking.
The Companies Cup rewards the company with the most active employees, takes place in paralle with Walking Month, during the same interval, in the same conditions. For reasons of fair-play, given the differences in the numbers of employees per company, the number of steps per company will be calculated as follows:
- The steps of all company contestants will be added up to get the “simple total”.
- The simple total will be supplemented by a “company bonus” of 10% for each 30 employees the company registered. For instance, a company with 29 contestants registered will have 0% bonus, while one with 30 or one with 59 will get 10% bonus, one with 60 registered contestants 20% bonus and so on. The simple total plus the company bonus add up to the “final total”.
- The final total will be divided by the number of contestant registered by that company to get an average number of steps per registered contestant.
For clarity, this procedure only refers to a bonus per company. The bonus has an effect on the Companies Challenge and doesn’t impact in any way the number of individual steps of each company contestant.
Participants registered through companies have the same rights, including eligibility for prizes, as well as the obligation to write the company name as specified by the company, in the respective field of their profile, so that their steps can be included in the company total. These participants may or may not form teams, as they wish, just like any other competitor, with people from the same company or friends from outside the company. This will not influence the Companies’ Cup, as this ranking is calculated using only steps of employees, not steps of by teams in which employees may be part of.
Organizers calculate and publish a weekly intermediary ranking, followed by a final ranking at the end of Walking Month, only using steps from people who have the company name in their profile. The ranking will show the company name and the number of steps per company, without including the number of steps for each employee or their names. However, competitors agree that such information could be send at the request of the company in question, according to Walking Month’s Personal data policy, for purposes such as creating an internal competition and/or ranking.
During the competition, contestants are encouraged to walk as much as possible and, thus, to have a more active lifestyle, to the benefit of their own health and well being. Contestants are advised to dose their efforts according to their own current state of health and physical stamina, trying to improve their own records rather than best other competitors.
Since through its very definition the contest is not localized to any particular place, and participants are free to walk as they choose during daily activities, anywhere in the world, the organizer declines any responsibility regarding potential accidents or ill effects. Participants are advised to respect all local laws and conventions during walks done for Walking Month.
Immediately request assistance dialling 112 or the local equivalent Emergency Number if during a walk you find yourself in difficulty (blood pressure, diziness, dehydration, any ill state).
Walking Month publishes information about the advantages of an active, healthy lifestyle. These posts are not medical advice and can not replace medical consults done in person by specialists.
Contestants have the right to withdraw from the competition or to not participate effectively, by not submitting data to the Walking Month app, blocking the synchronization or uninstalling it.
Withdrawal or non-participation do not automatically entitle a competitor to reimbursement of the donation they made to the partner NGO. Since participation is a reward given for people who choose to donate, and funds thus offered are not under organizers’ control, organizers have no way of offering refunds.
However, organizers will make reasonable efforts to inform the partner NGO about the withdrawal decision, and the NGO will make a determination regarding a refund taking into account local legislation.
Competitors commit to a fair play attitude, which includes, without being limited to, respecting the following rules:
- Using decent language and gestures towards organizers.
- Show respect to other competitors, volunteers, partners, organizers and the general public.
- Will not try to “hack the system”, by submitting fraudulent step numbers, or using any method that allows for an artificial increase in step numbers.
- Will not allow other people to use their fitness tracker or phone to record more steps; participation is personal.
Breaking these rules leads to disqualification of the competitor. Disqualification of a competitor may lead to the team being disqualified according to organizers’ decision.
All copyrights for any media recordings done during the competition and related events, by the organizer, belong to the organizers, including for audio and video recording, photos and texts. Organizers have the right to use these materials for promotional purposes for an unlimited period of time, in all territories, as well as to sell or offer the rights to these materials to programme partners, including the partner NGO. Copyrights on the graphics & texts published on Walking Month social channels and app belong to organizers.
By participating in Walking Month, competitors accept unconditionally, exclusively and irrevocably that organizers have the right to produce such materials, including statistics, during the competition and regarding the competition, and to make such materials public in any fashion, without any form of compensation.
Organizers and competitors are exonarated from any legal responsibility in cases of force majeure, as defined by relevant legislation, when they are not able to follow the official rules of the competition from reasons outside their will.
Organizers reserve the right to change these Rules of the competition for the whole duration of the competition, should the need arise, withouth affecting competitors’ right to prizes already announced or won.
The revised rules will be published at the organizers’ headquarters as well as online on WalkingMonth.ro.
