Technology for Race Directors…
RunSignup makes registration easy, sure. But we’re also here with free technology to help you manage your event business and race operations from conception to execution.
Registration
Make it simple for participants to register in minutes with a dynamic, mobile-friendly, and customizable registration platform.
Marketing Tools
Take advantage of free marketing tools including email and websites as well as built-in referral programs, incentive-base pricing setups, and social sharing settings.
Fundraising
Raise more for your nonprofit, charity partner, or multiple charity partners with integrated donations and fundraising tools.
RaceDay
Streamline your RaceDay operations with flexible bib assignment, a speedy CheckIn App and simple on-site registration options.
Need a Timer?
Browse our Timer Search for a Timer near you.
Built for Endurance Events
Runs & Races
Walks
Stair Climbs
Gravel Grinders
Obstacle Course Events
Paddle Events
Learn By Watching?
If you’re more into YouTube than blogs, we have some resources just for you. Dive into our race director’s video library for everything from quick “Did You Knows” to in-depth feature demos.
Registration Features for Race Directors
Custom Information Collection
Collect all the data you need (and none that you don’t).
- Multi-format question options, including multiple choice, radio button, time entry, essay, and more
- Custom question logic to ask some questions based on previous answers
- Quick-fill standard questions for emergency information and text notification sign ups
- Ability to ask for responses from each registrant
- Question response reporting
Participant Management
Ease customer service and keep participants coming back with flexible options for participant management.
- Enable self-serve options for participant management
- Allow participants to transfer to another race or event, join a team, and manage their giveaways, add-ons, and question responses (for free or for a fee)
- Offer bib exchanges with or without automated refunds
- Make it easy to manage participant changes that apply to many people with bulk participant management features for refunds, transfers, and deferrals
Merchandise Sales
Increase revenue and build your brand with merch for your event.
- Offer giveaways (like t-shirts) with option selection (like size) and integrated inventory management and a giveaway estimator tool
- Sell upgrades and premium merch through add-on items suggested in registration
- Create a store for merchandise you want to sell during and outside of registration
Volunteer Platform
Register and manage volunteers directly from your race dashboard.
- Organize your volunteer needs with individual volunteer tasks, timeslots, and groupings of tasks into categories
- Optimize your assignments with minimum and maximum numbers of volunteers needed
- Add custom questions with information and waivers from your volunteers
- Easily communicate through free email and automated volunteer lists (and sub-lists by task or category)
- Assign a volunteer coordinator and/or task coordinators to provide limited access to your lead volunteers
More Registration Features..
Participant
Insurance
Give participants peace of mind with optional participant insurance that they can purchase to protect against an unexpected need to withdraw. No emails on your part – and your race actually earns revenue from the insurance.
Instant Reporting
Access instant participant reports with filtering and search capabilities, then dive in deeper with comprehensive financial reporting, donation and fundraising reports, team reports, and more. Your data is always your data – and it’s always easy to parse.
Mobile Responsive
More than 70% of all race website views and 50% of all race transactions now take place on a phone. Every part of the online experience of RunSignup, from the race website to the registration pathway to adding a donation is designed to be mobile responsive.
Non-Binary Support
Offer more inclusive events with the optional ability to support a non-binary gender option in both runner profiles and their registration for your event. Runners can also find your event more easily by filtering the race search to find races with non-binary support enabled.
Secure Access Sharing
Make it simple for your race team to access and manage your race in parallel with flexible, secure, access settings that allow you to share the full dashboard or limited dashboard screens with everyone who needs access.
Marketing Features for Race Directors
Free Website
Every race comes with it’s own free race website that can be branded, customized, and formatted to match your event (no coding necessary)
- Brand your website with your logo (not ours), custom color scheme, and event images
- Bring your own domain or subdomain (SSL Certificate Included)
- Add unlimited content and pages and organize your site through menus and submenus
- Create a beautiful cover page with dynamic data elements that automatically sync with your race date
- Personalize your site with photos, videos, and even playlist
Free Email
Communicate with participants (and those you hope will be participants) with email integrated into your event.
