Built By Runners For Runners
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.
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.
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.
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.
There are a number of display options in your race dashboard:
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:
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:
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.
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:
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.
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.
Thanks to our new RunSignUp Analytics, we can now show the number of sponsor logo views on a per sponsor basis. This now includes counting the sponsor watermarks on photo views.
In this example, Lacas is the sponsor with their watermark on the photos, and the number of views is much greater:
Note the View count began on April 12, 2017, and the photo count started this morning, on April 14, 2017.
The first step of RunSignUp Analytics has been released into production. As the name implies, this is similar to Google Analytics for races using the RunSignUp platform. Over time it will collect and process all of the web interactions that your participants have with your race – and correlate it with the things that are important to races. This means not just page views, but knowing what actions, like emails or Facebook ads, resulted in participants signing up. This core infrastructure is the Analytics Engine that will drive our high level Promotion Dashboard we will be rolling out later this year.
The first application of RunSignUp Analytics is to show Sponsor Views – meaning how many times a sponsor’s logo has been viewed. This data started to be collected yesterday, April 12, 2017. Next week it will also include the watermark logo on photos. The data is shown on the Sponsor Management Dashboard:
The RunSignUp Analytics Engine is a new part of our infrastructure. It is built on the latest scalable technology from Amazon AWS. We use their API Gateway to collect the web events sent from our servers or from browsers accessing our servers. That gateway has scalable Lambda processes running to take the information and batch it thru Kenisis Firehose. More Lambdas then process the information and store it in our scalable RunSignUp Analytics Database for use with various RunSignUp applications that will be built.
In this example, each time a webpage is hit by someone, we send a packet of information to the API Gateway that contains all of the Sponsor Logos that are on that page. We will be adding more asset types and more information over time, but this initial test shows the basic functionality. This will process over 10 Million sponsor logo views (races have over 30,000 sponsor logos loaded into RunSignUp for their races). Over time, we expect to collect over a Billion interactions per year.
Stay tuned for many further announcements and development on the RunSignUp Analytics platform this year. It is one of our two strategic projects (the other is Race Day Scoring) that will bring a whole new level of innovation to the endurance industry.
