Happy Festivus: A 2020 Airing of Grievances

It’s been a few years since we’ve posted a Festivus blog…but we have to admit, we have a lot of grievances this year. So, in celebration of 2020 Festivus… Runners…We have a problem with constant desire for a race to be fun. Because of you, and the limitations on things like parties this year, we had to […]

RunSignup | GiveSignup Virtual Symposium (Winter 2021)

All Your Tools for a Dynamic 2021 Race Schedule Join us (it’s free!) The 2021 Virtual Winter Symposium is an all online version of our biannual educational symposiums for race directors, timers, and nonprofits. This virtual edition is tailor-made for an unprecedented year, with an emphasis on the event options for 2021 and the tools […]

A Happy List of the Tech We Used in 2020

RaceJoy made the news alongside big names like Uber, Fit Bit, and Nest in this CNN Business News article. How cool is that?! Sadly, it is in reference to products the CNN staff barely used in 2020. Clearly, the author isn’t taking advantage of all the great virtual and even on-site events taking place across […]

Individual Results Redesign

We have made some significant updates to the statistics on our individual results page. The improvements include updates to the look and feel. We achieved this by utilizing a clean modern design through the use of icons and rounded edges. Statistics are very important to participants. With that in mind we introduced a new overview […]

Payment Account Reporting Part I: Download All Transactions per Funds Transfer

You can now download a detailed report of all transactions per funds transfer from your payment account. Each individual transaction includes payee information, amount paid, fees, funds transfer amount, entity (i.e. donation website, race, ticket, etc.), and type of transaction (i.e. registration, donation, purchase). This is the first release of a larger update to give […]

23 Releases and Updating 40 servers – All in a Days Work

This is Bob. We will be releasing several year end blogs over the coming weeks. A couple of them will be an overview of the features we released and another for our 2021 product roadmap. But I thought yesterday was worth mentioning. Each morning, I get an email that sends me to a page to […]

Negative Split: Building Runner Confidence via Hybrid Events

Negative Split, a timing and race management company based in Washington State, has been hosting hybrid events with in-person participants since July. In that time, they have produced 5 events and timed 7 in two states, and they offered to share their process and key lessons to help other race organizers learn from their experience. […]

2021 Kickoff: Session Recordings and Resources for a Successful Hybrid Year

Thanks to the 670 race directors, timers, and nonprofits who registered to join us for our 2021 Kickoff Session on the key to a successful 2021 – hybrid events. You can refer to all the videos and resources below as you start preparting for a new year! Resources for building Hybrid events can be found […]

What Does Free Nonprofit Software Really Mean?

Funraise announced Funraise Free this month, giving nonprofits access to their “core platform” for free. But what does free nonprofit software really mean? Funraise Free is yet another freemium model – a common business strategy that seeks to grow the customer base while protecting subscription revenue. And a closer look at Funraise Free shows that […]

Richmond Marathon Delivers Hybrid Race Experience

Utilizes RunSignup’s Hybrid Race Day Technology We were very impressed with how Richmond Marathon successfully delivered a hybrid race experience and wanted to share their approach with event organizers and timers. Hybrid events are those that offer multiple event options and include variations of virtual, on-site, and challenge event types. Richmond Marathon’s 2020 event, held […]

The New Finish Line for Timers

As the industry continues to adapt to the challenges of Covid-19, timers have the opportunity to take a leadership role and help their events continue by offering a hybrid race experience. This includes a combination of race experience options, which may include scored on-site races with defined course paths, extended race dates, and virtual race […]

Simplified & Customizable Dashboard Menu

We have been incrementally rolling out a simplified dashboard menu for race directors. We showed the simplified menu to new users a couple of months ago. We will be rolling out the simplified menu to everyone on Monday (don’t worry if you are a power user – those instructions are toward the bottom of this […]

November 2020 COVID Numbers Update

We began monthly updates in July after doing weekly updates that ended in Week 18, and are shifting to monthly (August and October) and Quarterly (Q3) updates. The monthly update is meant to give stats that are useful to the endurance and nonprofit communities we serve. Quick November Numbers: Transaction volume was down 38% to $17.3M Overall Registrations […]

Guest Post – Engage Your Runners with Content – Their Voices Count!

