National Sponsors

Sponsors are a key part of many races. They help provide funding, expand promotion for the race, and can help build the brand of your race.

RunSignUp has started a National Sponsor Program that extends our regular Sponsor Program that we hope will bring sponsors and races together that may never had been available to either side. For races, establishing a relationship with a strong national brand like Strava is really not possible. Likewise, national companies have no efficient way to reach 15,000+ races.

Strava was the ideal first sponsor. It brings races a number of great advantages:

• Strong endurance brand
• A leading training app that is used by a growing % of the participants in every endurance event
• A way for races to promote their races thru the Strava community
• Very little overlap with existing local sponsors races may have
• $1.50 revenue to races per conversion, which is a competitive return for a sponsor

As we bring more national sponsors to our platform, we will be looking for synergistic relationships between endurance races and the sponsor brand and offering. We understand that not all brands will be synergistic with every race – for example, there are races who partner with Under Armour and Map My Fitness that would not want to have Strava as a sponsor.

When we introduce new sponsors, there will be two models. One is Opt-in and the other is Opt-out. Some sponsors will need to be Opt-out so that all of us can get the critical mass they need to make the program effective. If only 500 races opt-in for a particular program, it would not be worthwhile for a national sponsor to become available on the platform.

In both cases, we will send an email to all race directors and partners to let them know this is coming a week before it is made public. We did this with the Strava announcement, which was an opt-out sponsor. Races will have time to turn off a sponsor if it is not appropriate for their race. Likewise, when we have opt-in sponsors, races will have time to turn the sponsor on. Also, when we introduce the second sponsor, we will allow races to turn off all future National Sponsors. We also have a setting on the partner dashboard under Races -> National Sponsors to turn on and off national sponsors.

We have some very exciting discussions with other potential National Partners coming in the future.