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 making money, and engaging their customers during this time. Let’s use some statistics to show this is real.
For the month of April, we compared the Top 100 races in terms of transaction volume during that month between 2019 and 2020:
Note that the top 100 races totaled about the same amount of transaction volume. Over 90% of these races were put on by existing RunSignup customers. Some were new brands like the Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, but that was put on by an existing RunSignup customer.
The data shows that the 100th place race revenue was down significantly – from $26,581 to $10,410. If we expand the search to the top 1,000:
The numbers start to drop drastically in 2020 the further down the list of top races by transaction volume.
The cause is simple – not enough of our customers are putting on virtual races. There were only 2,647 races in April that had transactions over $100, while there were over 5,000 races that had over $386 of transactions last year.
We try to highlight use cases each week on our Go Virtual website and on our blog with Community Roundups. Bob and Allison did a webinar sharing how they switched the Scott Coffee Run to virtual. That race has 382 people signed up as of now as compared with 392 last year. Komen Twin Cities switched to virtual for their Mother’s Day Run/Walk, and still had thousands sign up.
No matter whether you come up with a creative new idea for a virtual event, or you take your real event virtual – people will be interested if you put effort into it. There is demand for a virtual edition of traditional races – people want to support you and have a way to remember this time.
So take a trip over to our Go Virtual website and create some of your own great ideas to make some money for your organization during these tough times.