Race Trends 2024

RunSignup’s annual RaceTrends report is the closest thing we get in the endurance events industry to a market-wide survey of what is happening in events and event participation. And the latest RaceTrends report for 2024 is out, shedding a unique light into the long-term trends taking shape in the race management industry.

So, how are we doing? Is the COVID-era hangover well and truly behind us? What do the numbers say for current and future participation growth in endurance events? And are the bullish pricing trends we saw in 2023 still holding up in 2024?

With me today to discuss all this and more is RunSignup’s Director of Marketing, and person responsible for this very important piece of research, Johanna Goode. And with Johanna’s help we’ll be making sense of the numbers, diving deep into some of the most important factors driving industry trends, and thinking through some of the implications of these findings for the future of endurance events.

In this episode:

• On the right track: strong growth in participation carries through to 2024
• Repeat participation across different event distances
• What is holding back growth in larger events? 
• Understanding regional differences in event participation growth
• Promoting locally: reaching out to local running clubs, other events and timers
• Using referral rewards to grow your race
• Are events getting better at attracting younger runners?
• Registration patterns: are runners really procrastinating in signing up?
• The importance of keeping registrations open as long as possible.
• Year-on-year entry fee changes across different event distances
• Keeping race costs down through optional swag
• Could introducing more price increases lead to more registrations?
• Mobile registrations: using Apple Pay vs storing credit card details
• Price transparency laws: what they are, and how they will affect the presentation of registration prices for your race
• The decline of social media traffic to race websites

You can download the full 2024 RaceTrends report for free: https://runsignup.com/trends

Many thanks to our podcast sponsors, RunSignup and Brooksee, for supporting our efforts to provide great, free content to the race director community:

RunSignup are the leading all-in-one technology solution for endurance and fundraising events. More than 28,000 events use RunSignup's free and integrated solution to save time, grow their events, and raise more. Find out more at https://runsignup.com/.

Brooksee are the timing technology industry-leader, bringing affordable real-time tracking and timing checkpoints to races with their patented iPhone-sized micro checkpoints. Find out more and get 50% off your timing for your next event at https://www.brooksee.com/headstart.

You can find more resources on anything and everything related to race directing on our website RaceDirectorsHQ.com.

You can also share your questions about liability waivers or anything else in our Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/racedirectorshq/ 

Transcript

Panos: 0:07

Hi! Welcome to Head Start, the podcast for race directors and the business of putting on races. RunSignup's annual RaceTrends report is the closest thing we get in the endurance events industry to a market-wide survey of what is happening in events and event participation. And the latest RaceTrends report for 2024 is out, shedding a unique light into the long-term trends taking shape in the race management industry. So, how are we doing? Is the COVID-era hangover well and truly behind us? What do the numbers say for current and future participation growth in endurance events? And are the bullish pricing trends we saw in 2023 still holding up in 2024? With me today to discuss all this and more is RunSignup's Director of Marketing, and person responsible for this very important piece of research, Johanna Goode. And with Johanna's help, we'll be making sense of the numbers, diving deep into some of the most important factors driving industry trends, and thinking through some of the implications of these findings for the future of endurance events. Now, as with RaceTrends report we've looked at in the past in the podcast, we'll only have time to go through the most important highlights from the report, so if you'd like to get your hands on the full set of findings, head over to runsignup.com/trends where you'll be able to find and download your free report copy. Besides the great work RunSignup does for the industry with free research like this, they also help support this podcast, and of course, that means not just this episode, but all the free content coming out of our podcast feed. So a big thank you to our friends at RunSignup for that. And also a big thank you to our other awesome podcast sponsor, Brooksee, the timing technology industry-leader, bringing affordable, real-time tracking and timing checkpoints to races with their patented micro checkpoints. Two great companies we'll be hearing a bit more from a little later in the podcast. But, now, let's dive into the numbers and hear how the industry has been doing with RunSignup's Johanna. Goode. Johanna, welcome back to the podcast!

Johanna: 2:24

Hey, Panos, it's nice to see you again.

Panos: 2:26

How are you?

Johanna: 2:27

I'm doing pretty well here in Philadelphia. We just won the Super Bowl yesterday, so everything's going well.

Panos: 2:34

Oh, congratulations. That was the Eagles?

Johanna: 2:38

Yes, yes.

Panos: 2:39

Was it by a big margin?

Johanna: 2:41

Yeah, actually.

Panos: 2:42

We had some friends visiting over from the US, and I just sat at that side of the table with a guy who happens to be very much into sports - which most people in the US are - and he was telling me that, basically, between the Eagles and the Chiefs, it's been like back and forth for a few years.

Johanna: 3:01

A little bit. Yeah, we've had a pretty good rivalry.

Panos: 3:03

That's good. That's good. Well, congratulations on that, and congratulations also on RunSignup. I see you guys in the reported states that you're sort of up to almost 50% market share, but I also see all those new hire posts on LinkedIn and stuff. Looks like you guys are on a roll.

Johanna: 3:20

Yeah, we've had a good couple of years. I think we are excited about the kind of things that we have coming out and all the new events that we're working with.

Panos: 3:30

And is that still much of the energy going into RunSignup still? Because you have the other brands - the TicketSignup and GiveSignup and stuff. Obviously, you're pushing 50% so, at some point, it must get difficult to get higher market share.

Johanna: 3:44

Yeah, that's kind of the thinking is - that we know there is a limit to how far you can grow in endurance events because there's just a limit to how many endurance events there will eventually be. But the interesting thing is, like, having our other brands, the TicketSignup and GiveSignup actually helps us to improve RunSignup because it gives us a broader market that we can go into, which gives us some funding and some ability to build cool new tools like our website builder and our email marketing that will exist across all of those products. So what we're doing in tickets can actually help RunSignup customers as well.

Panos: 4:17

On the off chance we have some people listening in who may not know anything about RunSignup, which is quite unlikely but you never know, how would you describe-- because you guys have grown into, like, a full platform. How would you describe what you guys do for race directors and how you view your place, sort of, in the industry?

Johanna: 4:40

Yeah, I think, as a company, we think of ourselves as a bit of a technology nerd. We're really focused on specifically how technology can help races, and we look at that from kind of a whole life cycle of a race. So if you were to describe RunSignup to someone quickly, I would say, I work for a race registration company. And that's true, but we do all sorts of things from promotion tools to websites to RaceDay Scoring tools and all sorts of things that you can use throughout your race.

Panos: 5:13

And the race Trends Report-- how does that fit in with everything that you do?

Johanna: 5:18

Yeah. So the thing that's a little bit tough about the endurance industry is that there really isn't a single aggregator of all races and all data. It lives kind of across all these different registration platforms, results platforms. It can be hard to know what's really going on in the market. And back, I think, in 2016 I think was the first year we started doing this, we felt like we had, at that point, enough races to have enough data for it to give us some real insight into what was happening in the market, and we've continued to do that every year. As you noted, we're about 45% to 50% of market share in the US now. So it's a really meaningful number of events and number of participants that we can look at, and that lets us dive in and say, "How are races doing overall? What trends are we looking at? What things should be worried about or excited about for next year?" And provide a little bit of guidance to race directors out there.

Panos: 6:11

Just to clarify on that, the data that goes into the RaceTrends Report, which we're going to be going into, is data that comes from registrations on RunSignup. And on the one hand, RunSignup getting close to or even exceeding 50% of market share makes that data fairly representative, and the fact that it comes from one place-- I mean, I don't think there could be any other single company who could produce this kind of report with this level of detail because you guys have the highest market share in an industry that receives lots of data from participants and races and stuff. On the other hand, this is RunSignup data. And RunSignup, even at 50% of the market, may have some idiosyncrasies about it that may sway things or may introduce some risks of swaying things in some aspects. How do you correct or account for that in the report?

