One of our Year End Wrap-up Blogs. Others include 2024 Year in Review, 2024 RunSignup Product Recap, 2024 GiveSignup Product Recap, 2024 TicketSignup Product Recap, 2024 Infrastructure Report, 2025 Company Strategy, 2025 RunSignup Roadmap, 2025 GiveSignup Roadmap, 2025 TicketSignup Roadmap. These will come out incrementally between end of November and early 2025.
Over the past 15 years, we have built the most complete end to end technology platform for endurance events. Over those years, we have developed many features based on the diverse set of needs across the 30,000 events who use us. Our Continuous Improvement approach and Infrastructure allow us to release over 2,000 improvements each year across our platform – meaning our customers are getting upgrades multiple times per day all with no real downtime (6 minutes total downtime since 2015).
We put together a new page on our website trying to capture all of our features – https://info.runsignup.com/products/runsignup-features/. Many of these features had improvements over the year. This year end recap will focus on the top 5 strategic investments we’ve made to improve our customers ability to promote and deliver outstanding events.
Email V2
We brought out the Beta of Email V2 in 2023 and it has matured into a full featured email platform that is competitive with products like MailChimp and Constant Contact. But we have two major advantages over those tools:
- Our Email system is built for events.
- Free. With unlimited contacts and unlimited sends.
Our customers will send 700 Million Event Powered Emails that resulted in 17% of all registrations on RunSignup because of features like:
- Modern Email Builder for rich content design and automatic optimization for mobile, tablet and desktop viewing across all the email client types (Gmail, Outlook, AppleMail, Dark and Light Mode, etc.).
- Pre-Built Email Templates for dozens of use cases like registration opening, price increase, triathlons, donations & fundraising, pre-race email, post race email, etc.
- Image Gallery with over 100 images by category like triathlon, cycling, skiing, etc. And the ability to upload and easily reuse your own images across events.
- Data Placeholders to combine event and participant data into your email automatically. Name, Bib, Corral, Start time, referral sharing codes, QR Codes for fast checkin, Add to Apple Wallet Button and dozens more.
- Automated Emails including Price Increase, Incomplete Registration, Registration Follow-up with Drip Campaign capability.
- Easy Conversion Tracking to see which emails generate how many registrations, donations and total $.
- Industry leading email deliverability because of our continuous monitoring and management of email standards, settings and configuration like DMARC, SPF and DKIM.
If you want to learn more, we do have an independent study that will help you drill into more depth.
We also have more fun plans for 2025, including Super Lists where you can create a list based on any number of parameters like people within 25 miles who gave over $100 and participated in at least 3 events. We will also be introducing integrated TXT Marketing capabilities for $0.01 per message.
Websites V2
We have been in Beta during 2024 with our Race Website V2 capability. Like Email, Event-Powered Websites are the direction more and more races are moving. It is less costly, easier to update and maintain, faster, more reliable and secure than alternatives like WordPress. Our Websites are also fully integrated with all of the rich data that comes from events like results, photos, integrated sponsors, team lists, real time donation and fundraising goal meters, countdown clocks and more.
We are happy to report we will be removing the “beta” tag from Race Websites V2 this month, December, 2024. We have hundreds of races that are up and running on Website V2 and we have gotten rave reviews. Here are some of the features customers love:
- Easy to use Website Builder with point and click interface.
- Unlimited Content Pages with flexible menu and submenus with multiple front page and back page banners. All easy to configure. Put all the content you want like a FAQ, training guides, parking instructions, awards, and everything about your event right where people are going to signup and look for results. With lots of display options and formatting.
- Rich content including images, video, playlists and more. Uses the same Image Gallery. Includes built-in system images we provide for free as well as Albums for organizations to upload, manage and reuse their own images.
- Bring your own Domain. We will provide the SSL certificate and manage all of the details for you. And we have a bunch of features to help your race with SEO for search engines as well as automatic placement on over 100 race calendar websites like RunningintheUSA.com, HalfMarathons.net, FindARace, LocalRaces, and hundreds of local newspaper websites via Evvnt.
- Data-Sourced Pages and Content blocks like participant status, countdown clocks, sponsor grids, Race location, Results, Event Tiles, Charity Leaderboard, Donation Thermometer, Groups and Teams, Event lists of other events you work with, Donation page, Store page, Photos, Results, Volunteer Info and signup, Refund Policy, Strava Maps and more.
For a more in depth look at Race Websites V2, you can see our website as well as this webinar and set of helpful resources.
In early 2025, Website V2 will become the default for all new races that are created. We will also be encouraging, but not forcing upgrades. We have one template option that looks beautiful when you upgrade from Website V1, but there is manual work to recreate all of your static content (things like Results will show, but your specific FAQ’s will need to be copy and pasted into a new page on Website V2).
