How to Create a Race (Complete Guide for Race Directors)

Creating a new race is a great way to fundraise for your nonprofit or school, build a business, or just bring your community together. Whatever your inspiration, turning your idea into reality takes work. The right software can make planning your entire race easier from start to finish.

Starting a race means putting all of the details together, and we’ll cover everything you need to know to create a successful race and put your ideas in action:

1. Make a Race Registration Form
2. Implement Effective Race Marketing & Growth Strategies
3. Grow Your Race Fundraising
4. Streamline Race Management
5. Enhance Your Race Day Experience & Memories

1. Make a Race Registration Form

Online race registration is the most common way people sign up for races. You’ll want to start by creating your registration form so that people can easily register for your race.

It may seem counterintuitive but starting with your form and getting it online even before you’ve officially opened registration is a good starting point. It helps your new race become easier to find online and get more people to your race.

With Race Entry, you can create your registration form in minutes. (And, you’ll start building your email list from your closed registration form.)

• Customizable Online Race Registration Form – Customize your form with your colors, logo, and a background photo. Plus, add questions to ensure you have the participant information you need.
• Simple Two-page Registration Form – Don’t lose registrations to a long form with many pages. Ensure a high conversion rate with a simple form.
• No Participant Account Creation Required – No one likes having to create yet another account and remember yet another password. Your participants won’t have that headache when you create your registration form on Race Entry.
• Multiple Registrations in One Transaction – Make it easy for your participants to sign up in groups for your race.
• Registration Open Email Notification Signup – Build your email list from your closed registration form by allowing people to sign up for an email notification when you open registration. This notification list also helps you boost opening day sales.
• Low Service Fees – Choose a registration service that lets you keep the full registration fee and charges your participants a low service fee. Race Entry’s fees are low and competitive for online race registration.
• Regular Fund Disbursements – You need your money so you can pay for your race. Race Entry offers bi-monthly disbursements of your race funds leading up to your race. No need to wait for race day.

With a quick, customizable form, you’ll start getting people signed up for your race soon.

2. Implement Effective Race Marketing & Growth Strategies

You need to get people to sign up for your race, and the more the better. You need a race registration platform designed to help you grow. Race Entry’s marketing and built-in growth tools do just that.

1. Course Map – Create a free race map to highlight key features of your course, including elevation, to encourage athletes to sign up for your course.
2. Share & Save – Offer a $1-2 discount to athletes who share your registration page with their friends on social media while they’re signing up.
3. Referral Program – Offer refunds for each new athlete your participants get to sign up for your race. Set your refund amount per referral, and only refund up to the full registration.
4. Abandoned Cart Emails – Capture incomplete registrations with automated abandoned cart emails. Make it easy for athletes to remember to finish signing up.
5. Calendar Listing – Grow your online presence and make it easy for runners to find your race on our race calendar and others that we’ve integrated with.
6. Marketing Page – Share information about your race, photos, and videos to get people excited about doing your race. You can even feature verified reviews from last year's participants.
7. Group Discounts – Encourage more people to sign up for your race by advertising a group discount on your form. This approach also increases your order size.
8. Bundles – Offer multi-person registration packs to get more people and families signed up for your race.
9. Birthday Emails – Build long-lasting relationships with your participants by sending customizable birthday emails. You can even include a special birthday promo code as a birthday gift.
10. Email Notification Sign Up – Don’t let people forget about your race just because they couldn’t sign up when they got to your form. Let them sign up for an email notification when registration opens instead.
11. Loyalty Program – Make your race a tradition for your athletes by offering discounts to returning participants.
12. Free Website – Create your own race website for free to expand your digital footprint and make it easy for AI to get accurate information about your race.
13. Free Email Marketing – Send emails to past participants, current participants, and more to sell more registrations and communicate important race day details.
14. Site Tracking – Add tracking to your registration page and others to understand how successful your digital ads are.
15. Cross-Promotion – If you have multiple races or an existing race, you can cross-promote your races from the confirmation pages.

With proven growth tools, you’ll have everything you need to make your race a success and grow your it year after year. Learn more about how to grow your race.

3. Grow Your Race Fundraising

Whether you’re creating a race to fundraiser for your nonprofit or partnering with local charities, you need tools that encourage donations and boost fundraising:

• Donation Opportunities – Accept donations from a standalone page and during registration. You can encourage your donors to share your fundraiser with their friends with pre-built email, SMS, and social media messages.
• Fundraising Teams – Let people create their own fundraising teams and goals to support your overall fundraising goal. You can even require fundraising team creation when people register for your race.
• Gamified Peer-to-Peer Fundraising – Show progress toward your goal, most recent donations, and progress on all of the mini-fundraisers your supporters have started on their own. Tracking support and donations publicly creates competition and helps you get more donations.
• Race for Free – Offer athletes the opportunity to race for free in exchange for fundraising and reaching a set fundraising target. You can both grow your fundraising and make your race more accessible to people to participate.
• Silent Auction – Host an online silent auction as another fundraising strategy. Keep your top bidders updated when they are outbid to encourage competition.

With a range of tools to support your fundraising efforts, you’ll be able to make a successful race fundraiser.

4. Streamline Race Management

Making a race means keeping track of all the details. You need tools that make race management easy. Race Entry’s tools do just that:

• Checklist – Track deadlines and details for race permits, barricades, port-a-potties, etc. to ensure that everything you need to do gets done on time.
• Reports – Understand your registration trends, financial forecasting, and more with pre-built and custom reports.
• Participant CRM – Know how engaged your participants are with details on donations, emails opened, and more.
• Sponsor Sales & Management – Manage your sponsorship program with online sales, invoicing, a sponsor CRM, and automated renewals.
• Booth Map Sales – Streamline vendor booth sales for packet pickup and finish line festivities with an interactive map.
• Merchandise Sales – Manage your race merchandise sales from an online store and featured items during registration.
• Volunteer Recruitment & Management – Gather volunteers, communicate with free mass email, and manage onsite check in.

With Race Entry’s race management tools, creating a race is easy.

5. Enhance Your Race Day Experience & Memories

You’re making a race. Your participants are making memories. It all comes down to a great race day experience, and Race Entry offers tools that enhance your race day experience.

• Live Race Results – Update results from your race in real-time so participants can see their place among the competition.
• Personalized Results Pages – Offer each of your participants a personal page with their race results that they can share with their friends on social media.
• Finisher Certificate – Customize a downloadable finisher certificate for your participants.
• Finish Line Video – Set up a finish line video stream and feature the moment each participant crosses the finish line on their personalized results page.
• AI Photo Matching – Highlight key moments for your participants from your race with AI-powered photo matching to display action photos on each participant’s results page.
• Photo Sales – Add watermarks to your photos and sell photos to your participants. Our third-party partner takes care of fulfillment, and you can add some margin to generate more revenue for your race.

You’ll also need race registration software that makes your timer’s job easy. Race Entry’s software supports timers with

• Simple Bib Assignment – Assign bibs before printing or assign them dynamically on race day.
• Searchable Results – Easily search results to find specific participants and answer questions.
• Timer Integrations – Quickly transfer timing data from the most common timer software.

With all of these tools and customization, you can offer your participants a great experience on race day and easy ways to remember their experience.

Learn more about how to organize a 5K race.