Johanna: 7:12

Really, I mean, it's just by calling out places where we know that our data may be different or may be impacted by certain things. So there's not necessarily any way that we can correct because we don't know the other company's data, but we can call out anywhere that we think this might be impacted by our event-- or, I'm sorry, by our technology specifically. The other thing we do for a lot of reports is to compare, specifically, events that were on our platform for two years in a row. So we can say, "Here are races that used us in 2023 and used us in 2024 and what happened to them" because that takes out things like, "We've increased market share. But it's not saying that all races have grown because we have grown." It's saying that these races specifically have grown.

Panos: 7:56

Yeah, exactly. And for a platform that keeps on growing and has grown through the years that the RaceTrend report has been published is a very important point, that basically, you're taking out the element of how RunSignup grows because, basically, you're saying, "Okay, these 1000 races were on RunSignup this year. They're also on RunSignup this year. They were there last year. How have these races that have always been on RunSignup done?" which basically corrects for some of that growth element. Speaking of numbers, before we go into the actual growth numbers and the stats and stuff, can you just then give us a little bit of a feel for how many races on RunSignup have gone into the report, data points, registration, maybe just like a rough idea of what we're talking about when we're thinking of 50% market share?

Johanna: 8:47

Yeah. So when we look at this, the baseline number that we pull from this year is about 85,000 race events, and that counts an event as a single distance. So it's a 5K, 10K, specifically there, that makes up about 30,000 race weekends where you have a group of those together in one event or in one race. For participants, we see about 10.8 million participants in 2024 and that includes paid registrations, imported registrations, kind of all sets of registrations that we have on the platform.

Panos: 9:19

Great. So going into 2024 then, which, correct me if I'm wrong, your sort of report years basically run December to December - like December to end of November kind of thing because you need some time to compile the data and stuff.

Johanna: 9:34

Good call out. Yes, we run it December 1 through November 30 because we want to have this out as early as possible in the following year.

Panos: 9:43

Okay, so last year, when we were doing this for 2023, I think 2022 was sort of, like, green suits and 2023 was like pretty positive stuff. How's the trend for 2024?

Johanna: 9:56

Yeah, 2024 was a really strong year. I think we weren't sure. We saw last year that we had kind of reached back to about pre pandemic levels. We were about 1% down from 2019 and so it looked like races had kind of done a more or less full recovery, and we weren't sure then what would happen from there, and I think the year was much stronger than we might have guessed. We had about 8% growth. Again, that's races who are using the platform both years. So on a per race basis, races grew about 8% from '23 to '24. And then we saw really low turn rates, low limits of races turning over. And so overall, I'd say it was a great year.

Panos: 10:38

Yeah. And I mean, I see that it's been a year of very positive kind of anecdotal vibes and sentiments all over the industry. I know you speak to many race directors and many in your team do. Does that reflect the feeling on the ground from race directors? Are they also feeling that things are getting better? Because sometimes numbers and feelings, they tend to deviate a little bit.

Johanna: 11:04

Yeah, I think there's always exceptions. But in general, I've heard really positive things from races this year as well. It's worth noting that the largest of races over 5,000 have still had the hardest time recovering, and so they may actually not be up to 2019 numbers yet. We've seen smaller races and mid-sized races come back a lot faster. So some of those races may still feel a little bit frustrated at where they are but, overall, we've heard really positive things from people in the industry as well.

Panos: 11:36

And when you say that participation is almost up to 2019 levels, I think you mentioned that we're 1% down.

Johanna: 11:43

We were 1% down last year. So we did not actually run the comparison this year to 2019 because we felt like last year was essentially saying we were at baseline if we were down 1%. So given that there was growth this year, we can say that was probably beyond 2019 levels.

Panos: 12:02

And that 2019 comparison, is that on the basis of same races that have been--

Johanna: 12:09

Yeah, that would have been races that were 2019 and 2024

Panos: 12:13

Okay, so my impressions in reading this year's report, which, by the way, I should say, has a few new, very interesting bits to it that we'll get into-- every year, it gets a little bit larger with a few more data, which is always helpful. My impression is that - pretty much continuation of what we had last year - it's getting clearer that some trends that had established themselves during the pandemic or some kind of like, glitches, they're slowly bleeding out of the system - the whole 18 to 29 thing, the age group scares that we had a few years ago turn repeat participation. So all these trends seem to be reversing back to sort of pre pandemic levels. Is that a first statement, you think?

Johanna: 13:01

Yeah, for the most part- we can get into details - I'd say age is still a little bit off, but we're getting there. Overall, I think things have more or less recovered and returned to kind of pre pandemic norms.

Panos: 13:17

And speaking of repeat participation, which I I noticed you guys put an emphasis on in the reports and also in your takeaway notes, how has that been faring in 2024?

Johanna: 13:30

Yeah. So I think this one always surprises people, and it's worth noting that, when we look at repeat participation, we're looking at different distances. And so if I ran the 5K this year and the next year I ran the 10K, that's actually not going to show me it's a repeat participant because I'm in two different distances. So if you have multiple distances, this number might be a little bit higher for your overall race. But even with that, I think races have an impression that a lot or a majority of their participants come back year to year because they see the same faces year to year. The numbers are actually pretty low. So about 17% of participants who ran a distance in a race in 2023 came back to do the same race in 2024. It's a little lower than we saw pre pandemic. I think there were some like 18%, 19% back in, like, 2017 2018. This is one that had fallen a little bit to begin with, but it's fairly close at this point, after really terrible numbers between all the virtual races. And just kind of the people who do virtual races and in person races aren't the same people. So, we saw really bad repeat participation for a couple of years there, and it's sort of reverted.

Panos: 14:36

And perhaps, not surprising in that, shorter races seem to have a stronger repeat participation than your marathon and your ultra marathon.

Johanna: 14:47

Yeah, it's around 19%, 20% for 5Ks and 10Ks and then a marathon is more, like, 12% which makes sense. There's more training involved. There's more commitment there than going out to do your neighborhood 5K.

Panos: 15:00

Do you think, actually, I was just-- I look at this data, year in, year out, and it's like watching a movie. Every time new stuff pops out in terms of things, and I was just thinking about the 5Ks, specifically about the 5Ks. Do you think that-- because the US has the peculiarity of things like a Turkey Trot, which is such a big thing in the US, do you think that might be skewing 5K repeat participation because you have events like the Turkey Trots which are like an annual tradition and like everyone goes, so that might be bumping repeat participation up, particularly?

Johanna: 15:37

Well, a little. Thanksgiving Day has continued to grow above and beyond the levels of growth in the industry. And yes, the majority of those - I forget the number I did actually at end of this year- have a 5K. So that might be a little bit. I think this 5Ks in particular-- there's just so many of them. That'd be hard for any one thing to really contribute a ton, but they do tend to be kind of the local races that people are most likely to do. If people are traveling doing big events, they're often going to be longer distances, but the ones kind of around the corner are usually going to be a 5K.

Panos: 16:15

I didn't realize that Turkey trots have a particularly strong growth trajectory. Do you have any views as to why that might be?

Johanna: 16:25

I mean, it's a tradition type event. It's something that people have started-- they start doing one with their family, and then when they move and they can't see their family, there's another one in that town and it sort of grows. It grows organically because you have whole generations of families that are doing things. Grandparents go out and do the walk, and the parents will come and the kids will do the kids run. And so you have a little bit more of a broad range of people who are out doing a Turkey Trot versus most races. If you go to a lot of local ones, there's usually a lot of walkers. So they're a lot more inclusive than kind of maybe your everyday race is thought to be, and I think that has kind of given it a unique position as a kind of family tradition event.

Panos: 17:09

Another trend that seems to be continuing from 2023 and, actually, you may be able to remind all of us - because I don't have the data - on how this trend used to be pre pandemic is that smaller events seem to be outgrowing larger events. I definitely remember this trend going back a couple of years. Definitely a post pandemic thing where you had-- and by smaller, we should say that, for the purpose of the report, small means fewer than 500 participants. Larger events, for the report, means more than 5,000 participants. And smaller events, they grew by an average of 10%, larger events by 5% which is a significant difference. I mean, it's not nothing. Was that a trend that existed before the pandemic? Or is it a post pandemic thing?

