We held our annual Race Director and Timer Symposium last week. As usual, we shared an overview of RunSignUp and talked about our roadmap ahead.
The core message is that RunSignUp is providing an open platform that provides technology to help races thruout the yearly cycle of Promotion -> Registration & Management -> Race Day. We shared two significant investments we are making:
- Promotion Dashboard – to control, automate and monitor your promotional efforts.
- RaceDay Go – A new brand that encompasses a wide range of tools to manage race day and help races offer memorable experiences.
Promotional Dashboard
RunSignUp has significantly expanded the set of promotional tools available to races over the past several years with things like Social Sharing and Tagging, Groups, many pricing options, fully integrated email, Refund Rewards, free Race Websites designed to deliver maximum conversions with strong call to action, first class mobile support and more.
We are announcing that we are moving to the next level to create a powerful Dashboard over the next year that will provide the following capabilities:
- Track all Promotional activities in one place with one schedule – eg. schedule price increases, email campaigns, advertising, travel and expos including cost.
- Track Source and Action of all registrations – eg. an email or a Facebook ad as a source for a registration.
- Track ROI – eg. show how many registrations and $ came from a Facebook Ad.
- Extend Referral Program to include Add-Ons as Rewards in addition to Automated Refunds – eg. give away a free pair of Asics Socks from the local running store to anyone who referred over 3 friends.
- Extend Affiliate Program – eg. provide incentives to a local running store if they promote your race in their newsletter or on their website.
- Automate Advertising – eg. provide a way to set aside part of registration fee to pay for remarketing ads or Facebook Ads that automatically are placed 2 days before a price increase and are monitored to increase or decrease budget depending on ROAS.
RaceDay Go Platform
The RaceDay Go Platform brings together all of our existing Race Day technology under a new brand and outlines our future strategy for building an open platform that races and timers can use in any combination for very low cost or in many cases for free. The various components support the full lifecycle of Race Day:
Open Platform
RaceDay Go is a truly open platform, which includes:
- Plug & Play – use any components you want
- Any Timing System
- Any Registration System
- Any Results System
- Branded separately from RunSignUp to encourage broad adoption
The Race Director
The Race Director is one of the two (along with RunScore) most widely used scoring solutions in the market with over 11 Million individual results delivered in 2015. Since Roger Bradshaw joined us in 2015, we have doubled the number of integrations with registration companies, demonstrating our open approach (which we intend on continuing). We also have made significant investments in The Race Director to improve support, add more documentation, and extend features (since Roger has more time for development with Matt and Megan helping him). We intend to continue to develop and improve The Race Director for several years and support The Race Director for at least 5 years.
RaceDay Scoring – The Next Generation of The Race Director
While The Race Director is widely used, it is built on old PC based technology that needs to move to the Cloud and Mobile. RaceDay Scoring is a product which will be coming out in early 2017 and will eventually eclipse The Race Director in terms of functionality and ease of use. We will be providing RaceDay Scoring and The Race Director together – meaning if you have a current support subscription for The Race Director, then you get RaceDay Scoring for free (and vice-versa). This will give timers an option to use one or the other or both to score races. We expect this to be a couple of years before RaceDay Scoring is able to reliably score all the different types of races reliably that The Race Director can, although for the “simple 5K”, RaceDay Scoring will provide faster and simpler functionality within the first year.
RaceDay Kiosks – SignUp, CheckIn, and Results
We have introduced a whole new generation of Kiosk Apps over the past several months for RD SignUp, RD CheckIn, and RD Results. These new apps all share the following attributes:
- Native Apple and Android, with Web version available for Chrome Browsers
- Off-Line Auto-Sync in case Internet is spotty
- Customizable – pick the fields that are important for your race
- Secure, PCI Compliant Swipe Device
- Phone Camera for Bar and QR Code Reading
- “Wet Finger” signature on Phones and Tablets for Waiver Signatures
Gun, Chip and GPS Splits and Times
The future of timing for races will be to bring together Gun, Chip and GPS splits and times. RaceJoy is an integral part of the RaceDay Go platform and adds the participant and Social elements that can make a great race day experience. We have seen races that use RaceJoy as their native app for delivering results and providing a social platform have had large adoption and great feedback. For example, the Vermont City Marathon had the following numbers:
- 5,664 Finishers
- 2,119 RaceJoy Participants
- 6,159 RaceJoy Spectators
- 60,734 Progress Alerts delivered (with Sponsor message)
- 4,852 Cheers sent
RaceDay Photos
We released the Beta version of RaceDay Photos to the public for general use. RaceDay Photos is a comprehensive, open platform to provide races with cutting edge technology to create a better race day experience for their participants:
Summary
From an already strong base, over the next year we will be bringing more powerful Promotional and Race Day features that were once only available to the largest races. The open platform allows races to use their own creativity and mix of other systems to reach participants and give them amazing race day experiences.
The Video of the Symposium Kickoff is available now, andthe slides from the Symposium Kickoff are below:
