Growing Your Community's Race

“Growth solves (nearly) all problems” - Sam Altman

“Life is growth. You grow or you die” - Phil Knight

An update from Ian

Before that summer evening at Barnaby’s when I first had beers with Tim, I knew nothing about growing community races. The prior chapter of my career was spent working with growing technology companies. I had witnessed companies growing from afar, which seemed to make people happy, but also come with growing pains.

I believed that helping community events grow would not only benefit races, it would help advance our mission of uniting athletes and strengthen communities.

Since I didn’t know anything, I had to start from square 1. For a race to grow, more participants need to register. Before registering, a participant must be aware of the event. So how do participants discover events? I had my own methods of finding runs through google, talking to friends and checking social media, but I did not want to rely on my intuition. I wanted data.

I found the data in the below chart that displays how athletes discover races.

Since these 4 buckets are how athletes discover races, they also represent how races can get discovered by athletes and grow.

Not long after that evening at Barnaby's, it became clear that new technology could help community races grow. So we built Run The Day's next generation platform to help races grow.

We believe that growing races will:

• build stronger communities

• raise more money for great causes

• get people active and connected

• help us positively impact our mission

A quadruple win!

Happy Friday! Happy Easter Weekend!

How Athletes Discover Their Next Race

Growth Tactics

• Social Media: If you have a large following, great! Skip to the next bullet. If you don’t, then you’re like me. The good news is that you don’t need a following like Kim Kardashian to leverage social media to grow your race. Here are several ways to tap into the power of social media:

  • Ask your community and event participants to post about the event (free)

  • Partner with local influencers though personal connections (free) or through a marketplace (paid)

  • Create a Facebook event for your race (free)

  • Run social ads or boosted posts (paid)

• Events Athlete has Previously Run: Emails, text messages and postcards to prior year participants is a great way to keep them coming back.

• Referrals from Friends and Family: Encourage participants to invite friends and family by making the event easily shareable. Teams empower your participants to authentically share the event with their network.

• Google Search / Race Calendars: post on race calendars - suggestions are listed below.

• Other Pro Tips

  • Price Tiers: Increasing prices is a great way to drive urgency so runners register early.

  • Guerrilla Marketing: make cold calls, pass out flyers, hang posters with QR codes, knock on doors and put out lawn signs.

4 Race Calendars to Post Your Event 📅

Listing on calendars is a great way to boost awareness for your race. Here are 4 websites to list your race:

1. Run The Day: list your race for free on Run The Day’s race calendar

2. Race-Find: a race discovery platform by date, location and distance

3. RunGuides: lists running events and clubs in North America

4. Running in The USA: a directory of running races and clubs 

Tech Update: Teams

Teams are a great way to grow your race registrations and dollars fundraised.

• Included in Run The Day Teams Feature: 

  • Manage team members

  • Assign new team captains

  • Set team fundraising goal

  • Easily share team page to X, Facebook, Text message and Email

  • Fundraising team leaderboard with direct ‘DONATE’ links

  • Upload authentic team photo

  • Email team members via mobile app

  • And more

• How to Use: In your race director dashboard, switch the teams toggle to ‘ON’. Participants will be able to create and join teams when registering for your race. Team rosters, fundraising leaderboards, team pages and other features will display automatically.

Download Run The Day in the App Store and on Google Play.

Get Sponsors 💰

Raise money for your cause with a ‘do-it-for-me’ approach to race sponsorship.

• The #1 challenge we hear from race directors is getting sponsors.

• Sponsorships are often the biggest money maker for a race (ICYMI - tips to budget your community’s race).

 Enter: Run The Day’s Sponsorship Consortium

• End-to end management of sponsorships sales

• We handle prospecting, copywriting, outreach, pitching and close

• You’ll get served sponsorships for your race to accept

• Your cause will receive money

We are opening applications to our community before making it available to the public. Apply to join Run The Day’s Sponsorship Consortium here:

Authentic Photos + Volunteer Signup + Sponsor Logos

@goruntheday

Highlighting the 2024 Walk Run Roll for Daniel’s setup on the Run The Day platform!