Johanna: 18:02

I don't actually know, because we never ran it before the pandemic. That one, we started making that comparison by size really coming out of the pandemic, because anecdotally, we were hearing that large races were really having a hard time, and the data has definitely packed that up that they have grown the slowest. They've made progress, but that is kind of where the gap still is. We do a sort of quick report on the 100 largest races each year, and from that, that cohort was down about 1% compared to 2019. So we can tell that that has been a little bit slower than small events, but I don't know if that looked like pre pandemic, because I've never done it.

Panos: 18:44

Well, the reasons that we discussed last year and you offer in your takeaways in the report about why that difference may be has to do with increased travel costs, which makes sense and is a pandemic thing. It's something that the pandemic sort of had an effect on. Staffing challenges, which, again, another thing that we hear a lot of, and I can definitely see being more challenging with larger races. Could it also be-- I had this podcast with Clint McCormick - it was actually the podcast before this one. We were discussing permits, and one of the things that he was bringing up is that generally, appetite in local communities for your huge, mega race seems to be getting curtailed a little bit. So basically, there's places where you have some pretty hard ceilings in terms of how large a race can get. And I wonder whether, for what you guys call, the larger events, which is above 5,000 participants-- whether perhaps some of them are being limited by the fact that there may be size restrictions for some of these races, that they just cannot grow beyond a certain point because of permits.

Johanna: 19:56

I don't know specifically, and I don't think that'd be impacting the very largest races, because they're already going to be permitted to kind of large events. Whether or not that impacts some races' ability to go from mid-size to large, that could be, particularly if you're looking at longer distances. Like, just the appetite, yeah, to close roads and constrict people's movements in different cities and towns can be pretty low depending on where you are.

Panos: 20:24

Well, it's interesting that you mentioned the very large races because, actually, looking at your top 100 races report, they grew more, like, in the double digits, right? So the really, really high end of races grew, I think - I just pulled up the top 100 races report at some point - by 11% which is closer to the smaller events. It seems to be those 5,000 to maybe not quite top 100 races that are suffering the most, that kind of, as you say, the races are sort of large-ish, but not too large.

Johanna: 20:59

Yeah. I mean, the very top races did quite well last year. You're right about that. There's kind of that bottom end of the report where you see a little bit more challenges, and you also see races falling off a little bit more frequently when you get to kind of the 7,000 to 9,000 range. So that could make up an outsized proportion of that 5,000 and up that is struggling. Also, there's going to be more races between 5,000 and 10,000 than races with more than 10,000. So it's going to be a lot more events in that range.

Panos: 21:30

And the 5K, 10K also could be considered, because there's also some really positive data that has come through for the 18-to-29 age group, which you'd think is your gateway age group for the industry. It might just include new people going into racing, right? I mean, new races you'd expect would go into the 5K and the 10K before they go into the marathon. So that might be positive news for years to come, in terms of all of that new participation in 5Ks and 10Ks spilling over to longer distances.

Johanna: 22:01

Yeah, start small, and then eventually people move on.

Panos: 22:04

There was a little bit of an interesting bump for ultra marathons. So those grew by 14%. Do we have any insight or any inkling as to what might be happening there?

Johanna: 22:17

I'm hesitant to make too large of a conclusion from that simply because I think Ultras have been our kind of wonkiest data over the last five years, because a lot of events during COVID were virtual events that were a week to do 100 miles or whatever types of longer term virtual events that end up being long distances. So I do think we've seen some pretty good impacts for specific Ultra races, but I'm not sure yet if that is more of just a correction from races being small virtual ultra marathons that weren't really ultra marathons to kind of now capturing a more true look at ultra marathons. So I would love for that to be true, because I think it's a great distance, but we'll see kind of how that holds up over the next couple of years.

Panos: 23:09

That's good to know. Yeah, the whole virtual thing, which, as we'll see later, is sort of dissipating since the pandemic, it's been one of those things that are skewed some of these data points a little bit - also the gender splits and all of that which we'll go into as well. One new bit of information that you added to the report is some regional variation in participation growth. So basically, you break out race registration growth by region in the US. So you have your Southwest, all the different areas, and there were some differences there. So, I think the highest growing region was the Southwest with almost 13% growth. Lowest growing region was the Plains region, which includes places like Iowa and Kansas and Missouri, which only grew by a bit shy of 2%. What should we read into that, if anything?

Johanna: 24:08

I'd be a little cautious to read too much into it, unless we see kind of trends in specific regions for multiple years. Some of that is just going to be skewed a bit by a really large event that comes or goes because the numbers are just much smaller that you're looking at overall. It's easier for a couple of large events to have a pretty big, outsized impact. I will also note the Plains region in general, just is a pretty low population area of the country. So that, again, kind of means there's fewer events and fewer people to deal with to begin with, so I wouldn't be overly alarmed that they didn't grow as much unless we see that kind of year over year, they're continuously lagging behind.

Panos: 24:50

Okay, interesting. So let's keep an eye out for sort of future reports and how this data may evolve. Churn is another thing - like repeat participation that you put a big emphasis on - and churn for last year was you note at its lowest since 2018. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?

Johanna: 25:12

Yeah, so churn is a bit of a manual report we do, and because of that, it only looks at races with more than 500 participants. So that is kind of the caveat to what we can see with this. But we're looking at events that happened in 2023 that didn't come back in 2024 at all, and that means they didn't come back on our platform or on any other platform. They just did not take place at all. And so we were at 3.9% churn this year. 2018 was the first year we started running this and there's some weird numbers amidst the pandemic between, like, what came back one year but skipped a year or whatever. But on average, we typically have seen around 5% to 7% turn each year. So 3.9 is really, really low. I think that's positive, because it means the industry is doing well enough that races are staying. If you're a race company that's trying to grow, it might be a little bit concerning, because it means there aren't races in your area that are taking a step back to leave some gaps in the calendar. So it might be a little bit harder for new events to break out. But in general, I think we'd rather see races that exist doing well than have lots of time that you might be able to create new events.

Panos: 26:23

And do we have any insight into how that churn is distributed across different types of events, like your 5Ks and your marathons, or where it might be worse or better?

Johanna: 26:34

We don't, because we look at churn by full race weekend versus by event distance. That's one that we pull for the full event.

Panos: 26:41

Virtual events, as we mentioned, I mean, they experienced a dramatic growth during the pandemic, and they've been on a sliding trajectory ever since. They reached 88% of total participation for 2024, down from 40%, not all that back in 2020. And in person events, to compensate, are up to 92% in 2024 from 60% in 2020. What is the state of virtual events these days, and also challenges? Because you guys also invested quite a lot back in the pandemic into that and you separate that data. Like, I think you consider it almost like a different niche within virtual events. What types of events are virtual events these days?

Johanna: 27:30

So I will clarify one thing there. 92% of the events are in person. So about 8% of events are virtual. Participation in virtual events is even lower. It's about 3.2% of participation is either a virtual event or challenge, which tells you, right there, that virtual events are largely small because they're not seeing there's more of them out there than there are participations or participants. I think there's kind of two buckets. There are still some virtual events, and some of these are challenges that do really, really well, do a lot of marketing, have really high investment in swag, and are really heavily grown off of kind of virtual marketing and getting people who may be outside the regular race realm. That does still exist. It's not something I would recommend that anyone start in, unless you are very, very good at online marketing, because that's really the only place you're getting something like that. The majority, I think, of what we see as virtual participation now is just participants on the margins. It's events that offer a sleep-in version or a run-from-home version that allows someone who maybe moved out of the area or wants to participate with their mom, but their mom lives across the country to pay a little bit of money and sort of support the event and go out and run on their own. Those tend to be the opposite, very low overhead events, aren't putting a lot into them. It's just kind of picking up an extra 1%, 2% of participants without a lot of extra work. An d I think that, as a niche, makes a lot of sense to not over-stress yourself, but have an option that allows people to participate virtually, instead of investing heavily in virtual events, that there might not be a lot of an appetite for.

