One of Nesta’s recent investees has seen its turnover grow by 250 per cent in a year. Vibeka Mair finds out the secret to its success.

Last January Oomph!, an organisation which runs exercise classes in care homes, made around £8,000.  In the first month of 2014 it made £65,000.

Ben Allen, founder and CEO, of Oomph! (Our Organisation Makes People Happy!), attributes its success to developing a very scalable model which can reach a large number of people, where there is a huge area of impact.

Oomph! helps fitness instructors and care home staff deliver exercise sessions in care homes for the elderly. It has developed a licensing model where a pool of fitness instructors pay to license its model. Each instructor receives intensive training and must meet quality standards which are regularly audited and monitored by Oomph! It costs around £400 for training and £30 a month for a licence to run Oomph! classes.

Care homes have the choice to train their own staff and deliver the classes for free or to pay for Oomph’s own fitness instructors to deliver classes for them – an hour-long session for a group of around 20 residents.  

Allen says Oomph! offers job opportunities, at above market-rate wages, to people from low or no-income backgrounds in a competitive and hardcore industry – a clear area of social impact.

But its real impact – which has motivated Nesta Impact Investments to back it with £200,000 in equity investment – is in its effect on the wellbeing of older people.

In order to provide new material for classes, Oomph! requires data capture from the last class of the person delivering it. This data already suggests strong social impact.

Around a third of over-65s fall over each year. In a one-off study in three of their clients’ homes Oomph! has tracked a 28 per cent reduction in falls in the homes since Oomph! classes began compared to the 12 months before.  With Nesta Impact Investment’s help, Oomph! is building on this early indication of impact with a much wider research project tracking a range of functional health and wellbeing metrics.

Oomph! has worked in over 600 care homes and reaches around 1,000 older people in a month.

Allen says the focus of its organisation is “fun”: “We want to create a party atmosphere with our classes, not an exercise class. Every month there is new music, and new exercises.