Customer Snapshot
- Volunteers Needed: 180
- Years Running: 49 (50 in 2027!)
- 2026 Registered Athletes: 2,700+
- Years on RunSignup: 15
Get to Know the Columbus 10K
Columbus Running Company has organized the Columbus 10K for decades, and this year marked their 49th anniversary. Race director Andy Harris runs the event on RunSignup, using it as the single source of truth for registration, volunteer signups, and race-day data. But like many race organizers, Andy’s team faced a familiar problem on race morning: a lot of good data locked inside the platform that’s hard to scan at a glance when you’re being pulled in multiple directions.
So, Andy built a tool to fix that — a lightweight, custom dashboard that pulls live volunteer data straight from the RunSignup API and turns it into something a volunteer coordinator can read in three seconds. He built it himself, without a software engineering background, using AI coding tools.
The Challenge: Great Data, Hard to Act On in the Moment
The Columbus 10K depends on a large volunteer force — Andy and his team target 170 to 180 volunteers. Team members oversee assignments of wildly different sizes, from small two-person posts to groups of 40, depending on the location.
RunSignup already gives Andy everything he needs to manage that roster: task setup, signup minimums and maximums, and race-day check-in with the RaceDay CheckIn app. The gap wasn’t the data — it was accessibility in the moment. Two problems stood out:
- Access and speed: not every team member has the RunSignup permissions or familiarity to dig through pages of race data quickly, and race morning doesn’t leave room for that kind of navigation.
- No-shows: with 15% to 30% of volunteers typically not showing up, leadership needs a live, at-a-glance read on where they’re understaffed so they can reallocate the people before it becomes a problem — not after.
Andy needed something that sat on top of RunSignup’s data and made it instantly actionable for people who aren’t logging into the platform itself.
The Solution: “Vibe Coding” a Custom Dashboard on the RunSignup API
Andy didn’t hire a developer or file a feature request. Instead, he turned to AI coding tools — Cursor and ChatGPT — and built the app himself. By clearly describing the problem and feeding the AI real data structures, he was able to work with the RunSignup API without needing deep coding knowledge himself.
The build process was iterative and fast: Andy tested with dummy volunteer records to figure out the correct API path and data fields. Refining as he went. What might have taken a traditional development cycle weeks to scope and build came together in a fraction of the time.
What the app does
- Pulls live data from RunSignup and displays a card for each volunteer area, showing the time frame, current signup count, and the minimum/maximum targets set up in RunSignup.
- Color-codes each card by staffing level — red when an area is below its minimum, yellow or orange when it’s sub-optimal, and green when it’s fully staffed.
- Lets a coordinator click into any card to see individual volunteer details, including phone number and live check-in status.
- Syncs check-in status from RunSignup’s RaceDay CheckIn App with roughly a 30-second delay — a limitation Andy considers entirely manageable given the payoff.
How it worked on race day
On race morning, the coordinator used the dashboard purely as monitoring and decision-support tool — watching staffing levels shift in real time and verbally directing team members to move between assignments as gaps opened up. The app is capable of reassigning volunteers for rebalancing, though those changes would be display-only in the app and wouldn’t actually be pushed to RunSignup. The team chose to keep that decision in human hands and use the tool for visibility rather than automation.
The Impact
The dashboard gave the Columbus 10K leadership something they didn’t have before: a live, plain-English read on staffing health across every volunteer area, without anyone needing to open RunSignup itself. Instead of reacting to no-shows after the fact, leadership could see a red or yellow card and reallocate help before a station fell behind. And because the tool was built directly on RunSignup’s existing volunteer and check-in data, there was no duplicate data entry and no second system to keep in sync.
What’s Next
Andy is already thinking about the next iteration. Planned improvements include:
- Tracking the number of volunteers actually expected to show up on race day, rather than just the initial signup minimums, for a more realistic picture of staffing needs.
- Making the architecture scalable enough to support multiple events, not just the Columbus 10K.
- Adding secure login protocols as the tool moves beyond a single internal use case.
- Offering his tool to other organizations – reach out to him for more information.
- Exploring how far this approach can extend across the Columbus Running Company’s broader event slate — including planning already underway!
Get in Touch
Want to learn more about the app Andy created? Get in touch with Andy by email him at aharris@columbusrunning.com.
Learn More
Want to build something similar for your own event? These Runsigup resources cover the same tools Andy used: