Your race is coming up this Saturday. In the back of your mind you are wondering “When should I open next year’s race?” The answer, of course is when you are ready!
This blog discusses some of the options, tradeoffs and various examples. It also gives pointers to some of the information and guides we have on our website as we discuss the various options. You can also review other content like our Renewal webinar, Overview slides, and our Help Guide.
There are basically three options:
- Open When We are Ready
- Day After Event
- Before Current Event Happens
Open When We are Ready Option
This is by far the most popular option for races. Most races are stretched very thin the weeks before the race. Most of the people working the race are volunteers and simply do not have time to plan a proper opening marketing plan.
RunSignup makes opening up your race easy with our simple Renew button:
This takes you back to a renewal wizard, where if you want to leave everything the same, it is quick and easy. We modernized the renewal process last year.
Renewing your race brings a lot of advantages:
- All of last year’s information just moves over. We auto-adjust your dates (so the race date is Saturday next year and we calculate things like leap years, or special days like Thanksgiving), and even price increase schedules, Giveaway sizes, website, and all the other details you configured last year.
- Keeping the same URL improves SEO traffic
- Improves tracking over multiple years, like Loyalty Reports
- Reconciled Year over Year reporting for financials as well as a number of quick YOY comparison reports
- And it keeps all of your contacts together for future marketing:
There are a number of reasons to wait until you are ready:
- Review Next year’s pricing
- Put in place next year marketing, including scheduled emails and automated emails
- Update your website and not confuse people with mixed year messages
- If you have fundraising, some donations happen after the race. We have a feature to set a donation period so it is simpler to reconcile which year to assign a donation. For example, this race happens on June 7, 2025, and they have set the donation period to end on July 1 so they count all donation that happen later in June to the 2025 race. They won’t open the 2026 race until after July 1.
It is also important to note that it is important to get your race open as early as you can. Having people signup helps to generate word of mouth promotion for your event (and don’t forget our Referral Rewards feature to encourage this!)
Day After Event
If your race is super organized, opening the day after your current event happens is the ideal. Opening up earlier can cause confusion for participants who might sign up for the wrong year and either show up a year early or a year late. Our system is also optimized to do all of the financial reconciliation and year over year accounting and comparisons with having a clean delineation.
The day after your event happens, that green “Renew” button appears. Renewing is simple and easy. You can then send an email to Last Year’s Participants very easily in the system to congratulate them for running the race, include a link to their results and photos, and perhaps offer an early bird discount. You can even pre-market the idea of opening up registration for next year in pre-race emails and at the race itself.
Opening an event the day after without any real marketing effort and a specific call to action is not productive. We see many races simply renewing quickly, but they really do not get many registrations until they start to market it. This is probably the best example of why you do not want to open your race until you are really ready.
Before the Race Opens
Some races want to open registration for next year’s race before this year’s happen. They believe that there is power in trying to convert visitors to this year’s race, especially on race day.
The best way to implement this in RunSignup is to copy this year’s race, and then change the settings for dates on event and update pricing and content to make it clear this is a next year race. We then recommend transitioning to the current year race once the race has passed. This has a number of benefits:
- It keeps your financials separated and clear for reconciliation
- It reduces the risk of people signing up for the wrong year
- Once you import the participants who signed up early, you get all the benefits of being able to do year over year reporting for participants and easily email current participants, etc.
RunSignup can help you with the details of setting this up if you think it is very important.
One of the questions we get is does this really have much of an impact. In short, not really. Here are a few examples.
Race A had 12,756 participants for their 2024 race. They opened up a couple of days early and had a total of 260 people signup on race day and 30 people signup the two days before – about 2% of the total for 2024. Those signups were the result of a pre event email highlighting next year’s race.
The other thing to note is they did a clear marketing blast the next weekend and had 424 people signup. Most of those came from a post-event email. So for this apples to apples comparison, a post event email the week after the race generated about twice the signups. Perhaps a day after email might have generated even more or captured both groups.
Race B had 18,823 participants. Their race weekend was May 3-5 (Friday – Sunday). They opened early and as you can see, had 835 people signup during the race weekend – about 4%.
This is about the highest we have seen for a race opening next year before this year happens. It is a well organized and staffed race that put a fair amount of effort into pre-event emails encouraging people to signup for next year. They only had a few people who were confused since they also left registration open during race weekend.
Of course the question is whether a post event email marketing could have produced better conversion than 4%.
Race C has 14,460 participants in their 2024 race in mid July. They waited until they were ready – about a month later – to open the 2025 race and had 1,088 signups. That is about 7%.
So it appears that there is not a huge advantage to rushing the opening of registration. This is further backed up by our Race Trends analysis of tens of thousands of events that shows only 8-9% of participants signup over 120 before a race:
Summary
Pretty simple – open when you are ready to do real work on promoting next year’s race.