Please follow our new blog for the latest RunSignup news.
Visit the new RunSignup blog
Bib Exchange is a hot topic. Road Race Management lead article in their last newsletter was all about race directors dealing with “illegal” bib exchange. Online Registration systems typically do not handle this very well. And that is where our latest release of RunSignUp provides some great solutions for Race Directors. Hopefully this reduces result errors, […]
Have you ever had a runner wanting to move from the Half Marathon to the 5K in your race because they got injured? When we were Beta testing this capability with the Dexter Ann Arbor Run, we had this happen about 20 times for a 5,000+ person race. That is a lot of overhead for […]
Most races do not allow refunds. This of course frustrates runners who may get injured or have other priorities emerge. There are three reasons to allow refunds: You have a Waiting List of people who will take the spot. You want to have a runner-friendly race that gives runners more flexibility and encourages them to […]
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 […]
We added the ability to set Event Specific Questions for races. This makes it easy for race directors to ask specific questions for certain events and not for others. Perhaps you want to know the estimated time for the Marathon, but not for the 5K. You can set questions to display on a per event […]
It has been a good week at RunSignUp. We get excited about two things. One, when we make a customer happy and hear about it. And two, when we finish a major project that will really help race directors, timers and runners. And we did a lot of that this week! On Tuesday we visited […]
We have so many features to make life easy for race directors and timers that they become difficult to learn! So we have just introduced our “Tip of the Day”. It pops up like the image on the right shows with a new random tip each day (only the first time you go to your […]
Results How do you post results from your race? Many timers will have a race site where they post results. You can also useCool Runnings to post results. Athlinks does a good job of picking up many races automatically and then has cool features to match runner names across races. RunSignUp recently added results posting. This is a simple […]
RunSignUp allows race directors to easily remove, refund or transfer runners between events. Race Directors can either do this themselves, or allow runners to self manage this (and charge a fee). In this video, we show you how a Race Director can easily: Remove a Runner form a race Remove a runner and refund the […]
RunSignUp has a number of advantages over older registration systems. We’ve talked a lot about our Cloud architecture providing a scalable infrastructure. Our rapid pace of software development is also allowing us to meet the needs of our race directors and timers. There are several important parts to this: Cultural. We listen to our users […]
We have just released the first part of a major set of functionality to enable results display for Races on RunSignUp. Upload an HTML, Plain Text, CSV, TSV or PDF of your race results, or point to a webpage containing them. We will do a conversion to simple HTML (for security purposes) or a PDF […]
We have a couple of big things coming in the next week or two, but we are also paying attention to the little stuff. We love to get feedback from users and while we may not always get to them right away, be assured we file them away and will get them done! Here is […]
We recently did a major upgrade of our management and monitoring tools to use New Relic. It provides us a number of things: Monitoring & Alerting. We had been depending on our own simple scripts for this. This now monitors the site every 1 minute and alerts us if there is a problem. SLA. We […]
When runners signing up for your race receive a confirmation email today, it comes from info@runsignup.com. We are updating this to come from the primary race director’s email address. This will make it simpler for runners to communicate directly with the race. We are also providing an easy mechanism for you to set the email […]
We just posted an overview of RunSignUp at http://www.slideshare.net/runsignup/runsignup-overview. It is 75 slides long! Lots of features, but worthwhile reading thru to see if you can get some ideas for ways to improve your race and online registration!
Financials Update RunSignUp has always been known as the fastest payment processor for races. We have been making some very important changes to the financials system to provide better information to race directors, timers and partners. The new financial reports allow you to drill down into each payment to the individual runner or donor to […]
Did you ever wish you could have a simple URL for your race? Well, we’ve got a quick and simple solution for you with this new feature in RunSignUp. Once your race is created, simply go to Customize -> Race URL and set up to 5 different URL’s. Note that these are first come, first […]
The more runners in your race, the more problems the race director faces. There are a number of new techniques being used in Online Registration to help reduce the burden on Race Directors. Runner Input Errors How many times have you received an email from a runner saying “I made a mistake on my age.” Or “I mis-spelled […]
I just got back from visiting my daughter in Tanzania. She is over there for a year teaching English in a remote Massai village with the Orkeeswa School. She started a running club after school. The club participated in the Half Marathon and 5K at the Kilimanjaro Marathon in February. On June 9, they held […]
One of the things we want to do at RunSignUp is be pretty transparent about how we operate. It helps us understand what is good and what we can improve upon in a direct fashion. As you may know, we run on the Amazon Cloud. This gives us a large number of advantages in terms […]
I’m the co-race director for the Scott Coffee Moorestown Rotary 8K. We hired a young photographer just out of college for $200 to come take shots at our race this year and then posted the pictures on our Facebook page the day after the race. The traffic has been amazing and it has generated a […]
I recently presented at Race Director University. Here are my slides: Online Race Registrationhttp://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=raceregistrationcourse-120531073657-phpapp01&stripped_title=online-race-registration&userName=runsignup
This month we will discuss a good problem that more races are having – selling out, and how to handle some of the hassles of runners wanting to change their race or transfer their bibs. Wait Lists With the growing popularity of running, more races are starting to reach a maximum number of runners they […]
We have started working on the scalability of RunSignUp. This is a major project for us this summer, building on our move to the Cloud from this past winter. We have implemented a bunch of caching and other performance optimizations over the past couple of months. Users have been seeing this in increasingly fast page […]
Being a Race Director is a tough job. There are hundreds of balls to juggle. We find the best race directors are those that learn from others and continually look for new ideas to make their race better and better. Race Director University is a new organization that is offering a full program May 21-25 […]
There was an article in the New York Times about how technology companies are over anxious to collect and “monetize” user information. While they talk in public about how they “do no evil” or fall on their sword when there is a public outcry, they all have business models (and legal contracts their users click […]
RunSignUp Releases New Race Registration User Interface Fast, Modern and Easy to Use Race Registration Helps Runners and Race Directors Moorestown, NJ – March 9, 2012 – RunSignUp, the leading innovator of online tools for Races and Running Clubs, today announced the availability of a new user interface for online race sign up. The interface […]
We just had another race director switch from a different registration system! She already had some registrants in her old system. With the Import capability of RunSignUp she can easily import those participants. There is the added benefit of now being able to use the free iContact capability to easily email all of her participants. […]
The goal of the new user interface is to provide a great experience for the runners who are signing up for your race. We have tried to streamline the process, yet give you all the options you love with teams, donations, fundraisers, custom questions, multiple participant sign up, etc. We also have a number of […]
We went to see Jiro Dreams of Sushi this past weekend. It is a great documentary movie about Jiro Ono: “JIRO DREAMS OF SUSHI is the story of 85 year-old Jiro Ono, considered by many to be the world’s greatest sushi chef. He is the proprietor of Sukiyabashi Jiro, a 10-seat, sushi-only restaurant inauspiciously located […]
One of the most simple ways to get runners to your race is to invite them via Email! While RunSignUp will never email runners, we think this is a very effective tool for race directors. And we’ve made it simple and free when you use RunSignUp by tightly integrating with iContact. You can see more […]
We are getting ready to release a new User Interface that runners will see on RunSignUp. The new website can be viewed in test mode at https://test3.runsignup.com/ Our objective is to have a clean design that is appealing to runners and is easy to use and as streamlined as possible. You can see an example of […]
One of the cool things you can do with Sites is create a photo gallery. You can see examples of this at https://riversiderun.sites.runsignup.com/ and at http://rotary8k.sites.runsignup.com/sponsors/. It is amazingly simple to do. I created this short video:
We are happy to welcome Road Race Place as a new partner! They join RunningintheUSA.com as a partner that takes advantage of our Affiliate Program. This provides their websites a way to query our list of races and automatically list all of our races on their websites! Magic… This is great for Race directors who […]
“I can’t say enough good things about RunSignUp. I use it exclusively at this point. I have a few Active stragglers that will be switching over this year. Its been a great partnership.” From a timing service who has over 30 races on RunSignUp.
When RunSignUp first came out with our Facebook integration we created a very cool feature that allowed us to create a Facebook Event for a race automatically. The bad news is that Facebook changed the way Facebook Events work. And you can no longer renew an event and change the date to the next year. […]
This month we will discuss how race directors can take advantage of several major features RunSignUp has added – Email Marketing, Custom Widgets, and RunSignUp Sites. Email Marketing Communicating with your runners is important in many ways. Reminding runners that your race date is approaching and to sign up. Sending educational emails to make sure […]
RunSignUp Releases Free Race Email Marketing Service Partners with email and social media marketing leader iContact to allow race directors free email services for promoting races Moorestown, NJ – March 9, 2012 – RunSignUp, the leading innovator of online tools for Races and Running Clubs, today announced the availability of a new free email marketing […]
I come from the Internet Technology business with a lot of focus on open source and the newer Cloud models. This has been a driving force in how we have thought about designing and delivering RunSignUp. I just re-read an article by a friend of mine on The Open Web. It is a bit geeky […]
RunSignUp continues to grow very quickly by developing easy to use cloud services for the running community. Learn more about us here. We build in PHP, MySQL and use the Smarty MVC template engine. We do a lot of AJAX and Javascript on the front end. We run on an advanced Amazon infrastructure and have […]
There was an article in the NYTimes today “No More Innovation for the Fun of It”. The point of the article was that many of the big companies like Apple and Google have turned into businesses that really only care about money. And in that pursuit they do things like capture information and figure out […]
Winter Updates – all of these features are currently available: Age-Base Pricing – You can set pricing for multiple age ranges. RunSignUp automatically calculates the prices so when Mom signs herself and her family up everyone is assigned the right price automatically. It is accessed via the “Customize” tab and the “Registration” sub-tab in your Race […]