- Drag & drop Email Builder to create professional and beautiful layouts
- Automatically match the brand of your race website or further customize your email templates
- Access default email lists of current and previous participants, volunteers, donors, and more
- Upload unlimited emails and send unlimited emails (it’s still free)
- Personalize your emails with dynamic data replacement tags
Referral Programs
Automate your referral program and incentivize participants to become ambassadors for your event. When enabled, 7% of all registrations come from referrals!
- Reward participants who refer their friends by offering an (automatic) refund when they meet a pre-determined number of referrals
- Activate your super-supporters with swag rewards that collect swag details like shirt size from a referrer once they earn the swag rewards
- Stack your rewards to keep your best referrers working for you
RaceInsights Analytics
All the data you need to optimize your marketing spend, right at your fingertips.
- Track the source of every click, registration, donation, and transaction on your race website
- Create custom source tracking codes to evaluate the success of individual marketing campaigns
- Quick demographic and geographic reports reveal your participant profile
- View year-over-year comparisons to monitor changes in registration patterns
More Marketing Features..
Coupon Codes
Add individual or bulk coupon codes with flexible parameters for usage and time limitations. Or, share a unique link that automatically adds the coupon code.
Pricing Strategies
Turn your pricing into the ultimate call to action with a curated strategy of age or membership discounts, loyalty programs, or bulk pricing setups.
Social Media
Customize your social sharing messages and images, access automated reports to build custom audiences, and add conversion codes and pixels to track the success of social advertising.
Groups and Teams
Capitalize on the social nature of running with team options for all participants, whether it’s competitive or purely social. 30% of participants will join a team when it’s an option!
RaceDay Features for Race Directors
On-Site Registration
Simplify on-site registration kiosks with the specialty settings of on-site registration.
- Go paperless with an easy on-site registration process
- Allow card and/or cash payments for your race day registrations
- Immediately sync race day registrations with the RaceDay CheckIn App and RaceDay Scoring
- Auto-logout on-site registrants to allow the next participant to register
RaceDay CheckIn App
Make lines a relic of the past with the super-speedy RaceDay CheckIn App.
- Check in volunteers in seconds with a quick QR scan or search
- Assign bib numbers in advance or directly from the app
- Connect to a label printer for personalized labels printed on-site
- Manage check-in for both participants and volunteers
RaceJoy Tracking App
Activate spectators with real-time runner tracking, available through Certified Timers.
- Hype up participants through custom cheer sending
- Keep runners on track with off-course alerts and SOS alerts
- Track your participants throughout the race with your own tracking dashboard
- Engage sponsors with in-app ads and custom audio clips
Photo Platform
Extend race day and bring participants back to your website with free RaceDay Photos.
- Upload unlimited photos from race day, organized into albums
- Allow participants to contribute their own photos from race day
- Auto-tag participants based on their bibs
- Keep participants talking about their event with easy sharing options
More RaceDay Features..
RaceDay Corrals
Make it simple for participants to register in minutes with a dynamic, mobile-friendly, and customizable registration platform.
TXT & Email Notifications
Take advantage of free m marketing tools including email and websites as well as built-in referral programs, incentive-base pricing setups, and
RaceDay Results
Raise more for your nonprofit, charity partner, or multiple charity partners with integrated donations and fundraising tools.
Bib Assignment
Select the right bib assignment option for your event, whether it’s to assign at registration, by upload, or dynamically at check-in.
Fundraising Features for Race Directors
Integrated Donations
Encourage giving with a soft donation ask build directly into the registration path.
- Customize your donation levels to highlight the impact of every donation and increase the average donation amount
- Add manual donations one at a time or via CSV upload
- Give donors the option to cover their processing fee to make their donation go even further
- Enable a simple checkbox prompt at checkout to capture additional donations
Individual Fundraisers
Engage your participants as fundraisers with built-in tools to help them succeed.
- Each fundraiser has an automatically created fundraiser page with your branding and their own customization options to add messaging and images
- Empower fundraisers to raise more with an integration with Facebook Fundraisers that syncs donation data from both platforms
- Add offline donations to a fundraiser page (it’s free)
Team Fundraisers
Bring people together to raise more for your cause with team fundraiser options.
- Flexible options to join or create a team, with all individual fundraising amounts rolled up to the team total
- Team fundraising pages (managed by the captain) in addition to individual fundraisers
- Allow for one or multiple captains for each team
Fundraising Gamification
Make fundraising fun with friendly competition and engaging rewards.
