If you have a race that looks like it may be in the path of Hurricane Florence, you may have gotten an email from us today with some tips for communicating with and managing your participants in a questionable weather situation. But even if you’re not in Florence’s path – or likely to see any weather that extreme, a communication plan for extreme weather can be valuable to all races. Here are the tips we sent out:
We encourage you to communicate with your participants and want to remind you about the tools RunSignUp makes available to make that communication easier and, if necessary, to allow transfers to other races and to provide refunds.
Our suggestion is to communicate with your participants early and often and let them know:
- Do you anticipate that your race will be impacted by the storm?
- When will you make a decision if the race will be held?
- How will you communicate last minute updates?
- If the race is not held will registrations/donations be refunded? (How-To’s on Refunding a Participant, Adding Funds to the Refund Reserve, and Issuing Bulk Refunds)
- Will the race be rescheduled? If so, when or when will you provide details of the rescheduling?
- Will you allow for refunds or transfers to other races, or deferrals to another year? When should participants expect those to occur? (How-To’s on Transferring a Runner to another Race, and Deferring a Participant)
- How should participants get in touch with you for questions?
RunSignUp makes several tools available to you including Free Email Marketing & Free TXT Notifications (TXT Notifications may not work if you have not already set up this feature for your race) to communicate with your participants. Also, you can update your RunSignUp Race Website with a Custom Content Section that appears on your Race Info page, you can even set up a special Weather page as a top level menu item (Race > Race Page > Custom Content.) You will also want to update any of your own websites and Facebook and other social media pages that your participants may use for information on your event.
Having good communications with your participants can avoid misunderstandings, minimize the need to handle individual calls and emails from participants and avoid unnecessary chargebacks. Please let us know if there is anything we can do to aid your communications with your participants in the event of a possible cancellation.
