How to Organize a Virtual Race

Organizing a virtual race or including a virtual race category with your in-person race can help you get more people participating and make your race accessible to more people.

The key to a successful virtual race is creating a sense of community despite the distance between your participants. We’ll cover what you need to do to organize a successful virtual race:

• What Is a Virtual Race?
• Why Do Race Directors Hold Virtual Races?
• How to Market a Virtual Race
• How to Find Virtual Race Sponsors
• Virtual Race FAQs

What is a Virtual Race?

A virtual race is a race that is held at a location and time of the participant’s choosing instead of at a specific time and place. Virtual race participants don’t require a hotel booking, airline tickets, or other complicated travel arrangements.

Each virtual race has different rules for the timing allotted for completing the race, but they are more flexible on the location and the timing of completing the race than a traditional race.

Virtual race events often include swag like medals, shirts, and sometimes other items like bibs or sticker decals. These items help create a sense of community and build enthusiasm around your virtual race.

Virtual Race Calendar

Why do Race Directors Hold Virtual Races?

Race directors hold virtual runs for many reasons. Here are seven reasons why you should consider creating a virtual race or including a virtual race category:

1. Cost Savings
2. Better Margins
3. More Participants
4. Greater Fundraising Reach
5. Flexibility
6. Simple Management
7. Expanded Online Presence

1. Cost Savings

Virtual races are much cheaper to organize because:

• No need to obtain a permit.
• No need to hire a professional timer.
• No need to hire a porta potty company.
• No barricades needed.
• No law enforcement required.
• No need to pay to host a packet pickup expo.
• No need to hire a finisher announcer.

These costs can add up, so organizing a virtual race is much cheaper than organizing an in-person event.

If you’re adding a virtual category to your in-person race, your costs for delivering on these signups are lower compared to your in-person registrations. You’re ordering shirts, bibs, and medals anyway, so it’s not that much more work to send race packets to your virtual participants.

2. Better Margins

Because virtual races have much fewer costs, you’ll have a higher profit margin on your registrations. This larger profit margin helps you be more profitable. If you’re organizing your race as part of a nonprofit, you’ll have all of that extra margin to support your work.

3. More Participants

A virtual race is accessible to more people because they don’t have to travel or be nearby to participate.

Consider pitching your virtual race as training to prepare for an in-person race. Keep participating fun by offering awards, medals, and swag to your participants. You can even put together a race day playlist to further enhance your virtual experience and help people feel connected.

You can also ask your participants to share their own videos and photos from running your virtual race. You can share their posts and even compile them to further enhance the excitement and connection around your virtual race.

Remember to charge more shipping for your international virtual race participants. You will be vastly increasing your marketability to not just those that live within a certain distance of your live event, but to essentially anywhere you are willing to ship them what they purchased.

4. Greater Fundraising Reach

By drawing participants from all over, you’ll expand your fundraising reach. This extended reach enhances the effectiveness of your peer-to-peer fundraising. It’s much easier to scale your fundraising and get more people donating when you are expanding your reach with a virtual race.

5. Flexibility

Virtual races offer an event the ability to quickly pivot and make changes. Even if you have a live race, you can plan and execute a virtual event in a matter of a few minutes.

You can also offer your participants the same flexibility – you can let people pick when they’re going to complete your race. They can run later in the day instead of early morning. You can also give people a week or a month to complete their race, which can make it easier for people to fit it into their schedules.

6. Simple Management

As you’re saving money on permits, timing services, barricades, etc., you’re also reducing the organization and management task load. Virtual races are easy to create because you don’t have to do the work to host an in-person race.

All you have to do is ship the swag or packet to each of your participants.

You may find a company that will do all of the fulfillment, so you just have to create the designs and do all the marketing. Of course, this approach can cost more than managing the shipping yourself. You’ll also have less of a quality control check if you’re not seeing the shirts and medals before shipping.

7. Expanded Online Presence

Building your virtual race online presence and awareness can be a challenge for in-person races. You can increase your engagement on social media by offering a virtual option with your in-person race or even a completely virtual race.

By putting on a virtual event or virtual challenge, you are giving these new followers a reason to be engaged as well as spread the word about what you are trying to accomplish.

Check out: How to Create a Race (Complete Guide for Race Directors).

How to Market a Virtual Race

Good marketing is a combination of understanding your offer, identifying your audience, and how you get your message out.

We’ll cover each of these three elements to help you create an effective marketing strategy for your virtual race.

Your Offer & Virtual Race Branding

Creating a virtual race brand presents some unique challenges. Athletes and participants are paying for an experience. Without a distinct course, day, finish line, and competitors, what can you do to craft a distinct, branded experience for your participants?

It comes down to the details – both tangible and psychological.

Race Bag & Swag Items

To make your virtual race experience tangible, consider the following:

• Create & ship branded race bibs.
• Create printable finisher certificates.
• Ship race shirts and finisher medals.
• Create a virtual race bag with promotional offerings from your partners.

When it comes to the psychological part of your virtual race, consider the other ways you can mimic other aspects of an in-person race.

Competing with a Group

One part of the in-person race experience is competing with a group. You can help your participants recreate that experience on a small scale with the incentives below:

• Offer group discounts or group bundles to encourage people to sign up and participate with their friends and family.
• Create a referral system to reward your participants for getting their friends and family to sign up, too.

