Wait Lists

An increasing number of races are selling out.  This opens up all sorts of potential frustrations and opportunities for Race Directors.  We see the glass as half full – so the next several posts will introduce some ideas on dealing with this, including posts on Wait Lists, Refunds, Race event transfers and Bib Exchange.

Wait lists are very valuable.  Once a race fills up, allowing runners to put themselves on a Wait List enables the race director to do several things, like:

• Potentially giving those runners preference next year.
• Including those runners on next year’s race promotion emails.
• Allowing registered runners to get a refund and people from the waiting list to take their spots (making everyone happy and reducing the impact of bandits and non-authorized bib exchange)

RunSignUp offers a number of capabilities with our Wait List:

• See reports on the waiting list.
• Auto-enable waiting list entries to be invited to replace runners who have asked for a Refund.
• Select either First In-First Out, or Lottery basis for selecting people from the Waiting List.
• Open X number of entries to the Waiting List.  For example you decide your race can handle another 500 entries, this will automatically send emails to the 500 chosen and invite them to complete their registrations.
• Allow a runner to reserve X spots on the Waiting list.  For example if a runner only wants to sign up with their family of 4, you can allow that and the family of 4 only gets invited if there are 4 slots open.
• Allow X days for a Wait List Entry to respond to the email and complete their registration.  For example after 2 days, the entry is no longer valid and an email goes to the next person on the Wait List.

As you can see, we have gotten some great feedback from the races that have worked with us on these features.  The video below explains Wait Lists in more detail: