We have all company meetings every 2-3 weeks where different departments share their progress over the past 10-12 weeks. Over the past two weeks we had our Platform team and then our Event Day development teams present, and we thought we would share so our customers could see our progress.
We have a LOT of major releases that bring our customers a lot of extra value. And the fun thing is that we are actually developing more software even faster as our teams become more efficient.
Race Website V2
A HUGE release for us. We now have a common website platform for Races, TicketSignup, GiveSignup, Membership Organizations, Partners and Organizations. Each new feature we add that is common will be instantly available across all platforms brining further speed to our development process and ambitions to get as many useful features to our customers as possible.
The new generation makes our website product a better choice for most events and event organizations than WordPress (and our email for MailChimp).
Next Gen Memberships
Our Next Gen Membership system is now fully rolled out with over 135 existing clubs and 60 new membership organizations using it. We just came back from the RRCA Convention, and customers are loving it. One of the keys to the success is that the system takes advantages of all the next generation components we have been building the last several years like Websites, Email, Store, Waivers and more.
Another favorite is the flexibility and control over offering a variety of membership levels to accommodate almost any need:
In addition, we give power to membership directors with tools like reporting and editing.
And we are not done yet. Manual Imports are already out with bulk imports in the next couple of weeks, and Apple Wallet is on a test server as this is written:
GiveSignup Peer to Peer Fundraising
We have released a number of nice enhancements to our fundraising platform. We thank customers like Tunnel to Towers, Pedal the Cause, Travis Manion, Ernies Els Foundation, Ben the Shore, Peaks to Portland and many more for their suggestions. Here are some of the highlights:
Email V2
Email V2 is now fully deployed and Email V1 has been retired in races. The transition went very well, and customers are loving the modern design and all the features. As shown below, we continue to make progress on lots of fronts (we are just about ready to release Email V2 for our Volunteer system). The big strategic effort, hopefully coming this summer, is Super Lists. This will expose very powerful search and filter capabilities to build lists based on the data in our platform. So you will be able to build lists that combine race, ticket, membership, donor and fundraising information fields like zipcode, # of events, $ raised or donated, etc.
Next Gen Invoicing
We also released next gen Invoicing capabilities across our various products so events and organizations can easily send and track invoices for things like sponsorships or services provided. This helps with collections and with organizing your transactions and accounting.
MTE Tickets Beta
Our Patent Pending Multiday Timed Entry Ticket capability is now released in a Beta with some early customers using it already. Since 2023, our team has been working on our next-generation solution for timed ticketing and admissions. MTE solves problems for events that sell tickets for multiple dates and/or time slots, such as haunts, holiday light shows, tours, seasonal events and festivals, bookings, and admissions.
The central design is based around calendars. Over the coming months we will be working on putting calendar based interfaces across the dashboard to make it easy for customers to quickly manage their recurring events. Some of the screenshots below are available today, and some will roll out over the next several months:
Ticket Self Serve
We continue to add capabilities to our Ticket Self Serve with the addition of being able to manage additional store items. This allows events to market up-sell items and services to ticket buyers. We have also added ticket transfer to a friend.
Ticket Donation Imports
We also added the capability for Ticket Events to import offline donations so they can show on their donation goal meters.
RaceDay Scoring
With the release of RaceDay Scoring V4, we have stepped into a level of capability and maturity that most races can be scored by timers with this new product. The good news is that we continue to invest heavily in RaceDay Scoring to make it even more powerful.
RaceJoy Streaming Data
We are nearing the beta phase of a major project we are doing to RaceJoy. The core of the next generation is based on streaming chip data from RaceDay Scoring to RaceJoy. RaceJoy will be able to show both GPS positions as well as chip timed based positions. This will provide functionality similar to RTRT that large races with split timing equipment will be able to use.
In addition, we will be refreshing the User Experience of RaceJoy to make it more modern and closer to the rest of our App family. And we will be doing a total refresh of the popular RaceJoy Cheers with some special race announcers doing cheers.
RaceDay CheckIn
One of the big development features that we have recently started on is integrating Membership into RaceDay CheckIn. This will allow a member to use the Membership QR code to checkin to races and ticket events.
In addition, we continue to make refinements for offline and connection management as well as making it easy to share the app with new volunteers, include information when assigning bibs, and password ease of use.
RaceDay Technology Partners – Race Result Integration and MyLaps Cloud
We continue to iterate the integration we released in January for Race Result to refine it and make improvements based on feedback from the timers who have used it in over 100 races already. We also continue to work with MyLaps on their upcoming Cloud Timing product. We work hard to make all of our partners successful and keep an open system.
Mobile Timing App V2
We have begun work on a refresh of the Mobile Timing App that will include a refresh of the UX as well as infrastructure improvements.
And later this year, we will be taking the projects recently completed with Rowan University and integrating them into the app for automated upload of photos and streaming video integration.
Ticket App
Finally, we have completed the integration with the new MTE ticket capability.
Development Improvement
As we have outlined, we continue to make investments in our infrastructure (we have only had 4 minutes of downtime since 2015) as well as improve the productivity of the development team. We continue to invest and continuously improve in both of these areas. We have rolled out productivity and quality tools like code scanning and integrating automated testing into our process. Here is a graph of the tests and how we continue to work testing right into the product to facilitate our continuous improvement processes.
The primary key to to our productivity is the team we have. We continue to be fortunate that our team stays together – and as each team member becomes more experienced, as we all learn and improve, as we put in place more and more reusable components, we are becoming more and more productive. It shows up in this graph of the number or deployments on our platform (does not include the Event Day App team, but they are similarly becoming more productive). We are over 200 releases a month now.
The experience of our team has a very good mix, with a number of long time people, and a continuous stream of new talent with fresh ideas.
Summary
As an employee owned company, we strive to make sure we are doing everything we can to deliver technology that helps our event customers. We try to continuously deliver more solution based technology, but we have so much more to do. Thanks to all our customers for sticking with us, and please know we are doing everything we can to keep your trust by delivering the very best technology for events. Hopefully sharing this review gives you confidence in what we are doing, and how we are trying to continue to deliver for you.