Please see RunSignup.com/Coronavirus for recommendations and tools.
Things continue to evolve as of April 11, 2020 from Week 6, Week 5, Week 4, Week 3 and Week 2 of the Coronoavirus.
The transaction volume we saw the past week is 65% lower than the same week last year. The 65% is a pretty good improvement from the 76% the previous week 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 $1,968,786 vs. $5,668,183 last year. Also, you can see we were having a great year (up 29%) before the virus…
The other point is that of that lower volume, of the 20 top races over the past week:
- 11 are virtual races
- 8 are races scheduled for this spring that have converted to virtual – so those are new virtual race registrations or donations
- Only 1 is fall 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.
Donations as a % of volume has increased from 8% to 13% of transaction volume (and up from 12% last week). This is a combination of lower registration volume, and some increased use by nonprofit customers of GiveSignup Donation Websites and Donation Forms.
As of April 11 2,509 races have used our postponement tool, up from 2,324 last week:
We also have stats on what participants have chosen. Virtual seems to be the most popular choice that races are offering, and participants are selecting:
We continue to see about a 10-15X increase in Chargeback volume. We discussed our concern in this webinar – like the coronavirus numbers, this could become exponential. Chargebacks are being processed against even the most iconic races including Broad Street and Pat’s Run even though they both have communicated great options to participants very clearly.
We continue to receive decisions on our challenges from VISA – and lost all of them to date in spite of no refund policies and many accommodative policies for deferment, virtual and more.
We continue to encourage customers to have a reserve compliant with our reserve policy to stay in compliance with their legal and fiduciary responsibilities to credit card holders. In an effort to help races minimize chargebacks, we instituted a new notification when chargebacks come in to that the race director can reach out to the participant and try to convince them to reverse the chargeback.
We have seen many payment processors institute much more restrictive reserve and holdback policies. Eventbrite recently laid off 45% of their staff and is holding all payments until after the event. We had discussions with Stripe this past week, as a potential way for customers to move off of us and do their payments thru Stripe. They informed us they did not want to take on new event customers and would have a 75% holdback. While our 20% holdback policy has been unpopular, we feel our specific industry knowledge and increasing depth of knowledge will enable us to better apply appropriate reserves over time. As early examples, we have no holdbacks on donations or membership fees. We also intend to release a BYO merchant account option in the next 3 months for those customers who can find a better reserve policy.
Finally, we are beginning to have conversations with a number of race directors, timers and industry organizations about what the “new normal” will be. We are going to be collecting thoughts on approaches to having safe live events ones the stay at home restrictions are lifted. Things like corral size, how to operate checkin, how to handle water stops and awards ceremonies. Also how to expect people to sign up (probably even closer to race day and on race day!). We hope this information will help races prepare and come back stronger than ever and lead our communities in regaining our confidence, health and happiness.