Coronavirus Impact on Races Week 14

Please see RunSignup.com/ChallengePlatform, RunSignup.com/GoVirtual, Looking Forward: Guidelines for Races, and RunSignup.com/Coronavirus for recommendations and tools. Things continue to evolve as of May 17, 2020 from Week 13, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3 and 2 of the Coronavirus.  The transaction volume we saw the past week is 29% lower than the same week last year vs. […]

Webinar Recap and Recording: Virtual Challenge Events for Nonprofits

Your nonprofit needs to raise money and engage supporters without spending money. GiveSignup’s free and flexible challenge platform gives your nonprofit all of the tools to create an interactive and social virtual challenge: push-up competition, cycle/run across your state, dance-athons, and more. With live map tracking, progress meters, easy activity logging, and beautiful activity pages that […]

Overall Dynamic Challenge Goal

You can now set an overall goal for your challenge that updates in real-time. This is great for challenge events that have a collective goal that all participants are working together to achieve. For example, American Cancer Society’s DetermiNation Runs the Country Challenge has set the goal to run across the country in one week. […]

Webinar Recap and Recording: Virtual Challenge Events

Have you heard about the Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee? They opened registration on RunSignup in April thinking they would get 200 participants, and ended up with more than 19,000 registrations. When we saw the demand for virtual challenges, we built a challenge platform that handles everything from participants logging and tracking their activity to […]

Coronavirus Impact on Races Week 13

Please see RunSignup.com/ChallengePlatform, RunSignup.com/GoVirtual, Looking Forward: Guidelines for Races, and RunSignup.com/Coronavirus for recommendations and tools. Things continue to evolve as of May 17, 2020 from Week 12, 11, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5,  4, 3 and 2 of the Coronavirus.  The transaction volume we saw the past week is 18% lower than the same week last year. The 18% is a very good improvement from the 25% the previous […]

RaceJoy Anywhere for Virtual Events

We recently launched the RaceJoy’s race anywhere feature for virtual events offering location independent events. With such a high interest from race directors and timers across the country, we held a Webinar this week to go over the capabilities and how virtual events can get the most of them. As the industry has shifted to […]

Cycling Challenge with Elevation

Elevation has been added as a new type of challenge. This is very useful for cycling as well as mountain trail running. It allows challenges to collect both distance and elevation along with time all at once. Note the columns for Time, Distance and Elevation in this example: Individual results will show details: Let’s show […]

Free RunSignup – Facebook Fundraiser Integration Now Has Automatic Approval

The free RunSignup – Facebook Fundraiser Integration is now even easier for your nonprofit to enable to raise more and save money with an automated set up and approval process. Previously, a manual whitelisting process meant that nonprofits had to wait several days to weeks to begin using the RunSignup – Facebook Fundraiser integration while […]

Challenge Activity Timelines and User Experience Updates

After thousands of people logged their miles this weekend for challenges like The Jersey Virtual Challenge and the Buckeye State Challenge, we accelerated the release of a new user interface to make it even easier for people to log their activity. There are 3 major updates: Log a single activity screen Activity Timeline Component Don’t […]

Real Race Examples with Social Distancing: 220 Person Race in Indiana

Real races continue to happen as timers lead our industry into the “new normal”. This past weekend, the Social Distance 5K provided a truly competitive racing experience for the participants while adhering to all local and state regulations and CDC social distancing and safety guidelines. Please note that all states and communities have different reopening […]

Race Expectations Survey: 45% of Revenue Expected in 2020

We sent out a short survey last week to help create a snapshot of revenue expectations of races in 2020 and 2021, and look at how organizations are adjusting to their expectations. The survey closed on Monday, but we expect to do follow-ups throughout the year to track expectations within the industry. Top Takeaways 2020 […]

Cross Country Summer Training Challenges

High school and college cross country teams use the challenge platform to not only track summer training, but also for fundraising. We have created two examples that Bob is in the process of getting approval to use at the high school he used to coach at (Moorestown) and where he ran in college (Bucknell). You […]