Panos: 29:15

These virtual options that in-person events these days offer-- because I agree. The first bucket of, like, your niche themed virtual races that are all about marketing and getting the Star Wars medal or whatever. They're almost their own kind of like universe. But the virtual options stuff that come with regular races, which used to be more popular as we were coming out of the pandemic, but now, as you say, it's down to maybe a couple of percentage points in participation. Did we used to have those before the pandemic? I actually don't remember. Because the technology must have been there, right? I mean, it isn't that complicated.

Johanna: 29:52

They did exist. I forget what the numbers were, but they were even lower than now. I think it was just under 1% of participation and was virtual. So they did exist, but you didn't see them nearly as often or kind of as commonly produced.

Panos: 30:08

Do you think for the-- because obviously you guys also do the technology side of things and, however lightweight, there is some special stuff you need to do to add these components and to administer them and everything. Do you think it's worth it for people to keep on having this option of the virtual race component? I guess that you can do the 5K remotely or the marathon remotely.

Johanna: 30:33

I think you want to make it as simple as possible. Some events we see don't even, like, mail you a medal. It's just literally, if you want to support the event. At most ship something, I would not recommend spending a lot of time on creating a great virtual experience at this point because I think the people who are choosing to do that are choosing it for other reasons, like they want to support your event, versus the bling of it.

Panos: 31:00

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Johanna: 33:41

No, this is race weekend.

Panos: 33:43

Oh, race weekend. Okay.

Johanna: 33:44

I used to run this off of events, and I think it actually means more this way. So this is off of race weekend.

Panos: 33:50

Okay. And by race weekend, just to remind people, because it's critical for this statistic, it means-- let's say you have your 10K on the Saturday, and your marathon on the Sunday or something, we're talking about the whole thing. Only about 1% of race weekends had more than 2,500 participants. So it means that, if you're already above that, you're in very rarefied air. And then another stat, nearly half of all participants took part in races that had between 100 and 1,000 participants. So this is nearly one half of participants, which means that most people-- that's sort of like the sweet spot that they do most of their racing - between 100 and 1000 participants in events of that kind of size. One of the interesting bits about all these stats is the takeaway notes that come with it. So you're saying in the report, the majority of the running community exists around small community events and local mid-sized races. To grow your events, tap into local runners by working with grassroots running clubs, running stores and coaches. Brilliant idea. In terms of a place like RunSignup, how can people sort of do more around that with the tools that they have available on the platform?

Johanna: 35:11

Yeah, I think there's a couple of ways. You can use searches to figure out what's around you. We actually have 500, 600 something like that - I don't have the number in front of me - clubs that use our platform to begin with, like running clubs in the US. And so, you can give a discount to those running clubs through the platform. Even if you don't want to use that, you can use the search to figure out what clubs exist in your area and give you kind of starting point to reach out to them and to see if you could work together with them on getting some of their runners there. Similarly, I would use-- there's a timer search just available and research. Look at what else is available in your area. Reach out to timers. Sometimes, even if they aren't your timer, they have a calendar that they want to keep updated. They want to promote to the people in your community, kind of finding events and people that are near you, that may want to work with you to kind of boost the whole industry.

Panos: 36:09

In terms of sort of leveraging the existing registrants you may have. I'm going into this because there was some really interesting data that we're going to mention later in the report around the efficacy of referral rewards. Is that something that also smaller events can use?

Johanna: 36:25

Yeah, absolutely. I think, the best marketing you're ever going to have is people telling other people that they should come to your event. That's always going to be more effective than any advertising you can use, because people trust their friends and family more than the internet in general. So yeah, making sure that you have reasons for the people who are coming to your race to bring more people, stuff like having teams available, using referral awards, making sure that you're kind of leveraging the people you have to spread the word as well, it's a really good place to start,

Panos: 36:58

And a very free place to start actually, which I think is also very helpful for race directors. Since we're going to be going into referral rewards later with a few stats, we may as well just sort of do a quick summary of it here. How do they work, exactly?

Johanna: 37:11

Yeah, so referral rewards are automated through the platform. So if I sign up for your race and you have this enabled, I will get at the end of my registration, a little pop up that says, "Why don't you invite your friends? You could earn XYZ." And it'll give a specific link that I can share. If three of my friends or however many people I have set as my threshold register for the event using that specific link, then RunSignup knows that you have referred those participants, and I can be rewarded with a refund of the amount of your choosing. We usually recommend around 3 to five registrations for around$15 to $20 as a bit of a sweet spot - hard enough to get that a lot of people maybe refer one or two people, but you won't actually have to refund them, but enough money that they'll at least try. That's sort of where we see most of our events fall.

Panos: 38:05

Is it a monetary incentive? Or could it be, like, some special swag or something like that?

Johanna: 38:11

We see monetary most commonly, and that's the easiest, because you don't have to do anything, it's refunded automatically. You do have the ability to set up swag. Often, we'll see that as kind of a second tier for your very best referrers. Maybe once they hit 10 referrals, you do that. But you could set it up however you'd want. What would happen then is that I would get an email that would say, "Hey, what shirt size do you want? You earned this. Now, let's collect your information that the race needs." You would still have to actually send me the shirt or have it available. So there's a little bit of manual work if you go that route, but it does have options for things like that. We have seen events too-- the last one I'll note is we've seen events use things like gift cards, because it is something that has to be fulfilled by the race, but it's much easier to fulfill - a digital send someone an Amazon card versus actually send them a shirt.

Panos: 39:04

Moving on to some demographic trends from the report, looking at gender, men who are in the minority in terms of participation with respect to women, they have been closing the gap, I think, for a few years, and they continue to do so, I guess, in total registration. Maybe virtual events have something to do in there, sort of the skew of virtual events, because female participation was even higher when we were coming out of the pandemic and it's sort of drifting towards the 50-50 mark now with men. Do you think that maybe it's just something to do with virtual events, because women do participate more strongly in virtual events?

Johanna: 39:48

So yes and no. Definitely, in 2020, when we were at, like, 58% were women, that was driven by virtual. We did see pre pandemic, I think it was around 55% women. So that has narrowed slightly overall anyways, like we have actually seen a tiny bit of true narrowing there, even if we just kind of cut out those 2020, 2021 numbers. But it's pretty slight. It's from about 55% to about 53%.

Panos: 40:15

And speaking of a group that didn't take virtual races particularly well, was the very crucial under-30 group. I would have imagined, that's something that, intuitively, I always got wrong. But I would have thought that the under-30s would be really big into virtual and this and that but, apparently, they didn't. They didn't like it all that much.

Johanna: 40:34

No, they did not. 18-to-29 year olds did terribly through the pandemic.

Panos: 40:39

Yeah, it was more of an over-50s type of thing, right? The virtual races,

Johanna: 40:44

Yeah, which, I guess maybe it was maybe more accessible to people who are older and home and maybe have more limited times that they can do stuff. But yeah, we had a lot of concern about the young people, young adults, particularly coming out of COVID.

Panos: 41:01

We did, and things are looking much brighter, right? So 18-to-29, to be exact, is the age group that we're looking at here, and that was up another 6% from 2023. There was already a slight uptick from the year before, but a very definitive, clear, strong, 6% up from 2023. Now, the crucial question in my mind behind all this is, this 6% and the uptick before that, is it races actually doing something special that attracts this kind of audience, or is it that just younger runners choose to go more into racing? So basically, is it that we managed to find the recipe of pulling more people into racing, or races are just there and more young people want to participate?

Johanna: 41:56

That's an impossible one to answer for real. My guess would be that it's a little bit of both. I do think races are trying to do things like making sure they have, like, fun photo stations, that they are bringing in more social elements to their events. I do think they're trying to reach participants in new ways. I don't know that races have, like, really figured out marketing to that group entirely, so much as they have perhaps improved some of the race day experiences for people of that age. And also, it's just a large group within the country, and so some of them are starting to find their way to events. And I will say this number has looked better and better over the years. We're up to about 16% within that age group. That is still down from 2016, 2017. We had seen this group declining even pre pandemic. So I don't want anyone to get like too relaxed. We still want to make sure that we're figuring out how to get these runners in because, typically, we see our largest groups between 30 and 50. So we want to make sure that those groups don't just fall off once these kind of 18-to-29 year old age up. So keep working on it.

Panos: 43:09

But are these people-- I know that you mentioned the charitable component of races is particularly important to them, which is interesting and I think informative for people who don't have a charity partnership - might be something they want to consider there. Do we have a sense for whether this age group also tends to fundraise more or whether they're more of a competitive runner? Like, what kind of runner are they apart from the age that sets them apart? What else might set them apart in terms of, I guess, their profile?

Johanna: 43:42

I mean, we can't tell this from our numbers, but I think from runner surveys that we have seen, no, I think this group tends to be more social runners. They want to go out and do things and be active rather than be super competitive. So your prize money might not help as much as having a fun post race music show or some other reason that people come out to join your event.

Panos: 44:03

Another aspect of races that you highlight in the demographics part of the survey, but I think is very important in a business sense, more broadly, is the importance of kids races- not something that's necessarily on everyone's radar, although many races offer a kids component these days. You mentioned in your takeaways that they could be kind of a good way to foster race participation for next generations and also be a little bit more inclusive in terms of attracting families and stuff. Do we have any data on, like, the actual ROI or impact that kids races may have? What I'm trying to answer is if people go away from hearing this curious about setting up a kids race, would it make sense economically? Because you do mention in the report that the kids race in and of itself is not a big concern, right? It's a small race, small revenue, small everything. But would it help bring other stuff with it in terms of, okay, maybe, if there's a kids race, maybe more adults run. Maybe, these kids move on to run other parts of the race weekend, that kind of thing?

Johanna: 45:18

It's hard to do that from any sort of aggregate sense because there's just so many variables of what an event is doing. That'd be an interesting case study to, like, compare an event that added a kids race, kind of over the years, if that shifted things at all. I think the one thing that you can kind of point to goes back to what we were talking about with Thanksgiving races, which is that those continue to grow, and I think part of that is because they are family races. And so, that is an event where kids are coming all the time, and so that's allowing mom and dad and grandma to come, and then that is also, as they go to college, grow up, providing a bit of a transition for them into adult racing.

Panos: 45:58

Now we move into two very, very important aspects of the report that most race directors have been following meticulously over the past few years - registration trends and pricing trends. Both of them are super, super important. Starting off with registration trends. There's this whole debate that's been going on, like, anecdotally, counter anecdotally, like, people arguing online and stuff about procrastination, right? How real is it? Data seems to have been showing other stuff from what people seem to believe is the case on the ground. So what's the picture there?

Johanna: 46:38

Yeah, I think, every year - I have been in this industry, which is more than a decade now - everyone has told me that people are registering later and later all the time, and that's never held true with the data. Every year, this number comes in. On race week, we get between 24% and 26% of registrations. It's kind of been steady. Actually, even through the pandemic, that remained relatively steady in that range. This year, I will say there was ever so slightly a tick away from procrastination. We were at 23.9% on race week, which is again very slightly, but the lowest that we have seen on race week. We also saw a very small decline of people registering one to two weeks out. I'm hesitant to make too much of that unless, again, we see that continuing year over year or it becomes more pronounced. But at the very least, it says people aren't registering later.

Panos: 47:34

And can we spend perhaps a minute to try and make the case for why people should try and allow registrations to be open all the way to race day? Because I know this is something that scares a lot of people, particularly people who are not very familiar with race day technologies and they're a little bit concerned about, like, "Oh, how am I going to be taking registration, printing bibs, shirts?" All of that kind of stuff. Like, these numbers still-- as you mentioned, the fact that such a large percentage of numbers, and this is 62%-- I mean, this is for last month for 5Ks, I would have said 62%. But still, a quarter of participants registered on the last week. Like, can we make the case for why, particularly for smaller events, people need to invest to understand the tools they have in hand to try and stay open for registrations as late as they can?

Johanna: 48:36

Yeah. I mean, I think unless you have an event where you don't care how many people come, you want to make sure that you have the maximum number of opportunities for people to register. It is certainly true. I don't think that, if you close registration a week out, you would be 24% down, because I think you'd have some level of impact to people realizing that it is an absolute deadline and will register. There's also going to be some percentage of those who won't have made up their mind yet, won't even have heard about your race yet. Maybe it's the people who were told by their neighbor the night before and decided to come, or were waiting on the weather or just forgot, and now they don't have an opportunity at all, and you are going to see a decline in participation that way. I think the other end of that is, when we talk about race day registration, I think it's changed a lot in post pandemic years. 15 years ago, you saw a lot of paper entries being filled out on race day, which is a huge pain for a race, for a timer, for literally everyone. That kind of shifted into more, like, on-site kiosks, where people would have little laptops they'd register on when they got there. And we still see some of that, but the vast majority of what we see for late registrations now, including on race morning, is simply people registering online on their own. And so, what a lot of races do now is they may or may not have a kiosk available for anyone who really chooses that option. But for the most part, for race day registration, you're using just a QR code, someone can scan and register on their phone and make sure that they are able to get in quickly. People are pretty comfortable now registering on their phone, which we may talk about later. So they're used to that process, and that then can send their information automatically to the timer. Nothing is getting queued in having a system in place where your systems are all talking to each other. Registration talking to your timer is really important so that people can leave things open as long as possible and really maximize the race day participation.

Panos: 50:31

Yeah, because I sense that timers, that you mentioned there, used to be a big kind of choke point for all these race day stuff. It's them who suffer the most, or have suffered the most in the past with last-minute registrations and getting people onto the race timing systems. But that has improved a lot over the past few years, right?

Johanna: 50:56

Yeah. I mean, always talk to your timer. But the number of systems out there that talk to each other now that allow for a timer to pretty quickly sync with your registration data has really gone up and increased, and so I would expect a kind of modern timer to be able to work with you to make sure they can take registrations to the last minute without paper.

Panos: 51:17

And that's also where dynamic bib assignment comes in, isn't it? The fact that however many people come to your kiosk on race day or whatever, you can just print bibs on demand and everyone's happy.

Johanna: 51:29

Yeah, you can give people a bib as they're coming in. We see some races that still have reasons they want to pre assign bibs for people who pre registered. Some races do all of it dynamically, and that kind of gives you the opportunity to get people in really fast and easy if they weren't there previously.

Panos: 51:45

Yeah, awesome. Just to wrap this whole thing up, something that you mentioned I want to just stress, for something like a 5K or even a 10K, there would be many people who just discover your event, let alone decide to register on the last week. I've registered for a 5K on the very last week because a friend might be running it, and they said, "I'm running this 5K on the weekend." If you're running constantly, like, a 5K isn't a big toll and then maybe you have a marathon coming up, you want to train for a-- these kinds of races, they have lots of opportunistic people just jumping in at the last minute through a referral. Maybe they just want to do like a training 5K at the end of the day. So it's really important to keep registrations open as long as you can until race day, ideally. Pricing trends - what's happening there?

Johanna: 52:42

Unsurprisingly, prices are going up. Kind of depends on the distance, exactly where we saw this, but we saw prices increase across all distances. 10Ks were kind of the highest at about 5%. Half marathons were a little bit less. We saw about 0.2% on half marathons. But across the board, we saw prices increase again. I think, sort of the biggest call out I have on this is that, yes, prices increased, participation also increased, which tells you that these prices are not turning people away. People understand that prices are going up on everything, and they may not like it, but it is not defining their decision. So I think it's important for races to feel comfortable not that they want a price gouge, but that they can set their budget to be realistic for what they actually need to be able to bring in in revenue, and that slight increase is not necessarily going to impact their participation numbers.

