New Wizard Coming…

We are hoping to roll out whole new way of creating a editing races in RunSignUp next week.  The original Race Creation Wizard we developed over 3 years ago will get a total make-over!

It will look very similar to the new Club Creation Wizard, which has gotten rave reviews. It has a clean, modern design.  It is easier to use.  It is fully Mobile Ready – meaning you will be able to make edits to your race from your smartphone!  Need to change the price of your race because of an emergency call you got a dinner – just use your smartphone, login and make the change.

Changes are saved on each and every page – no more having to remember to go to step 5 and save.  You will be able to make edits across events easily as well.

Best of all, it works with all of your existing races.  You will just have a beautiful new interface to do it from!

Resend Confirmation Emails

Runners have been able to confirm their registrations on RunSignUp for a long time.  But we have just added the capability for a runner or a race director to resend a confirmation email.

Runners can do this from their Profile Page – clicking on their registered races and the race they are signed up for.  Race Directors can do this form the Participant Management page.

How long before a race do people register?

We just ran a report for the races that use RunSignUp over the past two years.  Here are the results:

26.9 % 1 week in advance
16.1 % 2 weeks in advance
20.7 % 1 month in advance
35.3 % 6 months in advance
0.9 % % 12 months in advance

These numbers are skewed a bit.  Larger races that sell out will lead some weight to the 6 months in advance.  The numbers for smaller races are more proportional to the 1 month and less numbers.

Sharing Access to Your Race

As a race director, you have a lot of people that you need to share information with.  And the solution is NOT to give your username and password to everyone!

RunSignUp provides a simple “Information Sharing” section for your race.  You add any number of people to several different types of access:

• Edit Participants
  
• Full Control, with no access to Financials
• Manage Store Orders
• Upload Results
• Additional Race Directors
• Timer Access

 

 

Multiple Charity Donations

One of the races that uses RunSignUp for registration and donations supports 7 different charities.  They wanted to give runners the ability to donation some money to more than one charity at a time.  We thought that was a good idea and added it!

(Also note the nice little rotating graphics of the different charities on the page.)

Do you have any good ideas for us that would make life better for you and others?  let us know!  info@runsignup.com.

Coupon Code Upgrade

We have upgraded the Coupon Code capabilities!  As usual, it is all now mobile friendly with the responsive design.  The design is a bit simpler for people to understand and set up coupons.

The big new feature is better reporting.  You can now see a summary of how many coupons of each type have been used in this nice new report.  Note you can also quickly download into Excel for further analysis!

Responsive Design – The Best Method for Mobile Support

With 37% of RunSignUp users coming from a Mobile device, the need for races to have a great experience for mobile users has become imperative.

We have done device detection for about the past two years and will give a mobile interface to people coming from a mobile device.  This has been very popular with race directors and runners.  We are in the process of revamping this capability to come out with our Mobile V2.0 capability.  All of the Running Club User Interface is done in this fashion already.  And all of the runner and race director User Interface will morph over to this in the next month or two.  This means even race directors will be able to check participant reports and make changes to their race from any tablet or smartphone.

Responsive Design has emerged as the best way for websites to support all of the mobile devices.  Instead of having to detect the device and develop a separate template (right now RunSignUp on a mobile phone looks a lot different from RunSignUp on a computer).  There is no need to develop an iPhone and Android App or make people install them.  They simply fire up their web browser, hit your site and it looks beautiful!

The video below shows how responsive design works.  We also show you a website for the Annapolis Half Marathon.  We worked with them to produce a responsive design website to give their runners a wonderful experience.