Darren Delivers in Week 1 – Improved Sponsor Display in Footer

Darren joined us our User Experience team on Monday, and he released an improvement on Thursday!  While it was a simple change, he got thru the gauntlet of setting up his development environment, Github access, understanding how we do branches and merges, our page structure, our CSS structures, how we do code reviews and process changes.  Pretty good!

The new change helped improve how sponsor logos are displayed if located on the footer. The changes included the sizing, creating common layouts, centering, and how links are displayed with subtle image fades. It looks slick!

Darren will be delivering a lot more beautiful and powerful user experiences in the years to come!

2017 RunSignUp Symposium Presentation Videos

We’ve been busy editing and collating the videos from this year’s RunSignUp Symposium…and while the collection is not yet complete, we wanted to share the ones that are ready!

You can find links for all completed presentation videos here: http://resources.runsignup.com/2017symposiumpresentations/

Links for individual presentations are below.

Customer/Industry Presentations

Supercharging your Sponsor Program, with Peter Abraham

Driving Registrations with Referrals and Social Media Marketing, with Erik Young

Using your Database to Enhance the Experience for Runners and Race Directors, with Healthy Kids Running Series

Motivating and Engaging Fundraisers, with Kathy Wise

Delivering a Race that is Flexible and Enjoyable for Runners, with Cherie Santiago

Course Creation, with Ted Metellus

Equipment Management & Logistics, with Ryan Griessmeyer

Working with Races as a Third Party, with Crisp McDonald

RunSignUp Tutorials & Presentations

RunSignUp Intro and Overview, with Bob Bickel

Quick Hits for Advanced Users, with Bryan Jenkins

RunSignUp 101, with Lauren Bergren & Herman Kinard

Stay tuned for more videos!

Sponsor Report By Year

We have added the capability to view the sponsor report by year. This is useful to separate each year of data for your race. Simply select a year in the upper right corner. We have also added a Sponsor Views column:

Note the difference in views for the first sponsor, Lacas Coffee of 62,736 Views vs. 28,502 for the other sponsors. This was due to posting about 500 photos and having the Lacas logo on those photos.

 

RunSignUp Completes Sponsor Platform with Sponsor Offers

Moorestown, NJ – RunSignup has released the final stage of their Sponsor Platform, a system that makes it easy for race directors to manage and activate the critical revenue source for their event. The RunSignUp Sponsor Platform provides tools to organize and communicate with sponsors and creates new ways for races to demonstrate value to their sponsors through increased visibility options and the tracking of impressions across mediums. The latest piece of the platform, Sponsor Offers, makes the role of sponsor more dynamic, allowing for sponsors to reach runners with deals and coupons that will draw them in as customers.

The Sponsor Platform is free to all RunSignUp customers, and can be found on each Race Director’s dashboard. The platform accomplishes two goals: race director management of sponsors, and increasing the visibility and activation of sponsors.

Sponsor Management tools enable a race director to track sponsor statuses, payments, and communications easily from year-to-year.

• Customizable Sponsor Levels, with options to cap the numbers at each level
• Editable Sponsor information for the RunSignUp race website with HTML editing capability
• Sponsor invitations allowing sponsors to edit and manage the look and text of their sponsor space on the RunSignUp race website
• Easy Renewals from year to year
• Sponsor reports to see sponsor level, contact info, commitment, payment status, and visibility on the website at a single glance
• Invoicing and payment tracking for each sponsor

Sponsor Visibility and Activation tools help a race to increase the value of a sponsorship through more views and engagement, and provide the reporting to demonstrate that value to their sponsors.

• Broad dissemination options, with opportunities for sponsors to be seen on the race website, in confirmation & marketing emails, in pre-race Sponsor Offers email, as photo watermark, in TXT results notifications, on RaceJoy banners, and with RaceJoy Progress alerts.
• Sponsor Analytics: a running total of the number of views each sponsor logo has gotten via all the channels it is displayed on.
• Sponsor Offers, the latest release designed to drive engagement between participants and sponsors. Sponsor Offers allow a sponsor to provide runners with a specific discount or deal and prompts runners to view the deal with a clear call to action right on the race website.
• Automated Sponsor Offer Emails allow the race director to send an automated pre-race email that includes all the available Sponsor Offers (and other sponsors), providing value to both sponsors and runners and increasing the likelihood of a sponsor turning a participant into a customer.

