If you are a race director and striving to provide the best possible experience for your runners from registration through the finish line, you need to begin thinking about how to leverage Mobile.
Mobile Registration. Today over 40% of people register from a mobile device. If your registration process is not mobile friendly, you will absolutely frustrate and potentially lose runners. Your runners deserve a friendly mobile registration experience. Ask yourself if your runners should be seeing the image on the left or the right for their registration experience?
Mobile Results. If you work with your timer, you should be able to post results that are mobile friendly. We have seen rates of well over 60% of users access results from mobile devices. People are checking after a race and before they get home or back to the office on Monday. Again, ask yourself if you want your runners to see the image on the left or the two on the right on their smart phones?
Mobile Notifications. Again, working with your timer, you can easily add TXT and EMail notifications. This let’s your runner’s friends and family know how they did, and can drive more interest in your race for future years!
Mobile Race App. And if you really want to give your runners the full experience for mobile on race day, then take a look at an app like RaceJoy. In addition to giving a native app for things like race, hotel, and course information, it allows spectators to track the real time progression of their runner friends who are wearing their phones during the race. I was at the Cherry Blossom 10 Miler and was able to know when my daughters were coming on the race course so I could be ready to cheer for them. And get information like expected finish time, and unofficial results as soon as they crossed the line. These types of apps have the potential to turn the world of results on their head by making everything GPS measured and real time. While this is not satisfactory for competitive events, most entrants in a race are there for the fun and exercise and camaraderie. And these apps appeal to the bulk of the runners. Here are a couple of screen shots:
