One of the questions we get is why not use an existing CRM like Salesforce?
There are a variety of reasons, but the key one is that if you want to take care of your customers, all of the information AND actions need to be together. Let’s look at a couple of examples:
A runner calls you and asks to be added to a team and get that team discount with a refund. You look that runner up in the CRM and see they have come to 7 of your races and were a fundraiser who raised $483 for one of your charities last year. You probably don’t mind giving her the $5 discount/refund. Having all that in RunSignup let’s you do that in a single system and a single browser window by clicking on 2-3 pages in the system with a natural path. If you have a large race organization, the customer service rep can put a note on why they give the $5 refund so if others look they can see why.
A second example is you want to send a special offer to sign up to past participants who used a coupon last year, but want to exclude current participants and people who paid full price last year. Will the CRM have all that data?
The other big reason we built our system from the ground up to be a CRM database is because most race organizations simply can not afford a costly CRM system, and certainly can not afford the overhead of managing syncing data and integrating two separate databases.
This is similar to why we built our own EMail marketing system for races. A simple example is if you want to send bib numbers via email before the race. Most email marketing systems de-duplicate email addresses so if a couple signed up together with a single email address, they would only get one email with one bib number on it.
Simplification of one system that is built for races is another reason. Most race organizations do not have time to learn lots of technology. This is the reason why we built RaceInsights. Sure, races can use Google Analytics to do the same thing, but it is hard to learn and does not allow them to drill down into details like how much came in for donations vs. registrations from a marketing campaign or email.
We have an open platform, and specific solutions may be interesting to races. For example, our recent integrations with MailChimp and Shopify allow customers to take advantage of those system’s capabilities.
RunSignup is focused on providing a complete toolset to races that bring modern technology in a format that is easy to use and customized directly to the race market.