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.
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..
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..
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..
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..
The Latest Blogs for Race Directors
Prevent Data Loss, and Recover From it More Easily With the Latest Version of RaceDay CheckIn
RaceDay Checkin is one of our most popular products. However, there are instances where races discover that one or more of their devices failed to sync changes to RunSignup. If this is not caught in a timely manner, it can make a…
Read MoreRaceDay Primer for Race Directors
Today, technology advancements now means any sized race can offer many of the same race day features that even the largest races, like the NYC Marathon, offers. All races can now offer real time tracking, split alerts based on timing equipment on the course, officially scored finish times within seconds of participants’ finishing, txt notifications, online photos, and more. In addition, newer technology innovations like dynamic bib assignment are bring a host of advantages such as reduced cost, greater efficiencies, and more revenue by allowing registration to remain open even after the gun goes off. But much of this is kind of a mystery to race directors, and this blog aims to help race directors understand all that is available to them so that they can deliver the quality of a big race experience regardless of the event size and budget.
Read MoreRaceInsure is Here to Help Protect Race Directors
This is a partner post in conjunction with RaceInsure, a new insurance option by race director and insurance professional Scott Sutter. How often do you think race directors read the fine print of their race insurance policy? With the juggling act that…
Read More2024 RunSignup Product Roadmap
One of our Year End Wrap-up Blogs. Others include 2023 Year in Review, 2023 RunSignup Product Recap, 2023 GiveSignup Product Recap, 2023 TicketSignup Product Recap, 2023 Infrastructure Report, 2024 Company Strategy, 2024 RunSignup Roadmap, 2024 GiveSignup Roadmap, 2024 TicketSignup Roadmap. We continue on our path to roll out “Next Gen”…
Read MoreDrumstick Dash 13K RaceDay CheckIns with Ease
The Wheeler Mission Drumstick Dash held its 21st event in Indianapolis, Indiana and is known for their Thanksgiving morning event where participants ‘move your feet so others can eat!®’ This year the event used RunSignup’s RaceDay CheckIn app to efficiently process a total of 13,094 participants (12,251 the day before race day and another 843 participants on Thanksgiving race day). Event organizers made full use of technology to deliver a streamlined experience for their participants, including dynamic bib assignments, QR code scanning, RaceDay CheckIn app, and on-site label printing.
Read MoreHow Do Runners Find Races?
It’s the biggest question for any race director: how do runners find my event? Some technology platforms like Eventbrite try to pitch themselves as event marketplaces that people come to seek out events. In reality, runners don’t need another marketplace for events….
Read MoreRaceDay and On Site Registration: Maximize Registration
Maximize registrations by leaving online registration open until the gun goes off. RunSignup’s on site registration is perfect for a pre-race expo, packet pickup, or anywhere people need to sign up in person or on race day.
Provide efficient paperless race day registration with streamlined registration process while automatically syncing new registration data with the RaceDay CheckIn app and timer scoring software like RaceDay Scoring.
Read More2023 Midyear Trends Update
We release an annual RaceTrends Report each winter to provide a thorough assessment of the state of the endurance and fundraising events industry. Today, we have a brief update looking at midyear data to help event organizers better understand the current state of the…
Read MoreRace Emergency Preparedness for Wildfires
If you’re on the US East Coast, you may be facing health advisories related to Canadian wildfires. But even if you’re not currently impacted by air quality concerns, an emergency preparedness plan can help you deal with whatever issues may arise. We…
Read MoreTamalpa Headlands 50k presented by UltraRunning Magazine
Bringing Back a Legendary Course Guy Palmer, Greg Naaco, Peter Frank, Tom Lyons, and other Tamalpa Runners designed the 1998 Tamalpa Headlands 50k that started at Rodeo Beach. Under the stewardship of former Race Directors Diana and Tim Fitzpatrick, the race start…
Read MoreNew Suggested Features in Race Creation Wizard
There are hundreds (ok, thousands) of features in RunSignup for races to take advantage of. However, there are four key features that almost every race could take advantage of to increase revenue. And they are super easy to enable with default settings,…
Read MoreGuest Post: Runners for Public Lands Vision For More Inclusive Races and Events
This is a guest post from Runners for Public Lands. Runners for Public Lands is eager to launch the Race Director Resource Hub to assist event organizers in implementing a sense of belonging, natural history, and environmental stewardship at their events. This…
Read More