Turning interest into entries

Whilst there’s currently a lot going on in our industry, we wanted to share with you our take on the road ahead. Here's how we plan to get more people on your start lines, with less hassle, and how we're putting collaboration at the heart of it.

What we're going to do.

Put simply, we’re going to give Race Organisers what they need most: more participants and incremental revenue from bookings. In other words, growth.

How we're going to do it.

We’re going to get even better at doing what we do: converting interest into bookings.

We believe that as we emerge from the pandemic, there are significant opportunities to grow participation numbers across the board. As a participant acquisition channel, our service can be split into the classic segments of the marketing funnel: awareness, consideration and conversion. At every stage there are opportunities for growth, for ourselves and for our Race Organiser clients.

A green background with a funnel-shaped flowchart. The chart shows five stages: "interest" at the top, then "research (awareness)," next "findarace.com (consideration)," followed by "checkout (conversion)," and finally "bookings" at the bottom. Each stage points to the next.

So rather than broadening our services by pivoting in new directions, eg developing into a standalone booking platform or putting on our own events, our focus is 100% on becoming the go-to marketing channel for an event looking to grow. Our aim will be, as it always has been, to offer a better return for marketing spend than any other acquisition channel: including ppc and paid social.

Addressing pain points.

We're working with more events than ever and organisations of all sizes, from the Mass Participation Sports Organisers (MSO) group to your local Primary School's fun run. We speak to Race Organisers every day and understand their challenges clearly.

For example, we know that getting event participant data out of findarace.com and into your reg platform can be a time consuming yet critical process. We're working on innovative new ways to integrate more closely with the event management platforms Race Organisers use everyday to make getting the booking data from findarace.com to your platform easier than ever. An api is already live with the Eventrac platform and more are in development with two of the best-known online registration providers in the UK market. We are the only marketplace able to do this.

At the same time, for those working with their own in-house registration software, we’ll be releasing some custom integrations to automate the migration of participant data from findarace.com to their system.

Flowchart on a green background showing a central box labeled "bookings" with arrows pointing down to three boxes labeled "flexible downloads," "API integrations," and "custom webhooks." Each of those has an arrow pointing to a bottom box labeled "your CRM.

We work with hundreds of Race Organisers, each one with a different CRM set-up, and we're committed to providing a solution that maximises booking revenue whilst minimising admin for everyone.

The road ahead.

Over the last 18 months, event organisers have adapted brilliantly in exceptionally challenging conditions, bringing incredible life-affirming experiences to hundreds of thousands of people. But for many it will be the coming year that shapes their business longer-term. For our industry, 2022 is crunch time.

Despite the uncertainty continuing in the short term, we're feeling optimistic about 2022. We know the demand for in-person race day experiences is strong and believe that with an industry working together, we're going to see start lines busier than ever.