Panos: 53:36

Yeah. And I mean, it's very interesting to see and encouraging that the highest price increases of the 4% or 5% you mentioned came at the bottom end of the race distance. So with your 5Ks and your 10Ks, which also experience the most growth. So it's almost like people can't get enough of them, and maybe they have more pricing power than your marathons and half marathons, which admittedly both anecdotally and also from data in the past, half marathons which are very, very popular, and marathons because they're also kind of like larger events, and they include some of the larger races, I think they had reached a pricing point which is starting to be a little bit unaffordable for some people, right? I mean, we're talking really expensive entry fees for some of these races.

Johanna: 54:23

Yeah. I mean, some of that is built in by overhead, and particularly, like the overhead for permitting and police for road closures, and such can be a lot higher on long distances. And so that may mean that there was just less room there for prices to change, versus a 5K that has kind of more fixed costs built in.

Panos: 54:50

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Johanna: 58:04

Yeah. I mean, I think kind of thinking outside the box for races in general is useful, and kind of understanding your audience and the people that you are trying to pull. So there's absolutely a race where you must give out a shirt because people expect. It's very important to the brand of what you've been doing for 20 years, and I don't recommend you change things that people love and rely on. That said, when you have-- again, most races are small community races. Your school run may not need to be timed because the kids don't care what their time is. They're not out there racing. They're out there to have fun. It's parents who are coming out to support the school. There may be an option there to not have timing on an event like that, or to say, all of you have a lot of shirts. Maybe we give you the option to do a negative add on, essentially, and say, "I don't want a shirt, and so I'll pay a little less." Or you can not offer a shirt up front at all, and let people come in and do that. I have an event. It's not huge, but we've not offered shirts. We've never offered shirts for free. We do a "You can buy them if you want." And I think like, 20% to 25% of people will choose to buy them, essentially at cost. We don't really make money on them. We're also not spending any money on giveaways for people, and that lets us kind of keep the costs, the prices for people a little bit lower.

Panos: 59:22

But I bet that, for that kind of event, the shirt that you offer, which, as you say, is at cost, is a decent shirt, right? I mean, you won't try and do, like, a $5 text shirt for that, because you're like, Okay, someone's gonna buy it. You put a good design on it, and then you make it be like a really nice option for people to buy.

Johanna: 59:43

Yeah, it's going to be a higher quality that we expect people will actually want to wear if they're going to pay money for it.

Panos: 59:48

Now, one of the areas that I get the impression you feel really strongly about - you personally - is price increases. Is that fair?

Johanna: 59:59

Yeah. Yes, it is one that annoys me every year. Surprisingly, few races use many price increases. You see a 5K has, like, one price increase average per race. Even with marathons, it's only around two price increases. Marathons in general, have a really wide range of registration being open. I think it was something like 60% of them - I used to know this number - register more than four months out. So there's a lot of time there for price increases. And I think there's two reasons that price increases are really important and that races should take a look at their schedule and see if they can add one. One is that we know that price drives action. Even if it's not a huge increase, people see a price increase, it gives them a reason to go from"I will probably do this event" to "I am going to sign up now." Just pushes them over the edge there. The other is that having price increases kind of widens your ability to attract different types of runners. So there's going to be people in your area who are really price conscious, who are going to be looking for the cheaper events out there, and they may be willing to sign up super early to get your early bird pricing, and you can kind of lock those people in. Maybe you're not making a ton of money off of them individually, but they are people that you know are coming, and they're going to show up. On the flip side of that, we know that people pretty consistently register late, and that cohort of a quarter or so of your runners who's going to register on race week, people who are going to register on race day, they're likely going to do that regardless of what your price is,because they are showing the tendency to register at a late point. So if you increase that price a little bit more, you can make up a little bit of that income you may have lost on earlier registrants, and really kind of balance out your field in terms of where you're getting your revenue from.

Panos: 1:01:54

I do agree that I think you have a very good case here with price increases, and a very good reason to feel strongly about this because, now, looking at the data, you guys say that 26% of registrations take place within three days of a price increase or registration close. Okay? And back to what you were saying, a marathon, for instance, on average, would offer two price increases. Okay? So we have two price increases in a marathon, say, and registration closes, and then you're saying three days, either way of those three events, you get 26% of registration. So basically we're saying that 26% of registrations happen within a few days, essentially, in a registration cycle that could be spanning 679 months. So does that mean, you think, that if a marathon added another price increase point, which a marathon can very easily do because these races are almost open from day two after race day, so you can go from two price increases to three price increases very, very easily without giving the impression that you're swamping people with, like, register now. Do we think that basically would lead to, like, significantly more registrations? Or would the same people who would have registered across the two price increases now would register across three price increases?

Johanna: 1:03:26

I think it is more that the same people will register in different patterns. But because you have more price increases, you can kind of boost where they are registering and how much people are paying, which can boost your overall revenue without pissing off the people who really needed your early bird pricing to begin with.

Panos: 1:03:48

Okay. Because to me, and I think you seem to have implied that earlier yourself, the price increase isn't just about the$5, $10, right? It's a good opportunity to just be in front of people, to just tell them we have this price increase. It's just another natural, non-offensive way to just nudge people to register beyond the $5 and $10 and stuff.

Johanna: 1:04:13

Yeah, people need reminders, and they need to be pushed to act as fast as possible.

Panos: 1:04:20

Maybe that's something for races to consider, I think, particularly for races like marathons and races that have a very long registration window. I don't think there's any downside to this. Last thing I want to touch on is pricing. One of the takeaways in the report mentions age-based pricing as a means of perhaps tweaking the overall pricing strategy of a race. Now, that's something, I have to admit, that I haven't seen much of. Is that a common thing in races? Now, basically having a different-- I guess age based pricing in the report means that you charge a different price for different age groups. Is that the idea?

Johanna: 1:04:56

Yeah. And most often, you see this with kids or student type ages and or seniors. So it is typically trying to kind of build out the marginal groups there versus-- I have not seen a race use it for, like, 30s are a different price than 40s so much as kind of a way to give parents a break so they can bring their kids or reward seniors who are still running.

Panos: 1:05:24

Now, merchandise-- just quickly going through that. Some interesting data points. It seems that merchandise add on sales, that stuff that runners add with the registration on checkout is down fairly significantly, it seems, in terms of transactions from 2020. So, in 2020, it was up to 22%. Now, it's down to 13% although revenue hasn't suffered this much, because the report shows that, compensatingly, the items that are being added on have increased in price. Is there anything to discuss there, you think? Anything particularly important?

Johanna: 1:06:07

Not really. I don't have the numbers in front of me but, from my recollection, I think it was more to do with pandemic changes than an actual shift greater than that, prior to that. We just saw a lot of add ons and store items being purchased during the pandemic because, again, people weren't paying for an actual event. The race costs tend to be pretty low for those because virtual overhead is really low. And so it was just more of an opportunity to say, "I will get the glow sticks with it because I'm only paying $12 for the event anyways, and also, I'm at home, and I'm not doing anything else, so I'm going to pick up all these extra items." Whereas, I think, on actual real race days, there's a little bit less of an appetite for that.

Panos: 1:06:56

Now, one area that is starting to get a little bit technical, I guess, for most race directors towards the end of the report, but I think it's really important is the whole device situation. So the rise of mobile transactions, mobile views. A few years back, mobile was the new thing. These days, you mentioned that you design websites and everything you do is mobile first, as many companies are these days. These days, mobile is king. Most of the transactions happen there. It's a very important device. Quick note for people, as you mentioned in the reports, to always test what they do with their websites and stuff on mobile. So, don't just sit on your desktop and think that the website you designed on RunSignup looks great. Test it on mobile and all of that stuff. The one part here that I think maybe deserves a little bit of attention, because I'm not fully on top of it, is the whole Apple Pay thing. So how has that been significant in terms of mobile registrations and transactions? Because I sense there's something here, but I can't quite put my finger on it in terms of the apple wallet links that you guys sent out, and Apple Pay and all that stuff. So what's that all about?

