This was a very interesting quarter. We saw continued growth in our business. We saw “normal” returning to the endurance community, although with some final adjustments. Specifically, some of the growth we saw in the first two quarters of the year were due to the depressing impact of Omicron in 2022. What we are seeing in Q3 is a relative slowdown from 2022 due to the shift of people registering earlier in 2023 than they were during Omicron in 2022. In other words, a shift left in terms of registrations to earlier in the year compared with 2022. More analysis below…
We share our high level numbers and thoughts on the market and technology advances on a quarterly and yearly basis – 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, Q1 and Q2 2023.
RunSignup Quarterly Numbers
As we previewed in the opening paragraph, registrations and transactions seemed to slow growth from 2022 – however, it was a “shift left” in timing of when people signed up for events to earlier in the year because they were not concerned with COVID this year. The good news is that things are getting back to normal, as we can see in this chart that shows steady growth by quarter over our 2019 numbers while the 2022 comparison numbers showing a drop in Q3.
RunSignup Endurance Business
2022 is looking better for the endurance community as a whole. One of our measurements is of races that happened on our platform in 2022 and 2023 by month. This metric continues to be positive, up 7% overall for the year and marking a near normal level back to 2019 numbers.
We are very pleased with our steady accumulation of market share in the endurance business. This can be seen by the steady growth of about 11% from 2022 and 35-40% from 2019 in terms of number of endurance events. We covered this trend in our latest Registration Market Analysis.
The churn report for the quarter looks pretty good (these are races over 500 participants that were on RunSignup that happened within a month comparison between 2022 and 2023). There was 5.7% “no race” churn – normal for pre pandemic so far this year. We lost 2.6% to competitors, again about normal to pre pandemic and most unavoidable – for example Lifetime Fitness took about 30 races off RunSignup this year and put them back on Chronotrack, who they also own). These losses were more than offset by growth of 29% in new races on our platform.
We are feeling pretty good about steady growth in our endurance business. We have significant product feature advantages over other vendors, and with Race Roster’s recent price increases, significant price advantages (Race Roster charges $1.99 per participant plus 7%, RunSignup only charges $1.00 per transaction (big savings when a family signs up together) plus 6%). Better product and lower price usually makes for a good future. It also seems that Race Roster’s aggressiveness on pricing with select customers is waning – last year and earlier this year they seemed to be more aggressive going after RunSignup customers with large discounts. Smaller vendors, and vendors owned by larger entities as a side business also seem to be reducing their spend in development and in selling efforts and raising prices.
We have made steady progress on our product offering, with a newly revamped Race Renewal process, many Email enhancements like Pre-Built Emails and Image Gallery, Apple Wallet and Apple Pay support, Click to TXT Social Share, revamped Questions Dashboard Page, and many more. For timers we came out with a milestone release of RaceDay Scoring with Version 4, and continue to make enhancements to the Checkin App to add functionality like Result Kiosk modes and Medical Tent capabilities.
GiveSignup Peer to Peer Business
While our donation numbers only grew 8% this quarter from 2022, they are up 166% from 2019. We actually had a very strong quarter behind the scenes with a number of large $1 Million + P2P fundraising events committing to move to GiveSignup in 2024. So early in our planning for 2024, it looks like it will be a strong year in this business.
We are finding many nonprofits being frustrated with their high cost donor management and CRM systems as well as their email marketing and website capabilities. Many are starting to find that GiveSignup’s strength in events as well as a long history of helping nonprofits is able to make things easier, lower cost, and drive more fundraising revenue. Our efforts over the past year to help customers integrate GiveSignup data into their CRM and Donor Management systems allows them to have the best of both worlds.
TicketSignup Business
Growth moderated in Q3 due to losing a large customer from last year who was forced back to their prior vendor due to having the vendor threaten contract violation for leaving. We hope to win them back when their contract ends. We are actually finding many events locked into long term contracts that they wish they could get out of, and are surprised that our contracts allow customers to leave at any time without penalty. We feel if we are not doing a good job, then customers should be able to leave.
Allison does a nice job reviewing how we are designing for a wide range of ticket events from simple to complex:
For the year, our ticket volume has doubled and our transaction volume for tickets has nearly tripled. We are benefiting from three positive trends:
RunSignup customers using TicketSignup – We are seeing an increasing number of RunSignup customers realizing that we have a ticket product now. They love the fact they can use the same payment account, have a very similar feel to the product, and share common components like emails and images. Here are some sample success stories.
Unhappy Eventbrite Users – We are seeing a steady stream of unhappy Eventbrite users who are unhappy with Eventbrite constantly raising prices, introducing subscription fees (even to free events), and spending efforts on becoming a marketplace (like they can replace Google, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and word of mouth!). They are finding TicketSignup to be a better, faster product with higher reliability and timely payments at a far lower cost with free services like a full website capability and email.
Multi-Day Timed Entry Events – We are having great success with events like Haunts, where there are needs for clear and easy purchase of tickets across many days and time slots. These customers love our participant management features that allow for ticket holders to change their tickets themselves – especially on rain out days. They also love our Ticket App that has reduced lines and works with Square credit card readers for onsite purchases.
We see our TicketSignup business continuing to grow from about 6% of our transaction volume this year to about 10% next year, which will improve our overall growth rate as a company.
Membership Product
We will be introducing a major next generation of our old Club system as a full fledged Membership system around the end of 2023 with a great set of features:
- Flexible Memberships: duration, levels, pricing, and more
- Event Integration with RunSignup and TicketSignup
- Cross sell memberships during event signup
- Discount event signups with different membership levels
- AutoRenewal with saved credit cards
- Lightweight “no password” option like TicketSignup
- Websites (Free, Modern, Full Powered, Custom Branded, BYO Domain), including Member Only Access
- Email (Free, Modern, Full Powered, Custom Branded), including newsletters, automated emails and notifications
- Integrated Donations (and Donation Discounts)
- Powerful Reporting
- Online Store
- Apple Pay and Apple Wallet
- Import and Migration and Integration Tools with custom member numbers for easier migration
Of course the hundreds of running clubs who use it today are thrilled. But we are designing this for a wider audience of organizations who have events as well as memberships. For example a garden might want to upsell a ticket buyer to become a member, or members would get a discount or free admission to the garden. This has been a popular application for running clubs who hold events, and the expanded use will be beneficial to a new set of customers.
Our Development Team and Process
We are in the process of doing videos of all of our employees to post on our website. We have started with our Platform development team – you can see the interviews here – https://info.runsignup.com/about-us/our-team/company-video-page/. Bruce Kratz does a nice job of doing an overview of our development process in this video:
Summary
Our company is running ahead of our original plan for the year. We continue to build great software for our event customers. We will be doing our usual end of year product recap, 2024 roadmap in December. We are on a good path and certainly appreciate all of the support we get from our customers.