November’s Top News
Introducing RaceInsights: In today’s increasingly competitive endurance events market, effective marketing is critical to converting runners into registrants. With RaceInsights, powered by RunSignUp Analytics, we integrate your race’s data in a new, unified platform to give you practical business insights and help you maximize your event’s value while optimizing revenue. As race directors, you need to know who, when, and how runners are registering for your races to take action based on what is – and isn’t – working. To provide you with actionable information, we are tracking every click, registration, and transaction on your race website and analyzing the sources to show you the true ROI (return-on-investment) of marketing efforts like Facebook advertising and automated emails.
If it sounds complicated, don’t worry: it’s not! We have a detailed blog, and an eGuideto help you get started, and we’ll be running a webinar next week to make sure you understand your data and how to use it.
If you’re an analytics geek, you can take a look at the evolution of RaceInsights over the last month (and before), as we built the tracking for Facebook referrals, teased and then released transaction data, and finally, unveiled the registration web referral sources.
2017 Thanksgiving Registration Stats: We are thankful to have had a very busy day on the busiest of running days – Turkey Trot Day! We saw plenty of proof of the explosion of Thanksgiving races (some of which are not, in fact, called Turkey Trots), with growing numbers on RunSignUp. Our platform hosted registration for 340 Thanksgiving day runs, with 382,255 runners registering (including 4,499 day-of online registrations). Beyond the sheer numbers, we took a look at the type of promotional tools (hint: aggressive referral programs have success) used by races, and how many are utilizing RaceDay technology like CheckIn and Results.
Race Director Resources
Email Trends: We built RaceInsights to give you an in-depth look at your marketing efforts, but we know that your events don’t exist in a vacuum and it’s important to learn from what other events are doing in order to keep up with the competition. In February, we will be releasing the second edition of our RaceTrends analysis at Running USA, looking at all of the data from the 15,000 races and 4.2 million registrations we collected this year. As a little bit of a teaser, you can check out the stats from the overall emails sent by races with the integrated RunSignUp email marketing.
What the Running Boom Pop Means for Races: One trend that the industry has a consensus on is that road races have hit a wall – the number of finishers is flattening or falling, after years of rapid growth. Before you despair, we have some suggestions for what you can do to avoid the dreaded drop in registrations.
Registration & Profile User Experience Updates: We’ve made a commitment in 2017 to improve our user experience and truly be the most intuitive, easy and FUN to use registration platform (ICYMI, we even have a User Experience Manifesto detailing this commitment). Some of this month’s cool new updates include major updates to the Registration Path, and an easily navigable profile with some upcoming gamification features to engage your participants. Check out what’s changed and what will be changing via the recordings from two of this month’s webinars – one on the RunSignUp Profile, and the other on the Registration Path (with some bonus sneak peeks at the soon-to-be-unveiled new Race Website design).
Call for Photos! For the aforementioned new Race Website design, we need more race photos to use as the defaults for races that are new or don’t have any images from their own events. If you have any high-resolution photos that you’re willing to have us use, email them to johanna@runsignup.com. We’re open to proposals from photographers, as well; we just like highlighting events that we work with!
More Race Director Updates:
Take the Annual Running USA Race Director Survey!
Random Question Response
RaceJoy Raves
Participants and Spectators Celebrate with RaceJoy! Two premier races, the Madison Marathon and the Charlotte Marathon, provided RaceJoy’s live phone tracking, progress alerts, and cheer messages to participants and spectators over the weekend of November 12-13. It was another big weekend for RaceJoy, with 12,400 people using the app and more than 145,000 progress alerts issued.
RunSignUp News
We’re growing: We’re technology nerds and like to focus on all the cool things that
We’re growing: We’re technology nerds and like to focus on all the cool things that our developers are building…but making technology accessible and usable for our customers also requires a team of people to provide support, education, and organization. This month, we welcome Kevin Lai and Allison Bickel!
Internet Explorer Support: It’s time…we are dropping support on the Race Dashboard for versions of Internet Explorer that are older than Version 11 (released October 2013). Our analytics tells us there’s very little use of older browsers, and we can build better functionality for most users if we don’t have to compromise to account for older versions. Update if you haven’t!
Charity Payments Bug: Yes, even we find bugs from time to time. This one was a small bug that impacted 19 charities using direct payment from races on Braintree Marketplace. It created errors in 460 transactions out of 5,376,000 and resulted in underpayments of $642.29 out of $322,000,000 payments made. We have communicated with the 19 impacted races and paid the difference, and we apologize for the error – no matter how small, we take correct payment extremely seriously!
Stay current with all our news, updates, and best practices on Facebook and our Blog.
May all your races run well!
– The RunSignUp Team
The RunSignUp Monthly Newsletter helps Race Directors, Timers, Running Stores, and Club Officers understand how to use online registration to improve their races and running clubs. We also provide updates on our registration service, RunSignUp. This service provides race management tools, race check-in, kiosks, results, running club memberships, and more.
