Can RunSignup Market My Race? It’s one of the first questions race directors ask — and it’s a fair one. You’re investing time, money, and energy into your event, and you want to know whether the platform you’re trusting with your registrations is going to help you fill your roster.
The honest answer is: not in the way you might expect. But that’s actually a good thing.
We Don’t Own Your Data — And We Never Will
RunSignup’s approach to participant data is simple and non-negotiable: your runners are yours. We will never use your participant data to market other events to your runners, which also means we can’t use other customers’ participant data to market your event to their runners.
No email blasts to a shared database. No cross-promotion to runners who signed up for someone else’s race. No selling or sharing of participant information with third parties.
This is a deliberate choice. Race directors trust us with their most valuable asset — their community — and we take that seriously. A platform that markets across its entire participant database might seem appealing at first glance, but it comes at a real cost: your runners’ inboxes get cluttered with events they didn’t ask about, trust erodes, and the relationship between your race and your participants gets muddied.
We’d rather help you build something that lasts.
So How Does RunSignup Help You Grow?
Just because we don’t blast emails on your behalf doesn’t mean we aren’t working to get your event in front of runners. In fact, RunSignup is built from the ground up to drive registrations to your event — passively, consistently, and at no cost to you.
Your Event Is Found Through Search
When you create a race on RunSignup, we automatically optimize your event page for search engines using the details you provide — your event name, location, distances, and description. The result? Runners searching for local 5Ks, half marathons, or trail races in your area can find your event organically, without you spending a dollar on advertising.
According to the 2025 RaceTrends Report, 29.3% of all race website traffic comes from organic search — nearly one in three visitors arriving directly from Google without any paid promotion.
Your Event Is Listed Across Dozens of Calendars — Automatically
RunSignup has built an affiliate network that automatically distributes your event listing to national and local race calendars the moment your event goes live. Sites like HalfMarathons.net and RunningIntheUSA.com, along with local aggregators like running stores and timing company websites, pull RunSignup events via our Open API — meaning your race appears on multiple calendars without you taking any action.
According to the 2025 RaceTrends Report, referral sources — including affiliate calendars — drive 25.1% of all race website traffic. Combined with organic search, that’s more than half of your event’s web traffic coming from sources that require zero effort on your part.
The Tools to Do the Rest
The other half of the equation is yours to own — and RunSignup gives you everything you need to do it well. From free email marketing and referral rewards to a fully branded race website, the platform is designed to help you build and grow your own audience over time.
Website Marketing Example
Email Marketing Example
Website Example
Website Example
Referral Example
Referral Example
Loyalty programs and priority registration keep your best runners coming back year after year, while club memberships and club discounts help you tap into the local running community as a built-in distribution channel.
We also make it easy to know your marketing dollars aren’t going to waste. RunSignup’s built-in analytics and support for tracking pixels — including Facebook Conversion and TikTok Pixel — let you tie every campaign directly to real registrations and revenue, so you always know what’s working.
For a full breakdown of how to put these tools to work, check out our complete guide: 4 Ways to Grow Your Race with RunSignup.
The Bottom Line
RunSignup won’t market your race to other customers’ runners — because your runners’ data isn’t ours to use. What we will do is make sure your event is easy to find, automatically distributed across the web’s most-visited race calendars, and backed by a free suite of marketing tools that put you in control of your own growth.
Your data stays yours. Your community stays yours. And the tools to grow both? Also yours — free.
Ready to get started? Create your event on RunSignup today.