This year we have had several very large sell out races open registration to prior year participants in various ways. One used a password that was sent to last year’s participants that was the only way to register for the first week. Another used our Clubs system to upload all of last year’s participants into the “Club” and then opened the race on Saturday to only those participants. RunSignup automatically checked to make sure the names, email, date of birth matched as appropriate and let them register. This has proven to be a very popular feature.
We have just released a major improvement to this called the Loyalty Program. The basic idea is that you can upload a list and then set your events to be open only to those participants.
In the setup page on the right, you will note that multiple lists can be added – for example one for the Half Marathon and one for the Full Marathon. You can then set a date when registration opens to the public. Below that, you set which list is picked for each event. Finally, you can name this anything you want so your runners see a message that means something for your race. Perhaps “2014 Participants” or “Multi-Year Participants”, or “VIP Entries”. Here is what the runner sees:

When registering, we’ll automatically match participants on either:
- First name and E-mail address match — This reduces issues with maiden names.
- First name, last name, and date of birth match
Each member of the list you upload or type must have one of those two search criteria data to work.
We made this update for a large sell out race that will be opening later this winter, and it looks like several other large races will be using it as well. Thanks for the feedback to help make RunSignup even simpler!