Can I get a Whoop Hoop?

It’s been just over two years since we piloted the first version of Hoop to the 200,000 people of Islington. It’s been a whirlwind adventure and now, flash forward to October 2017, we’re extremely excited to announce that Hoop is available nationwide!

Back in our Islington days, a handful of us worked around the clock to bring local families information about the 400 or so activities they could do in their area. Our mission was to help families in the borough uncover all of the amazing events on their doorstep so that they could get out and enjoy their family time together. This mission is still very much at the core of all things Hoop, but now we’re nationwide, we’re bringing families information about over 50,000 activities across the country every week!

Whenever it’s looked like a mountain too steep to climb, we’ve been propelled forward by the amazing support from Hoop families. People have gone out of their way to send us incredible emails and lovely app reviews. We read every one but here are a couple of recent favourites that made us smile:

Kind words like these fill us with confidence that we’re doing something that really helps families. That said, we think we could be doing so much more so alongside our rollout, we introduced a bunch of exciting features to help our users understand even more about the activities on show:

Reviews

When we surveyed our users back in June the biggest piece of feedback was how important and influential they found insights from other parents to be, particularly when it came to attending a new activity for the first time. To help families share their knowledge and give each other the confidence as to what an activity is really like, we launched our new review feature.

More Info About Activity Venues

We appreciate the preparation that goes into each day out and so with our new venue info, activity providers can tell you everything you need to know before you head out the door. Whether it’s space to park your car, baby changing facilities or if the little ones need to be dressed for mess, help is at hand!

More Info about Activity Benefits

We also wanted to make it easier for Hoop families to understand what their children might take away from attending a new activity so we’ve brought in a variety of graphics to help showcase activity benefits such as, ‘makes learning fun’ and ‘encourages teamwork’.

This idea behind all of these changes is to make attending your next activity as easy as pie, and with this in mind, we’ve made it possible to book activities you see on Hoop! We’ve only just started this but you should see the option on more events each day, so keep your eyes peeled.