People sign-up for your race to have an experience.
Your job is to deliver the best experience possible.
That work starts early.
1. Communicate Well
Ensure your instructions on packet pick-up, race starting points, and registration confirmation is clear.
You can also communicate with your runners to get their input on the shirt and medal designs. Getting their insight also builds their excitement to run your race.
2. Plan a Beautiful Race Course
Plan your race course to be memorable. Think about what runners will pass on their way to the finish line. Are there any landscapes or architecture worth highlighting on your course? Or, maybe there’s a unique place where you can start or finish your race.
Once you have the course set, create a race map to help you market your race. On race day, make sure that you have mile markers visible and clear so runners can stay on it and gauge their progress.
3. Place Porta-potties and Aid Stations
As part of your course, you need to provide porta-potties and aid stations. These need to appear regularly throughout your course. Having porta-potties and aid stations every two to three miles is a good rule of thumb.
If they’re too far apart, you’ll get a lot of complaints. And, you increase the risk of injury.
4. Find Pace Runners
Help your runners stay on track to beat their PRs by providing pace runners. Local running stores or running clubs may have experienced runners who can keep a good pace for your race.
Make sure that your pace runners have bibs on their back that clearly display their pace time.
5. Host Expos
You can host an expo for packet pick-up and at the finish line. Gather vendors and sponsors to showcase their products and services. Ask hydration companies and other health companies to supply samples to the runners.
Your race is a golden marketing opportunity for local chiropractors, running stores, gyms, fitness products, and other health and wellness brands. You’re gathering a lot of people interested in running, fitness, and health for your race. It’s an easy decision for these brands to sponsor or pay for a booth either at the finish line or at packet pick-up.
Race Entry's software makes it as easy to manage sponsors and vendors as it is to manage registration.
6. Create a Finish Line Moment
Make crossing the finish line a memorable moment. Capture each finish line crossing on video and have photographers there to take photos. Have a podium to highlight the winners in each category and take their photo.
Station volunteers near the finish line to pass out medals to each finisher. Have water and hydration drinks ready to go for runners. Get food trucks and other vendors to come so participants and their families can get a quick bite.
6. Stop Disruptive Attendees
After you’ve put in all of the work to create a great race experience, a disruptive attendee can change it all.
While you may not be able to stop it the first time, you can prevent any disruptive attendee from participating in your race or races ever again. It’s easy with Race Entry’s block feature.
Just enter the email address of that attendee, and our software takes care of the rest.
This block feature is also great if you notice a pattern of chargebacks coming from a particular source. You can block them from completing a registration in future years, so you don’t have to deal with another one of their chargebacks.
Video Transcript
Edited for clarity.
Welcome to Race Entry’s tutorial. Today, we're going to talk about our new block feature that allows you to block people from registering for your races. This tool is great if you're getting a lot of chargebacks and maybe you had a participant who was super disruptive and caused a huge problem at your race. And, you don't want them to come to your race again. You can use this feature to block them from registering. Let's get started.
We'll start by logging into your account, and then you'll find your race from the list here. We're going to go to our fake Wing It race that we have on our demo account. And then, from the sidebar menu, you're going to go “Financial,” “View Financials.” Then, “View Blocks and Invoices.”
From this page, you can toggle between “Unpaid Invoices, “All Invoices,” and “All Blocks.” Just as a note, these invoices are specific to chargebacks. We're going to start on the “All Blocks” page.
You can see here that Alice has blocked four emails, and then you can also see how many purchases have been blocked. If you want to mass unblock these emails, you can click this button. Iif you want to drill down more you can click on the number here, and you'll see the drilldown stats. You'll see the specific emails and then how many purchases were blocked from each email. You can unblock them individually here as well.
To add an email to block you just click here and then you're going to type it in, then hit continue. You'll get a confirmation message. If you have more than one race with us, you will have the option to block this person from all of your races. Or, you can be a little bit more specific about which races specifically you want to block this person from. So, we're going to hit save. And now, when we refresh the page and go back to the “All Blocks” view, we now have five emails that are blocked.
One thing I want to note about this feature is that while we do start with email, it does block other things. We're obviously not going to go into too much detail here because we want to make sure that this tool is really effective for you. Just know that we're looking at other things, not just email when we're blocking people.
The Tucson Rodeo had a lot of success with using this feature, and they gave us permission to share that success with you. So, I'm going to navigate to their page now. You can see that Rachelle has blocked 18 emails which has resulted in 70 purchases blocked. That's a lot of chargebacks to not have to deal with, which is really great.
The other thing I want to show you on this page is that you can block people based on a chargeback invoice that comes in. So we're going to go to this page, and you can see here we have one, and there's a button here that says “Block.” You can block them right from here, you don't have to enter the email every time.
The last thing I would just want to talk about is just as you're thinking about using these chargebacks you kind of want to be a little bit strategic. Some chargebacks are more innocent situations than others. For example, maybe a husband registered his whole family for the race but didn't tell his partner. And then, his partner is reviewing the charges and is like yeah this was not us and disputes it and then you have a chargeback. So, you probably don't want to block every chargeback that comes in, but this is a tool if you're seeing repeat offenders you can definitely stop having to deal with those.
