Active LocalsThe Active Locals Journey
How I built a brand around designing the Active Locals app using social media and how that built the trust that let us walk into local communities, capture what makes them special, and help strangers find their people. From launch to 75,000+ users in just under two years, Australia wide.
Most people want to move more, and most want more connection.
Active Locals is an app from HCF Innovation that helps people find social exercise groups in their neighbourhood: run clubs, pickleball, squash and even philosophy meet-ups. The idea is simple, moving is easier, and a lot more fun, when you’re doing it with people who live near you.
It was my main focus in my first year at HCF Innovation. I owned the brand end to end, redesigning the identity across both the app and our socials and designing every graphic, while co-creating stories, media strategy and video with the social media team. Off-screen, I organised and co-hosted events and spent time with organisers and members across Sydney and regional NSW.
The statics speak for themselves
In under 2 years since launching Active Locals in April 2025, as of October 2026, we have grown our user base across Australia while also building an online community across social media platforms.
A small budget, no playbook, and a big ask of strangers.
We launched with a small marketing budget, and I came in with no prior experience growing a community online, just a real eagerness to learn how. There was no agency and no content library to lean on, so everything was made in-house. Later down the line, once the business realised the value of having a social presence, we hired a social media team to grow it further.
The harder problem was what we were asking people to do. Active Locals doesn’t ask you to download an app and scroll. It asks you to turn up, often alone, to a group of people you’ve never met. That’s a leap of faith, and nobody takes it for a brand they’ve never heard of.
So before anyone would join a group, they needed a reason to believe the groups were real, friendly and worth showing up to.
Social proof is what turns a stranger into a regular.
When people hear about a new app, the first thing they do is look it up on Instagram. They’re checking whether it’s real: are there actual people, actual events, and does it look like somewhere they’d fit in? An empty or inconsistent feed answers that question badly.
That’s why there was so much emphasis on building the brand online first. A consistent, warm and recognisable presence, full of real faces and real sessions, does the job no ad can. Every post was a small piece of social proof, and that trust became the thing that opened doors with the communities themselves.
01 - BRAND
A consistent, warm and recognisable identity across our socials and the app.
It gave people a reason to believe Active Locals was real before they’d ever met anyone from it.
Build a brand people trust
Flyer at WILL & CO, Bondi
Flyers distributed into Hello Fresh boxes across NSW and VIC
Graphics created for Instagram feed
02 - SOCIAL PROOF
Leaning on authenticity. Always using real faces and real sessions in every post. I wanted people to feel invited by the communities to join by sharing what the experiences were like.
Seeing people like them already turning up made it feel safe for a stranger to try.
Earn social proof
03 - CREDIBILITY
A credible brand made local groups happy to partner with us, and gave me a reason to go and meet them in person.
Opens the door to Organisers
04 - MEETING THE COMMUNITIES
I would go to sessions and events, solo or with a team, to film and photograph what the community and experience is like: so that we could help promote them on our social media pages and newsletters so that we could help grow their community.
This was also a great way to build strong connections with community leaders and members and bring them on the journey with us as I would be in constant communication with them on how to improve the app to meet their needs as users.
Show up and capture
Soul Social Club
Mind Shift Breathwork
Soma Social
Run Club Rose Bay
The Social Serve
Frisco!
Nia with Natalie
Irela Aquafitness
Pulse Pickleball
Groove Sessions
EZ Run Club
Feel Free to Dance
Sprout
Paws & Me
05 - PLATFORM THE COMMUNITIES
Sharing those moments so people scrolling our socials discover groups they’d never heard of, and organisers get content they couldn’t make alone.
Showcase the community
06 - INSPIRE
People I meet through events become inspired to download the app, or download it because they come across the content we’ve shared about certain groups. New users because new members, helping grow the groups, and some even go on to start their own through Local Leaders. The bigger groups are our best asset as they create more to share through socials and tags, and the loop starts again.
Inspire people to join
Warm, local and a little bit handwritten
The brand had to feel like a friend telling you about something on this weekend, not a platform selling you a subscription. I built a visual system and a voice that could be repeated quickly, every week, without losing that human feel.
That’s why there was so much emphasis on building the brand online first. A consistent, warm and recognisable presence, full of real faces and real sessions, does the job no ad can. Every post was a small piece of social proof, and that trust became the thing that opened doors with the communities themselves.
From a post, to the app, in one tap
The brand didn’t stop at the feed.
I redesigned the identity for the whole of Active Locals, not just the socials. The app itself was developed around the brand’s signature blue, so the moment someone tapped through from a post, it felt like the same place: the same colours, type and warmth they’d already come to trust.
Social proof only works if the experience lives up to it. A seamless step from feed to app keeps that trust intact at the exact moment someone decides to join.
The redesign, before and after
Content that works in two directions
For someone scrolling our socials, it’s a window into a group they’d never heard of, and often the nudge they need to go. For the organiser, it’s content they could never make on their own, putting their community in front of thousands of new people.
We took this as an opportunity to help co-host events throughout the community, collaborating with groups such as The Social Serve, Flight Club, EZ Run Club, Pulse Pickleball and others.
The goal was for someone to see a community they’d never heard of, picture themselves in it, and turn up next week.
01 - EVENT HIGHLIGHT - EZ RUN CLUB SOCIAL
Event proposal (scroll)
Meet the community leader
Invite on Instagram
Event Agenda on Instagram
Introduce the community
Capture the community
Event recap post
02 - EVENT HIGHLIGHT - PULSE PICKLEBALL
Event proposal (scroll)
Meet the community leader
Invite on Instagram
What to expect and agenda
Event recap post
Post event posts to showcase the community
What it taught me about the importance of
community
I used to think community was something that organically grew around you through places of routine like school, university and work. After a year of building Active Locals, I know it’s something you make, and have to actively search for it, with the key element of creating memories over shared experiences, and consistently showing up.
Most people don’t need convincing that they want more connection, and in a world post covid, it seems like everyone is craving it so much more in one way or another. There’s always the question around ‘what if no one comes?’ or ‘what if I don’t fit in?’ What they need is a reason to believe it’s safe to turn up, and that their people are waiting. Which is why I put so much emphasis on the brand and why it mattered so much: every post, every real face and every “come along” was a small promise that you’d be welcome, even if you came alone. And that’s something I started practicing in my day to day interactions.
I would attend community events to help capture the experience but it gave my such a joy in talking to people, learning about their experiences and what encouraged them to join, and what inspired leaders to create their communities. It gave me a sense of belonging as I kept meeting more and more communities, building and strengthening relationships as the promise of helping their groups grow slowly shifted into a stronger goal as I became a member of each of their communities too.
It proved that showing up mattered. People were excited to see me and in return I was excited to see them.
Being a member takes courage too. Saying yes to strangers is a leap, and the people who take it are the reason any of this works. I know because I took it myself. I started as the person behind the graphics, and ended up hosting my first event and finding my own people.
Community isn’t built in a day. It’s built by showing up again and again, until the strangers become the people you’d set an alarm for.