More information about the new Sponsor Offers can be found here: https://runsignup.wordpress.com/2017/05/03/sponsor-offers-and-sponsor-promotion/

About RunSignUp

RunSignUp is the leading innovator of online tools for race registration, race day solutions, and running clubs. Services include RunSignUp for registration, fundraising, and race promotion, RunSignUp Go for RaceDay, RD Go for Timers, RunSignUp Clubs to enable membership management, and RaceJoy for mobile experiences. More than 10,000 race directors, timers, running club officers and running stores use these services today, including leading organizations like the Boilermaker Road Race, Crim Festival of Races, Pittsburgh Three Rivers Marathon, Inc., Fifth Third River Bank Run, Komen Race for the Cure Philadelphia, Mercedes Marathon, Kentucky Derby Festival, Leone Timing, KC Running Company, Compuscore Timing, Knoxville Track Club, Pikes Peak Road Runners, Gulf Coast Runners, Columbus Running Company, Playmakers Running Store and many more. In 2016, over 14,000 races used the system to register more than 4.2 million participants. Services are free except for processing fees when conducting monetary transactions such as race registration or club membership renewal. RunSignUp is founded by runners for runners, using technical capabilities to bring the power of cloud computing to benefit the running community. For more information, visit www.RunSignUp.com.

Sponsor Display Settings

There are a number of display options in your race dashboard:

• Where sponsor logos appear on your race website
• Showing or hiding a Sponsor custom section on your main race info webpage
• Displaying sponsor levels or not
• Changing the word “Sponsor” to something else like “Supporter”
• Changing the word “Offer” to something like “gift”
• Link to sponsor watermark on photos
• Link to sponsor  in results notifications
• Link to add sponsor information to RaceJoy
• Link to automated Sponsor Offer email pre-race

Sponsor Offers and Sponsor Promotion

We have completed our free Sponsor Management roll out with Sponsor Offers and Promotion. Sponsor offers provide a way for sponsors to create activation mechanisms beyond a simple logo. This is highlighted on the Sponsor page of the race website:

And allows a sponsor to customize their own unique offer with logo, custom image and text:

EMail Offers

In addition to appearing on the website (or widgets on a race’s own website), offers can be automatically sent to participants before and/or after the race. This gives participants something extra and provides your sponsors a way to engage with them. Here is an example email:

Offer Creation

Sponsors can create their own offers, or the race director can via an offer creation/edit page accessed from the Manage Sponsors page:

Then the offer is created with a few simple fields and an image upload. Note we automatically resize the image to the screen width as seen above in the email and sponsor page examples.

Email Sponsor Offers

We have added a new Automated Email for Sponsors. This makes it simple to send an email to all participants automatically before and/or after the race. By default, we create an email for you that includes all of the sponsor offers and sponsors (even if they do not have an offer) that will go out 3 days before your race. You can create additional automatic emails before and/or after the race (but try not to be too pushy). This is done in the automated email section:

The default email is based on your email template. We have added a new email tag for sponsors and their offers: %RACE_SPONSORS_AND_OFFERS%:

We have added two new email tags that you can also use for your own ad hoc emails or create your own scheduled emails:

Summary

This final piece completes the most advanced sponsor management, promotion and activation platform available for races – and it is all free.  Invite sponsors, keep track of their status in terms of commitments, invoice them and manage payments, provide a robust variety of visibility options including race websites, emails, offers, photo watermarks, TXT results, RaceJoy banner ads, RaceJoy Progress Alerts, and RaceJoy Sponsor Spots. Give Sponsor access to managing their own content, as well as report on their visibility with Sponsor Analytics.

Sponsor Analytics

We released RunSignUp Analytics for Sponsor only 12 days ago. This gives sponsors a view on how many times their logo has been displayed on a page on the race website. For example, the 9/11 Memorial & Museum Run/Walk this past weekend shows the total number of page views for their sponsors (which are displayed on most pages).

Since the release 12 days ago a total of 7,796,000 sponsor logo views have been recorded. Many races, like the 9/11 Memorial, have multiple sponsors and each of them gets a count for a single page view. About half of the races on RunSignUp have Sponsor Logos on their race websites.

We will report more analytics as we continue to expand the platform. We hope this helps expand race’s ability to understand how to better promote their races, and use the information to solidify relationships with key sponsors.