Please see RunSignup.com/Coronavirus and RunSignup.com/GoVirtual for recommendations and tools. We also released Looking Forward: Guidelines for Races this week as well.
Things continue to evolve as of May 3, 2020 from Week 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3 and 2 of the Coronavirus.
The transaction volume we saw the past week is 40% lower than the same week last year. The 40% is a pretty good improvement from the 44% the previous week and 53% the week before but still implies the endurance community and nonprofit community is having to survive on a far smaller amount of revenue.
We’ve included two charts showing the total $ amount of transactions flowing thru our system on a weekly basis both pre and post Coronavirus. The first is a simple %, and the second is the actual transactions per week on our platform. For example, this past week was $4,030,388 vs. $6,768,067 last year. Note that this past week incldued the end of a month and the beginning of a month, so numbers increase as many races have price increases at the end of the month and many races open. For example this year the OneAmerica 500 Festival Mini-Marathon opened on May 2. Also, you can see we were having a great year (up 29%) before the virus, so this does not represent the community as a whole…
The other point is that of that lower volume, of the 20 top races over the past week:
- 16 are virtual races
- 2 are races scheduled for this spring that have converted to virtual – so those are new virtual race registrations or donations
- 2 is for for fall or 2021 races.
What this means is that the regular race registration revenue these race organizations are used to operating on has fallen probably 90% or more in many cases. Virtual is the new real…
The Next Phase
We are suggesting that races this year might want to consider going forward with a Virtual Race as a first option, and when things become clearer, then add a real race. This will set expectations properly, and your organization might be able to raise enough money and save enough on costs to make it worthwhile. Take a look at our Virtual Race Hub for ideas and how to make the move.
Some races are starting to plan small real races in the coming weeks. We published Looking Forward: A Guideline for Races two weeks ago thanks to the help of dozens of race directors, timers, industry groups and others. We also held a webinar this past week that showed how to set up corrals in RunSignup so you can limit the number of starters to different start times. (As an aside, we are working on a new user experience to make corral setup even easier). This is important, as we pointed out in our blog on Start Line Bottlenecks.
At RunSignup, we published a number of blogs this past week:
- RunSignup April Newsletter
- Race Registration Market Analysis
- Virtual Race Referral Rewards
- Virtual Races: Auto Results in RaceJoy Now Available
- Q1 2020 RunSignup Results
- Community Roundup 4/27/20 – The Long Game
This coming week, we have two webinars scheduled:
- Make Money, Save Money in this challenging time – Tues 5/5 at 2PM EST
- Making the Decision to Go Virtual – Thurs 5/7 at 2PM EST
Stay safe and healthy.