Customer Snapshot
- Company Founded: 2014
- Years on RunSignup: 12+
- Events Managed Annually: 12+
- Staff Per Event: 15–40
Race Awesome doesn’t do average. Founder Stacy & Corey Roberts has built a premium race brand across a dozen-plus Long Island events — from the Suffolk County Marathon to the Jamesport Triathlon — on a simple rule: every athlete gets the same high-end experience, every time. RunSignup is the platform behind that consistency, and Race Awesome has spent over a decade pushing nearly every feature the platform releases into production the moment it’s available.
Race Awesome Background
Before Race Awesome, Corey managed and was in the process of purchasing Event Power — a deal that fell apart in 2013–2014. Rather than walk away from the industry, Corey and his wife Stacy started their own company. Stacy the one who came up with the name: Race Awesome, a pointed answer to the brand he’d just left behind.
Race Awesome came to RunSignup through his timer back in 2016, and just used basic event page. The real turning point to going “ALL IN” was a RunSignup conference around 2020, where a RunSignup team member told the room bluntly: “If you don’t have an organization website with us, you’re an idiot.” RaceAwesome didn’t have one yet — by the end of the conference, they did, and they have been building everything in RunSignup ever since.
How Race Awesome uses RunSignup
- Organization Website with a custom domain — raceawesome.com is a custom domain layered on top of a RunSignup Organization Website, built as a single landing page whose only job is getting visitors to the next race registration. Race Awesome tried overlaying custom domains on individual race sites too, but stepped back from that approach because it broke single sign-on — athletes landing on a branded URL weren’t automatically logged into RunSignup, adding friction right before registration.
- Video banners — Race Awesome treats race website videos as their core marketing spend rather than paid advertising, hiring videographers to shoot footage they says drives registrations on its own. When they found that video banners weren’t autoplaying on mobile — missing an estimated 76% of site visitors — They flagged it directly, and RunSignup’s team prioritized a fix.
- Photography as standard, not upsell — free professional photography for every athlete is non-negotiable at every Race Awesome event, a policy the company held even before RunSignup’s own photo-tagging tools existed. Race Awesome staffs enough photographers (up to eight at the largest events) to guarantee no one is missed.
- Check-in app, fully paperless — Race Awesome moved off paper registration entirely in 2019, running race-day checkin through the RunSignup app on iPads, with mobile phone backup if hardware goes down.
- Dynamic and pre-assigned bibs, used strategically — smaller events use dynamic bib assignment to save on bib costs; larger races with heavy group pickup (marathons, holiday runs) switch to pre-assigned, labeled bibs sorted by distance or alphabet to keep pickup lines moving.
- Email Marketing — replaced a costly legacy email tool for managing a list built from years of races, and now handles both mass communications and personal outreach to individual fundraisers and participants.
- Consistent branding across every contracted event — Long Island Marathon, Suffolk County Marathon, Main Street Mile, and Seaford Hot Chocolate all run on the same RunSignup-powered structure, so the experience feels identical no matter which Race Awesome event an athlete shows up to.
- Early, vocal product feedback — when RunSignup beta-tested its AI chatbot on a limited set of races, Race Awesome pushed to have it turned on for every Race Awesome event rather than wait for general release, then continued flagging bugs and gaps as they found them.
Results
- The Suffolk County Marathon has grown by an estimated 500 additional registrations, which Race Awesome attributes in large part to the platform’s video and photo tools keeping athletes from clicking away to compare other races.
- Every late-season Race Awesome event is currently trending up year over year.
- The mobile autoplay fix Race Awesome flagged directly led to a platform-wide improvement, closing a gap that had been missing roughly a quarter of mobile visitors.
- Race Awesome has fully eliminated paper-based registration and check-in since 2019.
In Their Own Words
“What we care about is keeping our athletes in RunSignup and being that one button away from registering again,” Corey said, explaining why Race Awesome moved away from third-party results and timing pages in favor of keeping everything inside the RunSignup ecosystem.
On the company’s approach to pricing and standards, Corey is direct: “We’re not here to be average, we’re here to be awesome.” Every contracted event has to include professional photography, a real finisher arch, and a professional announcer or DJ — no exceptions, even when it costs Race Awesome a bid.
On Standard, Every Race
Race Awesome now runs a full slate of events under one consistent brand — Long Island Marathon, Suffolk County Marathon, Great South Bay Run, Jamesport Triathlon, Cedar Creek Duathlon, and several holiday and community 5Ks — all built on RunSignup’s Organization Website and race platform. The company also operates I Run This Island Foundation, a nonprofit Corey & Stacy created to formally separate race-day volunteering from Race Awesome’s for-profit events, ensuring compliant volunteer management. For its largest events, Race Awesome pairs a fully paid staff of 15–40 hourly workers (with built-in overtime policy for long event days) with charity partners who provide volunteer support in exchange for funding.
Closing
Race Awesome’s growth comes down to three things staying consistent across every event:
- A premium standard Corey & Stacy refuse to compromise on.
- A marketing budget built around video and photography instead of paid ads
- A deep, ongoing relationship with RunSignup where feedback moves in both directions.
As Corey put it, the platform doesn’t just support the Race Awesome brand — it’s part of what lets a small team compete at Race Awesome’s self-described “awesome, not average” level, event after event.