You’ll get more people signing up and you’ll make it more likely that your participants will complete your race because they’re doing it with friends and family.

Timing & Scoring

Another part of an in-person race experience is that it’s a competition. Some people want to win. Others want to PR. Offer your virtual race participants a competition with the ideas below:

• Allow participants to submit their own results after completing the virtual run.
• Recommend free tracking apps to measure the distance.

With each of these elements, you can create a valuable race experience for your participants.

Fun Ideas for Virtual Races

To further enhance your virtual race experience, consider incorporating the ideas below to make it more fun:

• Scavenger Hunt
• Photo Contest
• Costume Contest
• Best Finish Line Design
• Fastest Time
• Most Fundraised
• Live Engagement on Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, etc.

Many race organizers still think that virtual races are dumb, fake, or not a real event.  However, what they miss are the financial advantages and the ability to expand their brand and make it more accessible to more people.

Your Virtual Race Audience

As you’re creating your virtual race experience, keep your audience in mind. Start by asking yourself questions about their demographics and what they’re looking for in a virtual race.

Demographic questions include gender, age, and athletic experience. Start with these questions to create an idea of who your target market is. Then, ask why these people participate in virtual races.

Why Do Participants Run in Virtual Races?

Reasons people run virtual races varies, but common themes include:

• Cost Savings – Some participants don’t have to pay travel or accommodation expenses to participate in your race.
• Scheduling Flexibility – Some participants may not like waiting in lines or waking up early for in-person races. With a virtual race, they can choose what time of day they run and even what season they run depending on how you’ve structured your virtual race.
• Athletes in Training – Some participants may want to complete a virtual race as part of training for an in-person race.
• Supporting a Favorite Cause – Some participants are motivated to participate because your virtual race is fundraising for one of their favorite charities.

Add to this list of reasons as you consider your target audience and what your virtual race offers. Highlight the most important selling points of your race in your marketing.

Trying to find a virtual race to do? Check out How to Find Your Next Virtual Race.

Virtual Race Marketing Tactics

To effectively market your virtual race, you’ll need to focus on your digital marketing:

• Organic social media posts
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Ad campaigns
• Retargeting visitors to your site or social media page

As you're starting your virtual race, be willing to spend some money on ads. Use social media and Google to place your ads and track their results. Since you have a higher margin with your virtual race, you’ll have more room in your budget for ad spending.

As you get participants signing up for your race, encourage your participants to help you get more people signed up. Your most persuasive marketers are your Race Entry’s software makes this easy in two key ways:

1. Facebook Share & Save – Offer your participants a small discount on registration when they share your registration page with their Facebook friends. You’ll expand your reach on social media with an organic post and personal recommendation from a friend.
2. Referral Reward Program – Offer your participants a set refund amount for each additional person they get to sign up for your race. They can redeem their refund from their participant management portal, so you don’t have any extra work to do.

With these network marketing tactics, you’ll expand your marketing reach and get the attention of other interested athletes.

How to Find Virtual Race Sponsors

Virtual races allow for great sponsorship opportunities. Focus on businesses that have broad reach over your target region or nationally.

Reach out to grocery stores, restaurant chains, athletic store brands, food delivery services, etc. These businesses want to sell their services or products – it doesn’t matter to them if your participants show up for a race or complete a virtual race.

Check out: How to Build a Sponsor Sales Funnel for Your Race.

Virtual race goodie bags have been a great tool for years now, both for live and virtual races alike! These virtual race bags provide a great opportunity for your race participants to claim offers, and visit websites of your sponsors.

Race Entry makes it easy to feature promotional offers from your sponsors online to your participants. With these offers, you’ll also see data on page views and engagement with promotional offers. This data can be helpful and valuable to your sponsors in addition to the sales they were able to make from partnering with you.

Learn more about Race Entry’s sponsor sales tools for race directors.

Virtual Race FAQs

When should you open registration for your virtual race?

Many in-person races open registration four to six months before race day. With a virtual race, consider opening your race registration earlier than that because it will give you more time to get the most out of network marketing strategies like group registrations and a referral reward program.

When should you close registration for your virtual race?

When you close registration depends on what you’re including in your virtual race package, how long shipping to participants takes, and when your deadline for completing your virtual race is.

You should close registration when you run out of shirts, bibs, medals or whatever else you’re including in your virtual race package.

You should also close registration with enough time for your participants to get their virtual race package and complete the race. If you’re giving people a month to complete the race, you have more flexibility.

What are the best perks to offer for a virtual race?

Race bibs, race shirts, finisher medals, and a virtual race bag are the most common perks to offer for a virtual race. Ensure you have good designs for your shirt and medals because that will help motivate people to sign up. Most virtual medals are a minimum of 3.5 inches.

Whatever you include in your virtual race package, be sure to communicate clearly when you’ll ship the packets out so your participants know when to start looking for their package.

What online race registration platform can you use for virtual race registration?

Race Entry offers free online race registration software to virtual race directors. With our software you can manage virtual races with virtual result uploading, printable finisher certificates, personalized results certificates, sponsor sales tools, an experience app, and more.