RaceDay Real-Time
We provide a complete set of tools so that races and timers can provide the same set of features the largest marathons in the country have for any size or distance race. From Corral and bib assignment to CheckIn, Fulfillment and Medical Tent to timing and scoring the race with RaceDay Scoring to integrated Photos and video and RealTime capabilities for TXT and RaceJoy App notifications of splits and finishes and of course online Results. We also have a Mobile Timing App that can be used as a chip backup, split point manual timing as well as for small races. Millions of participants benefitted from these features in 2024.
The big advance we made in 2024 was RaceDay Real-Time. The major technology pillar is RaceDay Scoring, the open platform used by timers to collect real-time chip data to provide results. The new capability is based on advances made with RaceDay Scoring V4, with the chip data collection mechanism upgraded to a super fast Rust software platform. This is important because timing systems produce 4 to 10 times the number of chip reads (and sometimes 10X that amount) for each participant in a race. At the start of a 1,000 person race, there may be 1,000 – 5,000 chip times sent to RaceDay Scoring within the 90 seconds that the participants take to cross the start line. For example, a 27,000 person race that was scored with RaceDay Scoring took in 49,000 reads from advanced MyLaps equipment (which pre filters the reads well) just at the start line. That race had a total of 245,484 reads.
RaceDay Real-Time delivers that streaming data to users via both our RaceJoy app as well as via TXT messaging.
We have also worked with large panel and mobile panel providers like NovusMage on streaming the realtime data to them so they can show leaderboards and times for participants as they pass large display screens.
Memberships V2
Hundreds of running clubs have upgraded from our previous Club membership product to our new Membership product. The modern design uses the Email V2 and Website V2 as a foundation (and, yes they are free so a club can send unlimited emails and put all the content up that they want on the website), along with a very flexible membership design that fits many needs. Individual, Family and organization membership types as well as any duration.
One of the key features of the membership product is the cross promotion of races and clubs.
- Offer race discounts to your members, and membership discounts to the runners who register for your races
- Let runners sign up for your club and a race in one transaction to encourage new members
- Automatically recognize (and discount) club members registering for your race based on Member Level, and prompt those who aren’t members to register
The membership product also allows for merchandise bundling and sales, donations, custom questions, waivers and a self serve portal. It includes advanced features like Apple Pay and Apple Wallet. Members can also checkin to any race with their Membership QR code as their identification since Memberships is part of our integrated database architecture.
Reliable, Secure Speed and Ease of Signup
All of these features are on our single platform that has only had 6 minutes of downtime since 2015. This means races who use RunSignup are providing their customers the fastest, most secure and most reliable system available in the market. This makes races look good and allows participants to signup fast.
In fact, runners love using RunSignup. There are about 50 Million people with RunSignup accounts now. New people find it very quick to signup for events, and people with accounts find it VERY, VERY quick to signup. We remember all of their personal information, and event things like Emergency Contact and Shirt Size. This makes filling in forms fast and easy. And 1,297,980 participants have saved their credit cards for fast checkout (and another 1.5 million are signing up with ApplePay). Endurance athletes are also increasingly using their Profile Page to see past races and performances.
In 2023, there were 1,139,925 people who signed up for 2 or more races on RunSignup. That is up from 874,787 in 2022. The number of people who just sign up for one race each year is hard to measure, but is much larger – likely more than 4 Million in 2024.
Find A Race and Find a Timer
We are also rolling out a new Find A Race capability in December, 2024. It will include a new, modern design for the race list and have some cool features:
- When signed in, we will automatically show races that the person signed up for in the past at the top.
- We will use Geo-location to show races that in the local area.
We hope this helps since the Find A Race page is the largest source beside direct links (from race websites), Email and Google search of people signing up for a race. We will continue to support our affiliate network, but our traffic on this page is just much larger because so many runners know and trust RunSignup and so many races point to the simple RunSignup.com url on their ads and flyers and billboards.
We also did a major upgrade of Find A Timer that highlights Certifications that timers have. This helps assure race directors of knowledgeable timers in their area.
Summary
We made great progress in 2024 providing our endurance customers with the leading technology platform available. We have broadened our platform to include all of the major needs of our customers. And we will continuously improve the product so our customers can take advantage of the latest features to promote and deliver a great experience for their events. We delivered over 2,000 improvements to our platform and apps this year and will do even more next year as we continue to get better and better.
As we stated in our Company Strategy, we are a product led company, focused on delivering what our event customers want and need. And our Employee Owned company is excited to keep supporting our customers and welcoming new customers as we look toward 2025.
Finally, we would like to thank all of our amazing customers for your support! We would not be here without you!