The University of Bristol is home to around 25,000 students and 8,500 staff, with 370 buildings in and around the city of Bristol. The Sport, Exercise & Health department operates 3 of these buildings, which are home to many facilities including a gym, studios, a swimming pool, sports halls, tennis, badminton and basketball courts, a sports medicine clinic and more.
The department serves approximately 6,000 paid members – made up of 90% students, 5% university staff, and 5% members of the public. Around 69% of the student population engage with the department’s offerings that include free fitness classes, volunteering opportunities, it’s Bristol Moves rewards app, performance sport and more.
Challenge: Different login details for app
The University of Bristol first went live with Legend’s leisure management software across its Sport, Exercise and Health department in April 2017. Since they’ve benefited from the breadth and flexibility of the features on offer within the Legend platform. Including the comprehensive reporting that makes effective decision-making easy.
When new students and staff join the university, an API integration with the student and staff database automatically creates accounts in Legend. That means no manual data entry and no need to sign up. With single sign on (SSO), students and staff use their university login credentials (authenticated via their identity provider, Microsoft Azure AD) to access the university’s sports and fitness services via Legend’s digital member services portal. Easy and secure!
Knowing how seamless and easy this makes it for students and staff to access this portal, and with many using the app, the university wanted to make the app accessible via SSO too.
The Legend app, powered by myFitApp, and branded as the University of Bristol Sport App, lets students, staff and other members book, access on-demand classes, manage their membership and more. A separate account and password was needed to login to the app – creating friction and presenting a security risk.
Solution: Extending single sign on to the app
In 2022, the University of Bristol, Legend and myFitApp teams partnered on a project to roll out SSO to the Legend app too for the university’s students and staff.
The project ran smoothly. Students and staff can now log into the app seamlessly and securely using the same university login credentials they use for the Legend digital member services portal and other university systems.
Results: Increased app use and engagement
By working in partnership with Legend & myFitApp to extend single sign on (SSO) for students and staff to the Legend app, the University of Bristol has:
- Improved data security
- Removed a barrier to make accessing activity easier
- Increased engagement with as many as 40,000 app uses through SSO each fortnight (up from 14,000 each fortnight)
“Thanks to the close work we’ve done with the development teams at Legend and myFitApp, students and staff can now login to the app seamlessly and safely. That’s one less password to remember, and one less barrier to engaging in physical activity – a win all round! We now see as many as 40,000 app uses through SSO a fortnight. That’s significant as we have 25,000 students and 3 sports sites.”
– Arron Godfrey, Deputy Business Development Manager, University of Bristol
“We were pleased to partner with the University of Bristol and Legend to introduce single sign on using Microsoft Azure AD to the app. This improvement makes it easier for the University of Bristol and other higher education institutions to let students and staff seamlessly and securely access the Legend app.”
– Jonathan Cooke, Chief Commercial Officer, myFitApp