Johanna: 1:08:08

Yeah, I mean, I think the main priority is just making sure that it is as easy as possible for people to register on their phones. About 61, I think, percent of registrations took place on a phone. And so, you want to make that as simple and easy as possible, so people don't get to the last step and then decide, "Oh, I'll do it later, because I don't want to type in my credit card right now" and then forget to do it later. So introduced Apple Pay, like, mid 2023. And prior to that, we had an opportunity for people to save their credit card and their profile. That's still available. We've seen usage of saved credit cards come down slightly since we introduced Apple Pay, which makes sense, because people who are likely to have their credit card saved are the same people who are likely to have set up Apple Pay. But I think, I mean the real reason it matters is simply making sure that it is as easy as possible for people to get through the actual registration process combined-- in 2024, we have about 35% of participants paid with either a saved credit card or Apple Pay. So, it's a pretty significant amount that is choosing that option. And I think over time, we expect that to continue to go up too as people just get more and more used to having payment options available on their phones.

Panos: 1:09:23

So Apple Pay then is just that-- the fact that you know when you're on checkout and you click to check out, you get the option to pay through the native-- where you put your fingerprint and stuff, and the transaction goes through that?

Johanna: 1:09:39

Yeah. So just go straight through your phone. It's already set up. It tends to be secure because you're not actually entering your direct credit card information there. But it's also, in two clicks, I can have paid versus-- even if I'm scanning my credit card versus typing it in, that's a whole other step that I need to do instead of Apple Pay. I feel more confident personally, and I think this would relate to other people, with having it on Apple Pay than saving my credit card on 20 different platforms where, if my accounts get hacked, people can access my payment method.

Panos: 1:10:13

Well, definitely. Beyond the security, I mean, it's crystal clear and obvious, the convenience is immense, right? I mean, if you don't have your credit card on you, which many people don't these days because of Apple Pay, incidentally, I never go out with credit cards anymore, it's all in the phone, you're not going to be bothered. I mean, honestly, particularly if it's a kind of spur of the moment type race that you're, like, sitting there in the middle of the night like I do sometimes, like, "Oh, this 10K sounds fun. Let me register for it." If you don't have your credit card details with you at that point, I wondered, do you have any data on abandonment before Apple Pay when people used to punch in credit card numbers?

Johanna: 1:10:54

I don't. We would like to be able to do that. We've been working on different ways that we can look at our data in Google Analytics, kind of with the hope that we can pull a better look at, on average, when people drop out. It's a little bit tricky because different races have different numbers of steps in their registration. But yeah, that would be an interesting one to track in the future.

Panos: 1:11:13

For me, it's night and day - Apple Pay compared to putting in credit cards. Even if, as you say, for your platform, which is pretty big now, 50%, it's very likely that the person registering may have a profile, may have their credit card details saved already, but it's a big thing. Has this been widely adopted by other platforms - the whole Apple Pay thing?

Johanna: 1:11:34

I actually have no idea. I have not tracked. I doubt we're the only ones, but have not tracked how many platforms have the option available.

Panos: 1:11:42

Okay, it should be, because, again, particularly for the US, as your report notes, Apple users are, like, up to 81%. I mean, this is something that your registration platform needs to have, for sure. Let's see if we can figure the following thing out. Processing fees - I'm looking at here, 92% of people choose to have the processing fee be paid by the registrant. Okay, makes total sense. So basically, you have your entry fee at $50 and then there's a processing fee on top of it, which maybe, like, $3-$4 or whatever, and then you choose, you elect that to be paid by the registrant on checkout. Is that statistic correct - the 92%?

Johanna: 1:12:24

I think it's wrong, but it's not your fault. I think this chart is wrong. It should be 94% this year.

Panos: 1:12:29

Okay.

Johanna: 1:12:30

The final's not 2024. I'm looking at that right now and that is wrong, but it is significant. It was about 94%.

Panos: 1:12:38

Okay, okay. So basically, 92%, 94%, definitely, I'm not surprised that that's a very, very high rate. I'm thinking about the remaining 6%. Do you have any idea of obvious cases why a race may choose to take the cost itself rather than pass it on to the participant, particularly since it's such a widely common practice these days, right? I mean, it's not like you're thinking, "Oh, we're going to be the exception, and people are going to draw conclusions from that or something, or it's going to tarnish our brand or something." Like, everyone expects to pay on checkout for the processing fee. Why would some races choose to take that as a cost?

Johanna: 1:13:23

I do think there are events that have opted to use it as a bit of a selling point, to kind of say upfront that this race is $50 and that includes everything you're going to pay. And they will call that out from the beginning, that there are no other additional fees, that this is everything. I have typically tended to think it probably doesn't really matter either way. Participants aren't particularly moved by that in either direction. I do think this is one we're going to watch really carefully over the next couple of years,because the ways that fees are displayed in the US is changing fairly rapidly, and that may drive more people to want to go to a kind of simplified absorbing the processing fees so that they can have a really simple pricing structure that doesn't show kind of wonky numbers because fees are not even numbers.

Panos: 1:14:20

Oh, I see. So this is the price transparency stuff that the report mentions.

Johanna: 1:14:25

Yeah, so what's happening is, kind of, we've had, at this point, about a half a dozen states in the country have passed this. We have other states that have laws in process, and there was actually a federal law that is in process. So if that goes through, then it would apply to all states. With the states where it exists currently, what that means is that your price that shows in every place, in all of your emails, on your website, everywhere that you show a price, it has to include the kind of maximum amount of fees. And so it'll have to say, instead of-- it can't say $35 plus $2.50. It has to stay$37.50 or less. So you can indicate that that price might go down depending on what they do, but it can't be more than that. And so for some races, it's not that big of a deal. Our system can handle automatically, showing the pricing correctly and some races are fine with that. There are events who are like, "I like my numbers to be even. I like to be a quick, easy number to absorb. And I don't want people to have to think about the fact that the price might go down if they add extra people because of the way fees are calculated." And so for those events, we have already seen some customers who have opted to go with changing their pricing structure slightly, and then absorbing the processing fees so that they can have a nice round number. And I do think that might-- I could be wrong, but I think that might be a little bit more common over the next couple of years,as races are kind of figuring out what to do with this pricing structure.

Panos: 1:15:53

Yeah. I mean, you can sort of round things up and always compensate. And I get what people are saying about seeing a $40 entry fee rather than a $39.82 or whatever.

Johanna: 1:16:04

Yeah, it computes differently in your head.

Panos: 1:16:07

Yeah, totally, totally. Let's wrap up with a couple of interesting insights on marketing trends. We mentioned referral rewards earlier. So you guys are saying in the report that the referral rewards which we described, which is basically someone registers, you give them a unique code, you tell them,"Go find a few friends of yours to register with you," and if they do, you get a kickback, or a nice piece of swag or an Amazon gift card or whatever. So you're saying that the way you guys set it up, and you have some some guidelines on, basically, finding that sweet spot of how to set up referral rewards that it ends up only costing the race $1.24 per new registration, which sounds like,"Sign me up today" kind of thing, right? I mean, for $1.24 to be getting another registration, sounds too good to be true. Is this sort of as easy as it sounds to set up?

Johanna: 1:17:09

Yeah. I mean, yes, the setup is actually quite easy. You can go in and set your threshold. You can quickly just say, kind of, what the parameters are you want. We actually default to, I think, three registrants for $15. You can change that, but you don't even have to put anything in if that's what you want. The one caveat I'd say to how simple this is is that referral rewards only work if you are telling your participants that there is a reward they get. Yes, there's a pop up that they can see, but that's not enough to really motivate most people to share the event, particularly, more than once. And so you really want to make sure that all of your emails and your website and your marketing is reminding people of the rewards they can get, so that they are actually actively sharing the event. Our kind of referral reward numbers during the pandemic were astronomically high. That is because people were astronomically on the internet, so it was a much easier time to be sharing stuff like that. And we had seen kind of a drop off in the last couple of years when we made this actually easier for races to turn on, and I think a lot of that was that races were enabling it, but then not doing anything with it. And so, people weren't really going out and actually encouraging runners to share the event. And I am encouraged that this year looks like it's actually bumping back up. We're up to about 7% of transactions are from referrals when they're enabled. But the reason that cost per acquisition is so low is, kind of what I said before, lots of people are going to go out and share their link because it's super easy and one person is going to register, and then you don't have to-- there is literally no cost to you. And so there's just so few people that make it to that threshold that it keeps the overall cost really low. But you're going to get a lot of people who went out and made a half effort and got you one or two people to come.