This is a guest post from Dr. Alex Gometz of Prehab, which provides a set of services for runner injury prevention and recovery. There’s so much noisy content out there, but we have created a survey that you can share with your runners that is fun, meaningful and different. Topic: Injury Prevention to Run for […]

Availability Investments Help Customers Again

Like much of the web, RunSignup and GiveSignup host our infrastructure on Amazon AWS. Unfortunately, they had a pretty major outage on Wednesday before Thanksgiving in one of their data centers. It took down major websites like  1Password, Acorns, Adobe Spark, Anchor, Autodesk, Capital Gazette, Coinbase, DataCamp, Getaround, Glassdoor, Flickr, iRobot, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Pocket, RadioLab, Roku, RSS Podcasting, Tampa Bay Times, Vonage, The Washington Post, and WNYC. Apparently this was caused by their rush […]

Thanksgiving 2020: Participant Stories

In spite of the significant drop in participation, the tradition of running on Thanksgiving Day continued – as seen on social media across the country. A few highlights: The Wheeler Mission Drumstick Dash made a fun and inspiring video, highlighting runners across their community and reminding everyone of the cause they were running for. And […]

Thanksgiving 2020: By the Numbers

Like many things in 2020, Thanksgiving Day (historically the busiest running day of the year) looked different in 2020. Nonetheless, we’re thankful for all the race directors, timers, and nonprofits who used our technology this Thanksgiving to keep the holiday running tradition alive. So how did it turn out? The Holiday Tradition Continued While Turkey […]

Results Link on Fundraising Pages

Individual and team fundraising pages now show a link to the individual or team’s results. This adds to last month’s release that gives events the option to display fundraising progress bars on results pages. Many nonprofit events have a broad range of participants. Some people are competitive and will share their results pages. Others are […]

Fundraising Events in 2020 – Low Frills, High Enthusiasm

As a part of our survey to gauge experiences and expectations throughout 2020 and 2021, one thing stood out: event organizers were inspired and motivated by the enthusiasm that participants have had for supporting their cause – even if the events weren’t what they were used to. We’ve noticed this dedication to nonprofits in a […]

Signup and Results Apps Retirement

We are retiring the Signup App. Since we released the app, the popularity of people signing up from their own phone has become much more popular. With the limitation of shared surfaces in the COVID era has severely limited the popularity of this app. And truth be told it was always less than 1% of […]

Race Survey: In-Person AND Virtual Race Options Expected Through 2021

We sent out a short survey this month to help create a snapshot of the revenue and operational expectations of races in 2020 and 2021, and look at how organizations are adjusting. This survey follows a similar version in May, giving us a picture of how expectations have changed over the last 6 months. Top […]

Using Loyalty Lists with Reserved Entries

We have added a feature that allows races to tie a loyalty list to a multi-use reserved entry. This is a great way to create a link with special settings (overriding registration caps, allowing registration when the race is closed, special pricing, etc) while also making sure that only specific people can use the link. […]

New Deferral Features For an Easier 2021

With thousands of races cancelling in 2020, many of our customers used deferrals to provide flexible options for their participants. With 2021 approaching, we want to provide a streamlined process for races to fulfill those deferrals, making it easy for participants with minimal overhead and financial loss for the the event. In the past, deferrals […]

The New Start Line for Timers

This Timer Tip Tuesday covers the planning and important steps to take and to support the new start line for hybrid events, including on-site, virtual and challenge events. From social distancing practices to specific setup steps this session is packed with valuable information to help timers get to the new start line and deliver a […]

What 2020 Success Stories Tell Us About 2021

We recently sent out a survey asking customers to share their experiences and expectations as we move into 2021. We’ll be sharing those in full (and comparing them to the May version), but first, a little bit of sunshine. We asked race directors to share their positive experiences from races that did happen this year […]

Why Hybrid Events are the Key to 2021

March of 2020 awakened the world of Virtual Events. By June, the hot new option was a Virtual Challenge. As these two continue to be a part of the event experience and we shift towards resurrecting in-person events, 2021 will have be the year of Hybrid Events. What Is a Hybrid Event? A Hybrid Event […]

Challenge Events Setup How-To for Timers

As events continue to introduce challenge events as either an add-on or alternative to traditional events, timers are quickly becoming the go-to person for setting up the events on RunSignup’s Challenge Platform. The recorded webinar below, provided by Matt Avery, gives step-by-step instructions on how to set up challenge events and create motivating milestone badges. […]

Timer Fall Series: 2021 Hybrid Events

With many unknowns surrounding the pandemic, events are shifting to offering a hybrid race experience where participants have virtual and on-site event options with the ability to switch between the two. Each type of event involves different approaches and tools to manage the start time, the results, and the overall course and participant experience. All […]