- Highlight and thank your top supporters with fundraiser leaderboards
- Set milestones for fundraising goals and add default or custom badges that your fundraisers can collect in their own digital trophy cases
- Offer refund rewards for fundraisers that reach a specific threshold of fundraising dollars
More Fundraising Features..
Facebook Fundraising
Help your fundraisers to succeed and improve their interaction with your cause by enabling the free RunSignup – Facebook Fundraiser integration.
Multiple Charities
Support one or multiple charities within a single race, with options to pay the charity directly as donations are made.
Fundraising Minimums
Focus on fundraising with minimum fundraising commitments – and opt to waive the fee when the minimum is met (or not).
Fundraiser Email
Guide fundraisers to reach out with an integrated email tool for your fundraisers, including templates for requests, thank you’s, and recruitment.
The Latest Blogs for Race Directors
Women Step Up. Women Show Up. Women Run!
As we approach Mother’s Day, we’re also nearing race day for a number of Women’s Runs around the country. First started as a way to prove that women can run, Women’s Runs may seem redundant in 2025. After all, women make up…
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AI Will Become Third Largest Marketplace after Google and Meta
An increasing number of people are adopting an AI Chatbot like ChatGPT as their new way of searching for answers. While Google search and Meta’s Facebook and Instagram still dominate as marketplaces to find events, AI is growing rapidly. Here is the…
Read More
Fee Transparency Laws For All States Effective 5/12/2025: Audience Based Events
Update 5/6/2025: A new FTC national rule makes fee transparency and all-in pricing a requirement for audience-based events nationally. Since races on RunSignup are typically participation-based, fee transparency is automatically enabled only in the seven states with broader statewide laws (California, Colorado,…
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Blackbeard’s Revenge 100 Ultra & Relay
Blackbeard’s Revenge 100, a “road race as bold and untamed as the pirate it’s named for”, was introduced by Trivium Racing in 2019 to fill a gap left by the cessation of another long-standing 100-miler. While the second running of the race…
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Race Directing 101: How to Plan, Promote, and Grow Your Race
Becoming a new race director is an exciting and rewarding challenge. Whether you’re launching a 5K to support a local cause or managing a full marathon, organizing a successful even takes planning, organization, and the right tools. But don’t worry – getting…
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Have Fee Transparency Laws Impacted Registrations?
Fee transparency laws have been enacted in several states, and a Federal Law is working it’s way through the system. While it’s early to draw any strong conclusions about the impact of the pricing changes on ticket sales, wanted to take a…
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Brooksee Timing Downsides
Brooksee has been aggressively promoting their Laurel Timing technology. The reality is that races may want to consider the several downsides to their approach. “At the finish line, Laurel by Brooksee delivered a 99.95% read rate, outperforming a leading legacy timing system…
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2024 RaceTrends “Instant Podcast” (and Using Information Summaries as a Race Director)
After we released the 2024 RaceTrends Report yesterday, VP of Development Bruce Kratz shared a quick and easy way to digest a summary of the information: an AI podcast! To get this podcast, Bruce used Notebook LM’s Podcast feature to have AI…
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Medical Tent Check-Ins and Outs
For mid-size and large events, RunSignup’s RaceDay CheckIn app streamlines the medical care process on race day. It offers an efficient, centralized solution for tracking medical tent activity, accessing participant data, and retrieving emergency contact information. Efficient Medical Tent Management The RaceDay…
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Founder’s Corner – Competitive Bandits
A couple of months ago we wrote a blog about why Free events are Free on RunSignup. We also wrote about some of our philosophy around why we offer so many free features and tools like Free Email, Free Websites, Free Volunteer…
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2024 Turkey Trots Break Records (Again)
The biggest US running day of the year impressed in 2024, with 1,109,909 people participating in 936 races across the country and raising more than $3.6 million dollars for charities. Those record-shattering numbers represent an increase of 21% – more than 189,000…
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Scary, Spooky, Silly: Halloween Events In 2024!
Happy (day-after) Halloween! There’s something special about holidays that brings out the most creative and fun events, and we’re here to highlight a few of our favorite Halloween events. From traditional races with costume contests to pumpkin-themed events to terrifying Halloween haunts,…
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