Live Map Tracking for Challenges

The next release of our Challenge software is now available – live map tracking. You can see it live on some challenges already – for example the Buckeye Challenge (yes, the challenge is to run around the perimeter of Ohio). This results page will be improved by the end of the week, but the map feature is […]

Engaging Sponsors During COVID-19

As more and more events go virtual, we’re seeing an increase in conversation around the role of sponsors with virtual or modified events. We have collected some of the best ideas we’ve seen, and will break down our insight on sponsors during COVID-19 in this blog. Note: while most of these ideas are universal, many […]

Local Communities Embrace Virtual Events

Every morning, we wake up to a Google Alert with all the news that includes “RunSignup”. Occasionally it’s news about us; more often, it’s local news about races that use our platform and link to their registration. Lately we’ve seen a shift: all the races popping up are virtual, and the local news is learning […]

Virtual Race Bib and Finisher Certificate Updates

There were 4 updates to virtual race bibs and finisher certificates this week, improving the virtual swag that you can offer to your race and challenge participants for free. Virtual Race Bib Email Marketing Replacement Tag There is now a replacement tag in RunSignup’s free email marketing platform to send participants the link to their […]

Spending Money to Make Money: Scott Coffee Rotary Run Update

This year we made the decision to convert the 36th annual Scott Coffee Rotary Run to a virtual race. As the biggest fundraiser for the local Rotary Club, it was important to make money this year. We also wanted to engage our participants with a fun event while ensuring that they come back next year […]

Coronavirus Impact on Races Week 12

Please see RunSignup.com/Coronavirus, RunSignup.com/GoVirtual and Looking Forward: Guidelines for Races for recommendations and tools. Things continue to evolve as of May 17, 2020 from Week 11, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5,  4, 3 and 2 of the Coronavirus.  The transaction volume we saw the past week is 25% lower than the same week last year. The 25% is a very good improvement from the 37% the previous week […]

Multiple Activities Added to Challenge Events

The next release of our Challenge software is now available – multiple activities. This blog will use a Triathlon as an example, but think creative. Gyms will be able to use this to track multiple challenge activities – maybe pushups, sit-ups and pull-ups. Yoga studios might want to have challenges based on the amount of […]

Announcing RaceJoy Anywhere for Virtual Events

Official Mobile Race Experience From Any Location We are incredibly excited to announce RaceJoy is now available for location independence events. Virtual event organizers can now offer RaceJoy for both location independent and defined course route race experiences for participants of running, walking, cycling, and water events. RaceJoy delivers an official interactive race experience that […]

Virtual Races are Real – the Stats

Many people dismiss the idea of a virtual race – “It is not a real race”, “People might cheat”, “We would not want to taint the brand of our race with virtual”, “oh, the market is saturated and there aren’t enough who want to run virtual”, etc. This attitude is holding back many customers from […]

Community Roundup 5/13/20 – Applying the Lessons of Physical Races to Virtual Ones

We’re checking in regularly to see what the endurance community is doing to keep the industry running forward in the midst of the coronavirus crisis. For more ideas, view you can find all the previous highlights archive here. Today’s creative events look at virtual events or challenges that have been created by organizations that normally put […]

Eventbrite Q1 Earnings Report – COVID Edition

Wow! Eventbrite said yesterday that transaction volume in March was down 90% and was still down 85% in early May, 2020. Before we get into the analysis, here are the links: Q1 Earnings Press Release Q1 Letter to Shareholders Earnings Call Transcript The news they shared was simply extraordinary, and made us feel good about […]

Survey: Revenue Expectations for 2020-2021

We have a quick, 8-question survey to create a snapshot of revenue expectations of races in 2020 and 2021 and look at how organizations are adjusting to their expectations. Whether you organize one or many races, we’d love your input to help us create a complete picture of the endurance industry. Notes: 1 – There is […]