Panos: 1:18:59

And that, you think, doesn't take at all on sort of goodwill and stuff, the fact that so many people fail to get the threshold and stuff?

Johanna: 1:19:09

It doesn't seem to be because people keep doing it, because I don't think that people are trying. I think most people aren't trying that hard, so they've forgotten about it. It was enough of an effort to go try once. The other thing that I ran a case study on and I don't remember the percentages off the top of my head, but one question that's come up a lot is like,"Is this just the same people who are registering, who would have registered anyways, and now one of them is getting a refund because they use referral rewards versus actually getting new people?" So we were in this on a case study basis, looking at a race that really strongly promoted referral rewards, and from that race, we had 78% of the people who registered through a referral had not done the race previously. So sure, there might have been four people there who got someone a refund that they would have signed up anyways, but the majority of people who were coming to this race through referrals were people who hadn't done the race before. And so, they were, generally, the kind of people that you want to be reaching through referral rewards.

Panos: 1:20:06

I was really surprised to look at numbers for social traffic in the traffic acquisition part of the report. So this is the place where you break down how people get to the RunSignup website, and you have all the different aspects of traffic acquisition, organic traffic, social referrals, all kinds of stuff, email, all that kind of stuff. And numbers seem to hold pretty much fairly steady over the years. The one thing that seems to be moving dramatically is social traffic. So in 2020, you reported social traffic to the website to have been referring to almost 28% of visits. And for 2024, this is down below 10% - so this is 9.6%- which looks super massive. I know in other parts of the report, you have some caveats, maybe this was happening this and whatever. Is this a glitch, or is it real? Or what do we attribute this to?

Johanna: 1:21:08

One is partially pandemic impacts. I did look-- because we only keep the last five years active in this report, but 2019, was around 15% from social. So, some of that really high numbers there in 2020 is definitely related to people just being online more. It's how everything was being shared at the time. I do think some of that drop is probably related to just changing usage of social media to begin with in more recent years. A significant portion of social media has always been from Facebook. As people are on Tiktok more or on Instagram more, those platforms have not typically seen the same kinds of event advertising and event sharing in general. You just don't see people sharing their kind of events the same way that they would on Facebook. That is dropping some of the numbers as well.

Panos: 1:22:04

I should say, by the way, that the report also includes a large chunk on your timer survey results. So if you're a timer, or if you're a race director who's interested in what's happening with the timing industry, there's lots of data in there around the people in the industry and the business of timing, and how many races people time, and how they make the revenue, and all of that stuff, which is also super important in the report. Most important of all in this amazing set of data you put together, how can people download it so they can read it in full?

Johanna: 1:22:45

Yeah, so it's long, but we recommend-- if nothing else, you might want to look through the charts and see the actual numbers. If you go to runsignup.com/trends, there's a quick download button there. It's free. You can access it anytime you want.

Panos: 1:22:58

What should we expect from RunSignup in 2025? 2024, if I got it right, it was pretty big on websites and email and some membership stuff that I don't follow that closely. What's the plan for 2025?

Johanna: 1:23:16

Yeah. Well, so some of it is you'll see continued focus on those areas. Websites are a big focus for us, and we'll continue to get better at memberships as well. Some of our kind of fun projects that we should see in 2025 are we were working on introducing text marketing for about a penny per message, something that's been asked for forever. We usually don't charge for anything, but obviously there's a large cost there. So if we can put that in at a lower cost than what you'd be paying outside, that's another option for races. One that we've been excited about for a while is super lists, which is going to be kind of a contact matching ability that will let you look at all of your participants across events across years, and really filter out participants in unique, kind of complicated ways. So if you want to see who all your people from Pennsylvania who also donated and kind of build lists that let you be a little bit more targeted in your marketing, hopefully we'll see some new stuff out for V2 store items, the ability to track store items across races. And we are working on a V2 version for volunteers, which will just kind of take the current functionality, improve on that a little bit, and then also make that available standalone. So if you want to use that outside of a race, it's functional without having the race build first.

Panos: 1:24:41

That's awesome. Websites, I have to say, because in our day to day, we get lots of opportunities to visit both race websites and timer websites and other stuff. Every so often I see websites that used to be standalone websites be RunSignup websites now, particularly with timers. Lots of timers choose to basically use the RunSignup website builder rather than go out and pay, like, a designer or something to have a website, and they're looking really, really good. So it should be really, really rewarding for whoever's been working on that for the past who knows how long, which must be quite long.

Johanna: 1:25:18

Forever.

Panos: 1:25:19

Forever. What about AI? We're about to do-- hopefully, this should be the next episode after this to go out. We're going to be doing, like, a big deep dive or actually a first splash, I should say, because AI keeps changing all the time on AI and races and stuff like that. Are you guys working in that area? Do you have any new tools or any enhancements to existing stuff coming out around AI?

Johanna: 1:25:44

So we have two buckets that we're looking at for us now. One is just ways that we can, as a team, be more efficient, get more done, get more features available for customers, and make sure that the platform is as good as it can be. The other is understanding tools that races should be using and how they might want to incorporate that into their workflow. We don't have immediate plans to add things directly to the product, and that's kind of for two reasons. One is it's really expensive to add, and it isn't necessarily a better experience than using the tool on its own as it already exists. And the second is that it's all changing so fast. We want to make sure that you're able to be dynamic and use the latest tools and not use a V1 tool because that's the one that we built into our platform, and now you're locked into it. So as things stand right now, we don't see a lot of places where they're necessary within the actual product. We just want to help races understand how they might be able to use them in their regular workflow and what new stuff is coming out.

Panos: 1:26:47

Yeah, things are changing fast, you can say that again. Well, we're having our pre podcast catch up with Andy Reilly, who's going to be my guest for the whole AI marketing stuff and generally more AI stuff, and we were half excited, half petrified with everything, with the speed of changes and how it's affecting-- we were actually saying that we should get on and record the podcast soon because our notes are going to be out of date in a couple of weeks, so we'll need to be recording this every other month. Thank you very, very much for coming on and discussing this very detailed report with us, and also primarily for putting this together, because this is all you behind all this stuff every year, toiling away, putting this together. In case someone wants to reach out specifically to you with something about the report, how can they get through to you?

Johanna: 1:27:34

Yeah, so my email is also in the report, if you forget this, but you can always email me at johanna@runsignup.com. And I'm happy to answer any questions, clarify anything, correct any mistakes that might still have swept through, but anytime when you want to talk to me.

Panos: 1:27:52

Awesome. Well, thank you very much, Johanna, again, for your time.

Johanna: 1:27:56

All right, thanks, Panos.

Panos: 1:27:57

Thanks to everyone listening in, and we'll see you guys on our next podcast. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the 2024 RaceTrends report with my guest, RunSignup's Director of Marketing, Johanna Goode. You can find more resources on anything and everything related to race directing on our website, RaceDirectorsHQ.com. You can also share your thoughts about some of the things discussed in today's episode or anything else in our Facebook group, Race Directors Hub. Many thanks again to our awesome podcast sponsors, RunSignup and Brooksee for sponsoring today's episode. And if you'd like to learn more about these two amazing companies, head to runsignup.com, where you'll find just about everything you could possibly need to set up your race for success, including industry-leading registration tools, a professional free race website, free email marketing tools and tons more. And don't forget to check out Brooksee's new innovative Laurel timing technology, giving you real-time tracking of participants and a Virtual Command Center for your race, by visiting brooksee.com/headstart where you can also get a massive 50% off your first booking. Until our next episode, take care and keep putting on amazing races.