February’s Top News
RunSignUp Releases Second Annual RaceTrends Report: We have released our 2018 RaceTrends Report covering significant trends in race growth, race promotion, registration, fundraising, and RaceDay technology with raw data and actionable takeaways. A few key insights:
- Twenty-six percent of participants of 10K’s were repeat participants to that event, whereas marathons, triathlons, and ultramarathons retained 13%, 8%, and 8% of participants respectively.
- In 2017, registration prices increased across all race distances except the marathon.
- The largest source of registrations is people going directly to a race’s website
- Over a quarter (27.8%) of all registrations take place within the 3-day period prior to a price increase or registration closing date.
- Nearly 29% of race registrations took place during race week.
- 36.4% of all donation money collected was from the 0.003% of donors who contributed more than $500.
- 40% of RaceDay registrations came through via the RaceDay SignUp App
Don’t have time to dissect the full report? Just keep an eye on the blog – we’ll be breaking down key findings in the coming weeks. First up:
- Why Mobile Matters (hint: it’s transactions, not just mobile views)
- Are Races Declining? We address the question at the heart of it all
Registration is Open for Fifth Annual RunSignUp Race Director/Timer Symposium: We’re back in Philadelphia July 16-18, gathering with race directors and timers for networking and education. Highlights of the three-day agenda include:
- Opening Reception at the Mutter Museum (Monday, July 16th)
- Educational sessions led by industry experts (Tuesday, July 17th)
- Beginner RunSignUp Tutorials (Tuesday, July 17th)
- Advanced RunSignUp Tutorials (Tuesday, July 17th)
- Networking Happy Hour (Tuesday, July 17th)
- Optional morning group run (Tuesday, July 17th)
- Timing software and hardware sessions (Wednesday, July 18th)
- One-on-one consultations with RunSignUp team members (throughout)
In 2017, the Symposium brought together 200+ industry professionals from 35 states (and Bermuda). Will you join us this year?
Email Marketing Templates V 2.0: We released a major update to RunSignUp’s email marketing templates. The updates include:
- Multiple templates
- Auto-update of race emails within 5 minutes of race changes
- Partner & Club email templates
- Partner templates available at the race levels
- Easy toggle between templates and themes when building emails
In short: more flexibility in your emails, with more still to come!
Content Websites vs. Data-Driven Websites: Why do we provide a free race website to every race? Beyond simply wanting it to be easy for small, low tech events to have a website, we understand that there is value to incorporating your race data directly into your race website. With a RunSignUp free website, you can integrate strong SignUp and Donate call to action buttons, find a participant search, and participant self-management right on your race page – and include sponsor images, free results, and photos, without ever re-directing your participants. Bonus: we’ve recently updated the new template with an improved footer, including all the links to pages, sponsors, and a simple “Contact This Race” link.
Race Director Resources
Conditional Refunds: We have a new participant management feature that allows someone to receive a refund when someone else takes their place. This works for a sellout race with a waitlist – allowing access for the waitlisted participant, but not refunding the original participant until a new participant has paid their fee.
Improved Race Search: As a part of our new website design, we have upgraded the search for races. You can read the tech-y details in the blog, but the important takeaway is simple: the new search makes it easier for athletes to find the event they’re looking for.
RunSignUp CRM – the race directors secret weapon: We’ve done a number of updates to our CRM recently to help you build more meaningful relationships and gather comprehensive data about event participants. Included in this one: a new left-side navigation allowing you to toggle between managing registration for a participant and viewing more specific information, and a drill-down into events and referrals for each runner.
ICYMI: New RunSignUp technology partner eventbaxx hosted a webinar today to give more insight into their technology. You can still catch a recording here.
More Race Director News
Lots of Little Things
Preventing Changes in Participant Management
New Calculation on Participant Changes
Lifetime Heatmaps
Improved Create Past Events
Industry Info
As we prepared for and attended the Running USA Industry Conference, Bob mused about the state of the industry.
The Next Shoe to Drop in Registration – Folding Races: Registration companies folding was a concern we’ve heard a lot about (we addressed some ways to ensure financial viability in our January blog “Is your Registration Company Safe?”). Here’s another piece to the puzzle: races that fold, with the registration funds already paid out and the registration vendor on the hook for credit card chargebacks and angry registrants seeing refunds. We can’t prevent all races from folding, but we vet our customers to minimize our (and thus, your) financial risk.
Cancelled Races: Cancelled races aren’t just bad for the race and it’s participants – it’s a major problem for our entire industry, as it creates a negative image and skepticism of endurance events. We take seriously our responsibility to protect participants and our business and are in the process of increasing our underwriting standards with holdbacks for certain races on our underwriting review.
Tired of hearing about issues within the industry? Bob feels obnoxioustalking about it, too…but we believe that the industry needs transparency and openness to allow events and companies to protect themselves – and thrive.
Partner Progress
Payment Account 1099 Race Summary Report: For partners who have multiple races, we have a nice new report to show the amount per race per month – find the report on your Payment Account Page.
Timer Talk
- The Race Director 2018 enhancements
- An introduction to RaceDay Scoring – the next generation of The Race Director
- Timer submitted topics and Q&A
In addition to the Wednesday session, The Race Director founder Roger Bradshaw and RaceDay Scoring Product Manager Matt Avery will be available for individual timer meetings outside the session times.
To register for the User Conference or find more information, visit: https://runsignup.com/theracedirector
Fundraising Corner
Bring Back My Fundraising Team: We’ve made it simple for fundraisers to “bring back their team” – sending invites to fundraisers from the previous year once the team fundraising page is complete. Once a user decides to “bring back” the team, notification emails will go out to previous team members to encourage them to register and join the team (again)!
See you at Peer-to-Peer? Eric and Megan are heading to Florida to kick off the month of March – stop by and say hi, or send us an email to catch up in person!
RunSignUp News
Designed for Growth: RunSignUp has become the largest endurance registration company in the US, with over 15,000 races using us to register 4.2 million participants. We don’t take that for granted: we’re always thinking about how we structure our company – and the values we subscribe to – to allow our company to grow.
AI Driven Proactive Support: Part of that capacity for growth is ensuring we are efficient and proactive. We recently implemented a new racereview process to help catch issues with race setups – without overwhelming our Account Management team.
SLLLOOOWWW Site for 6 Minutes: Sorry! We ran a database migration that slowed down the site significantly for about 6 minutes. Thankfully, there were no lost transactions or errors during that time.
Stay current with all our news, updates, and best practices on Facebookand 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.
