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 from the 40% the previous week and 44% the week before but still implies the endurance community and nonprofit community is having to survive on a far smaller amount of revenue.
We’ve included two charts showing the total $ amount of transactions flowing thru our system on a weekly basis both pre and post Coronavirus. The first is a simple %, and the second is the actual transactions per week on our platform. For example, this past week was $3,290,699 vs. $5,257,941 last year. Note that last week included the end of a month and the beginning of a month, so numbers increase as many races have price increases at the end of the month and many races open. That is the reason for the drop this week vs. last week. Also, you can see we were having a great year (up 29%) before the virus, so this does not represent the community as a whole…
The other point is that of that lower volume, of the 20 top races over the past week:
- 18 are virtual races
- 1 is a race scheduled for this spring that have converted to virtual – so those are new virtual race registrations or donations
- 1 is for for fall or 2021 races.
What this means is that the regular race registration revenue these race organizations are used to operating on has fallen probably 90% or more in many cases. Virtual is the new real…
The Next Phase
We are suggesting that races this year might want to consider going forward with a Virtual Race as a first option, and when things become clearer, then add a real race. This will set expectations properly, and your organization might be able to raise enough money and save enough on costs to make it worthwhile. Take a look at our Virtual Race Hub for ideas and how to make the move.
Challenge Events – Challenge events are also a new source of revenue to races. We released initial capabilities for tracking challenges this past week, and expect many more features over the next couple of weeks including map tracking, teams, milestones and gamification.
Some races are starting to plan small real races in the coming weeks. We published Looking Forward: A Guideline for Races two weeks ago thanks to the help of dozens of race directors, timers, industry groups and others. We also held a webinar this past week that showed how to set up corrals in RunSignup so you can limit the number of starters to different start times. (As an aside, we are working on a new user experience to make corral setup even easier). This is important, as we pointed out in our blog on Start Line Bottlenecks.
At RunSignup, we published a number of blogs this past week:
- Making the decision to go virtual – Scott Coffee Run Example
- RaceJoy Now Offers Race Redo for Virtual Events
- Challenge Dashboard Intermediate Edition
- Flexible Timing Now Available w/RaceDay Scoring & The Race Director
- Goals Added to Challenge Events
- Overall Totals for Challenge Events
- Webinar Recap: Make Money, Save Money
- Virtual Challenge Events
- Real Race Examples with Social Distancing
Expect a lot more on challenge events over the next coupe of weeks as we look to develop technology that can help race organizations and nonprofits that can help them produce revenue. The challenge events are a great opportunity for nonprofits – not just runs, walks and rides, but also creative things like good deeds done or books read.
Stay safe and healthy.
