Importing Old Event Participant Data

You can now import participant data from previous years. This allows race directors to have easier access to all of their data in one place, and also enables some of the nice year over year reporting that RunSignUp offers.

Importing old data takes several simple steps. First, on the Import page, you can now add an Event. Note that you will have to add a New Event for all of your events – for example a 5K and a 10K and a Fun Run.  Putting them all on the same day will allow you to do reports that groups them together. Here is an example of adding an event:

Once Events are added, you are now ready to import data.  You can import via a CSV or type the participants in. There are a couple of things to make sure you do to make sure your data is as good as possible, as well as a couple of limitations.

• Date of Birth and Age – If you have the date of birth, we will calculate the age for you on the day of the race.
• Event – We show the events that you have added for that date – in the above case the 5K and the 1 Mile.
• Registration Date – If your old system can export the registration date, this will allow you to track comparable time periods this year to past years in the comparison charts like the one at the top.
• Offline Payments – You probably collected the money in on online system in previous years, but this is a way that you can import that data as well and report on previous years. When importing, make sure you add a column to your spreadsheet that says “Yes” so you can say the offline payment was received on the reports.
• Giveaways, Custom Questions, Add-Ons – There are limitations on importing these as they have to match the current year. So if you had giveaways of S, M and L last year and you set them up as Small, Medium, Large and XLarge in RunSignUp this year, you will have to do some work in Excel if you really want to import that data. The same is true for Custom Questions. Adding these details would be difficult for us to do and would make the system harder to use for race directors, so we will not be adding the ability to add old questions and so forth.

We are trying to make RunSignUp more useful for the thousands of races who are switching to us from old systems. If you have other ideas to make things easier for you, let us know!