Coronavirus Impact on Races Week 11

Please see RunSignup.com/Coronavirus and RunSignup.com/GoVirtual for recommendations and tools. We also released Looking Forward: Guidelines for Races this week as well. Things continue to evolve as of May 3, 2020 from Week 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5,  4, 3 and 2 of the Coronavirus.  The transaction volume we saw the past week is 37% lower than the same week last year. The 37% is a pretty good improvement […]

Guest Blog: 7 tips to Organize a Successful Virtual Event using sodisp

This is a guest post from sodisp. For a limited time all sodisp virtual events are free to create, up to 1,000 participants, with events using RunSignup for their registration able to have their virtual event on sodisp for up to 10,000 participants. The unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic has a very real and immediate effect on […]

Webinar Recap: Making the Decision to Go Virtual

This year is the 36th Annual Scott Coffee Rotary Run (yes, that’s the race that inspired Bob to start RunSignup). It’s a big fundraiser that the Moorestown Rotary Club relies on and it serves an important role in bringing our community together. Cancelling the race wasn’t a great option – so we decided to make […]

RaceJoy Now Offers Race Redo for Virtual Events

Many of the newly formed virtual events want to offer their participants the chance to re-do a route to improve their performance time, accumulate miles, or simply for a repeat experience. RaceJoy is now offering the ability to re-do a course for virtual races and will transmit the newest finish time automatically to official race […]

Challenge Dashboard Intermediate Edition

We are quickly adding features to our Virtual Challenge Event capability (for the growing list of challenge event capabilities see here). We will be doing a set of pretty major revamps of the dashboard pages for setting all of this up over the next week or two. But we thought it might be useful to talk about each […]

Flexible Timing Now Available w/RaceDay Scoring & The Race Director

As areas of the country are preparing for the gradual lifting of Covid-19 restrictions, RunSignup is working on ways we can support the industry through technology. We are pleased to share that RaceDay Scoring and The Race Director now have the ability to capture both start and finish reads with overlapping start and finish time […]

Goals Added to Challenge Events

We have added another feature to our Virtual Challenge Event capability (for the growing list of challenge event capabilities see here). This time we have added the capability to add goals – either one the director sets for everyone for each activity, or allow each participant to select their own goal. This is then displayed as a % […]

Overall Totals for Challenge Events

We have added another feature to our Virtual Challenge Event capability (for the growing list of challenge event capabilities see here). Overall Totals for challenge events are now easily available on cover pages. It sums up all of the activities all of your participants have done – miles, kilometers, dance time, pushups, even cat nap […]

Webinar Recap: Make Money, Save Money

This webinar was a high level look at some ideas you can use to make money and save money right now. If you want to dive deeper into any of these ideas, we have a ton of resources below to get you started: Webinar Recording Slides https://runsignup.com/GoVirtual State of the Industry Where are we today? […]

Virtual Challenge Events

Note: Check out all the new features by seeing all of the blogs we are posting as we release new capabilities to Challenges. One of the growing types of virtual events are challenges. For example, there are currently challenges to run (virtually) across Tennessee, New Jersey, New York, oh and another New York. But there […]

Real Race Examples with Social Distancing

We added a new section to the Looking Forward Guidelines: Real Race Examples with Social Distancing. Races will look different in the weeks and months to come, but technology and creativity are letting us get back to racing in a way that complies with social distancing. The examples that we add in this section are […]

Coronavirus Impact on Races Week 10

Please see RunSignup.com/Coronavirus and RunSignup.com/GoVirtual for recommendations and tools. We also released Looking Forward: Guidelines for Races this week as well. Things continue to evolve as of May 3, 2020 from Week 9, 8, 7, 6, 5,  4, 3 and 2 of the Coronavirus.  The transaction volume we saw the past week is 40% lower than the same week last year. The 40% is a pretty good improvement from […]

Webinar Recording: Corral Times for Virtual Events

Crisp McDonald walked through the reasons to use corrals to ensure social distancing, and the steps to get setup. Catch up on the webinar and slides! What is a Corral? – Also known as a wave or a time trial, corrals divide people into a variety of start time.  Why Would You Need Corrals? – As Races begin returning, […]

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