We usually do our Year in Review in a single blog post. This year has been much too big to put it all in one place, so we are breaking it up a bit into this one, with a recap of this year, and then a blog about our 2021 roadmap.
The development team had an amazing year. While we did not really do much of what we had planned, we did deliver a ton of much needed functionality that helped our customers during the pandemic. We had 2,002 deployments from Jan. 1 – Dec. 17, and 2,045 since Dec. 18 last year. That is an average of 5.6 deployments per day. Each deployment is a new release of our entire system. That is up from 1,500 deployments in 2019.
We again had 0 downtime this year, in spite of all of those deployments and monthly server updates. Our last downtime was 2015. We also had all on time payments, although some customers were frustrated by our new reserve policies we put in place due to the pandemic and have since lowered to 5% until after the event (more on that in our year in business review coming in another week).
We also grew our development team with some key additions:
- New VP of Development – Bruce Kratz
- New Lead Developer for Supporter Engagement – Rich Sbarro
- New Developer for the GiveSignup Team – Joel Peterson
- New Developer (transition from coop to full time Jan. 4, 2021) – Justus Fee
At a high level, we delivered the following to help our customers pivot:
- COVID Race Postponement and Cancellation
- Postponed and Cancelled Event Popup and Survey
- Manage Refunds and Chargebacks
- Manage Participant Transfers and Deferrals
- Virtual Events
- Easy transition from live event to virtual
- Improved User Interface for Results
- Result posting
- RaceJoy RunAnywhere
- RaceJoy automated result submission
- Participant photo uploads and sharing
- Challenge Events
- Multi-activity – distance, time, any count (books, steps, etc.)
- Easy user logging
- Goals and Milestones
- Dynamic maps
- Teams
- Track friends and family simultaneously on maps and leaderboards
- Trophy case with customizable badges, notifications
- Shipping
- Custom pricing/inclusion/exclusion based on locations
- Address validation
- Live Races in the COVID Age
- Timer software (The Race Director and RaceDay Scoring) support for rolling starts
- New Corral system
- RaceJoy GPS Tracking and Engagement
We also made major improvements to our GiveSignup offerings to help nonprofits raise more and connect with their supporters during this difficult year:
- Free Facebook Fundraising integration
- Virtual Event Fundraising
- Challenge Platform helped raise over $30 Million
- Dynamic Challenge Goal Display Options
- New Nonprofit Ticket wizard for easy onboarding
- Simple Donation Forms provide a major upgrade for nonprofits using PayPal
- E-Cards and Mail a Card options added to Tribute capabilities
- Improved Social Sharing
- Donation Website Banners
- Many Reporting Upgrades for full data access and integration with nonprofit CRM’s
- Integration with 360 Match Pro from Double the Donation
- Flexible Ticket Cap Display Options
- Donation Discounts for Tickets
Finally, we always keep focused on improving the overall functionality and usability of our system – pandemic or not.
- Simplified and Customizable Dashboard Menu
- Photos 2.0 – All new user interface, integration with results, abilities to have users do uploads, improved album and photo management, open API for photo uploads, and soon integration with Tickets and Donation Websites.
- Countless incremental updates
The entire development team and RunSignup | GiveSignup went above and beyond this year. It is enormously motivating to see so many customers using these new features to make the best of a rotten year. Thank you all for sticking with us, and recommending us to your friends and colleagues.
We will be publishing our 2021 Roadmap, as well as a Company and market recap for 2020 in the next two weeks.