Customer Success Story: Paterson Music Project Increases Fundraising by 368%

Looking for some inspiration and proof that events can be successful in 2020? With a little innovation and a willingness to pivot, Ride for PMP, in tandem with the Garden State Fondo, raised $20,000 for the Paterson Music Project (PMP) – an increase of 368% in fundraising. The success of the event was centered around […]

Hybrid Races Become Standard with Pfizer News

The world received encouraging news when Pfizer and BioNTech announced early results of 90%+ effectiveness on their vaccine trials: Vaccine candidate was found to be more than 90% effective in preventing COVID-19 in participants without evidence of prior SARS-CoV-2 infection in the first interim efficacy analysis Pfizer Press Release There is obviously still a long […]

Eventbrite Q3 2020 Earnings

We have been following Eventbrite since they are a similar company serving events and having a similar business model of charging for their services only with processing fees since they went public. We are also likely to begin to compete with them more as nonprofits discover the GiveSignup Ticket Platform that is purpose built for […]

GiveSignup Strategy

In September we announced a Series A funding round from Payroc that allows our company to accelerate the growth of both RunSignup and GiveSignup. In our typical openness, we wanted to share why GiveSignup is a key and complementary initiative to drive that growth. Allison Bickel, GiveSignup’s Lead, wrote this as an assignment for one […]

New Virtual Challenge Milestone Types!

Recently we have added a few more Individual Milestone Types for Virtual Challenges. You can now set up the following types of Individual Milestones to unlock. The newly available Milestone Types are in bold: Fixed Distance Completed Repeating Distance Completed Days of Activity Consecutive Days of Activity Percent of Goal Completed Fixed Elevation Gain Completed […]

USA Triathlon Ticket Socket Partnership

We have gotten some questions about USATriathlon promoting Ticket Socket. Two points. There is no obligation for a triathlon to switch from RunSignup to Ticket Socket. We continue to be the second largest provider of registration for triathlons after Active/Ironman. We continue to support the USAT API, and are collaborating with them on their new […]

RaceJoy for Challenge Events Webinar Recap

RunSignup’s mobile app, RaceJoy, can now be used for distance-based challenge events and is fully integrated with RunSignup’s Challenge Platform. The recorded webinar below provides an overview on the features available for participants and for event organizers to help take their challenge events to the next level. RaceJoy offers an excellent way to provide an […]

Ending Support for Google Tag Manager

We are going to be ending support for Google Tag Manager the second week of November, 2020 (next week) to allow time for customers to migrate to our purpose built integrations for the wide variety of ad tracking tools we already support. These direct integrations provide superior integration (for example tracking conversion $), and are […]

October 2020 COVID Numbers Update

We began monthly updates in July after doing weekly updates that ended in Week 18, and are shifting to monthly (August) and Quarterly (Q3) updates. The monthly update is meant to give stats that are useful to the endurance and nonprofit communities we serve. Quick October Numbers: Transaction volume was down 14% to $21.9M Overall Registrations down 17% […]

Introducing the New Donation Form Wizard

Just in time for Giving Tuesday, we are introducing the new GiveSignup Donation Form wizard that makes it easy for nonprofits to create donation forms in minutes. Donation forms combine ease of use with a modern and beautiful design that elevates your donations for both targeted campaigns and general donations. This is an easy solution […]

RaceDay Scoring Update Gives Timers Real Time Progress Stats and Meters

October Update! Race timers are invited to watch this recent update on RaceDay Scoring. Now is a great time to prepare for the comeback of onsite events – especially for those virtual hybrid events with defined course paths and flexible start times. Reporting and Visual Improvements: Recent changes include significant improvements in the dashboard and […]

Survey: 2020-2021 Endurance Industry

As a follow-up to a May survey on the state of the endurance industry, we have a quick, 5-minute follow-up survey intended to A) determine how much expectations have matched up with reality in the last 5 months and, B) create a snapshot of how the industry has adapted and innovated. Please share your input […]

Geographic Shipping Charges Expand Virtual Race Opportunity

With the rapid growth of virtual events and challenges, we are seeing International demand for many events. Our latest release allows custom pricing (and exclusions) based on Country and/or State. This helps virtual events raise more by expanding your geographic target, and ensures you do not lose money on costly shipping charges. As one customer […]

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