Head Start

If you have been putting on races for a while, it probably won’t surprise you to hear that organizing events is one of the most stressful jobs out there. How stressful? According to a 2019 survey by job searching site Careercast, it is in fact the 6th most stressful job you can do, less stressful only to careers like the military and firefighting.

So what makes putting on events so stressful? What toll is it taking on people like you, working every day to make amazing races happen? And what can you do to manage your stress levels long-term and avoid mental health decline?

Today we’re going to be going over all that in a really candid discussion on stress and mental health in our industry with the help of my guest, EventWell’s, Helen Moon. Helen has been working in the event industry in different capacities for decades, and as the Founder and Chief Executive of non-profit EventWell has most recently been focusing her energy on providing mental health support to event management professionals. 

In this episode:

• Why organizing events is an inherently stressful job
• The sympathetic/parasympathetic system balance 
• The three stages of the stress response and how stress leads to burnout
• The social stigma around talking openly about stress and mental health struggles
• Good stress (eustress), bad stress (distress) and mental decline
• Striving for excellence vs striving for perfection
• Stress resilience through the lens of your "stress bucket" 
• The importance of sleep, nutrition and exercise in sustaining good long-term mental health
• Breathing (really, it works wonders)

Many thanks to our podcast sponsors, RunSignup and Racecheck, for supporting our efforts to provide great, free content to the race director community:

RunSignup are the leading all-in-one technology solution for endurance and fundraising events. More than 26,000 in-person, virtual, and hybrid events use RunSignup's free and integrated solution to save time, grow their events, and raise more. Find out more at https://runsignup.com/.

Racecheck can help you collect and showcase your participant reviews on your race website, helping you more easily convert website visitors into paying participants, with the help of their Racecheck Review Box. Download yours for free today at https://organisers.racecheck.com/.

You can find more resources on anything and everything related to race directing on our website RaceDirectorsHQ.com.

You can also share your questions about stress management, mental health or anything else in our Facebook group, Race Directors Hub.

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Securing sponsorship is undoubtedly one of the toughest jobs on any race director’s plate. And finding and approaching sponsors, in particular, is probably the toughest bit of it.

Where do you even begin looking for good sponsor prospects? How do you know which person to contact? What do sponsors really want? And how do you make that first approach to maximize your chances of success?

We’ve got some awesome tips for you on all those burning questions and more from today’s guest, Teresa Stas. Teresa is the CEO of event sponsorship consultancy Green Cactus, she is also the author of “Sell Your Event!: The Easy To Follow Practical Guide To Getting Sponsors”, and she has spent her entire career helping events of all shapes and sizes land long-term sponsorship relationships, including Hood to Coast, the world’s largest relay race - now also a growing international relay race franchise. 

In this episode:

• Selling sponsorship = selling an audience
• Figuring out your event's audience 
• How your audience's interests can guide your sponsor prospecting 
• Understanding your audience through surveys, Facebook Insights, Google Analytics, marketing personas
• Putting together an introduction deck (not a sponsorship proposal!) for your event
• Where to look and what to look out for when prospecting sponsors
• In-kind sponsors, sustainability sponsors, media sponsors
• Finding the right contact person inside each sponsor organization
• Cold-calling vs cold-emailing sponsor prospects
• How to cold-call and cold-email sponsors
• Following up on your initial cold/email to sponsors
• Making the most of sponsor rejections

Resources:

• Make sure to visit https://www.greencactusca.com/resources for additional free resources from Green Cactus to help you with your sponsor prospecting.

Many thanks to our podcast sponsors, RunSignup and Racecheck, for supporting our efforts to provide great, free content to the race director community:

RunSignup are the leading all-in-one technology solution for endurance and fundraising events. More than 26,000 in-person, virtual, and hybrid events use RunSignup's free and integrated solution to save time, grow their events, and raise more. Find out more at https://runsignup.com/.

Racecheck can help you collect and showcase your participant reviews on your race website, helping you more easily convert website visitors into paying participants, with the help of their Racecheck Review Box. Download yours for free today at https://organisers.racecheck.com/.

You can find more resources on anything and everything related to race directing on our website RaceDirectorsHQ.com.

You can also share your questions about sponsor prospecting or anything else in our Facebook group, Race Directors Hub.

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90% - keep that number in mind -  that’s how much of your event waste you should be diverting away from landfill to be able to claim that your event is a zero waste event. Sounds tough? Easy?

For most races that’s a pretty high bar to clear - particularly as, when you start adding everything up, it quickly becomes apparent that a race can generate waste in many more ways than may seem obvious at first.

To see how a race might get to that zero waste goal, I’m joined today by P3R’s Director of Operations, Brian Schmidt. Brian and the P3R team have really been at the sharp end of event sustainability, having achieved a zero waste status for the very popular DICK'S Sporting Goods Pittsburgh Marathon since before “event sustainability” was even a term!

With Brian’s help we’re going to be looking at a race’s more obvious - and less obvious - sources of waste, waste segmentation, recycling, composting and reusing waste materials, as well as the importance of joining forces with local agencies and businesses that share your sustainability goal.

And since making sustainability sustainable in the long term has to come with a dose of financial pragmatism, and a careful balancing act between respecting the environment and delivering a fun race experience, we’ll also look at things like sustainability sponsors and other ways to take some of the burden of achieving zero waste off your shoulders.

In this episode:

• The biggest sources of race waste
• How much waste does a typical race produce per participant
• What zero waste means and what sources of waste go into the calculation of race waste
• Recoverable vs reusable vs recyclable vs compostable race waste
• Waste materials you may think is recyclable but isn't
• Reducing cardboard packaging waste 
• Donating leftover swag and discarded clothing 
• Working with local sustainability organizations
• Managing race purchases to reduce material leftovers
• Premium giveaways vs tons of giveaways
• Fewer water stations = less water station waste
• Managing the cost of sustainability efforts through sustainability sponsorships

Many thanks to our podcast sponsors, RunSignup and Racecheck, for supporting our efforts to provide great, free content to the race director community:

RunSignup are the leading all-in-one technology solution for endurance and fundraising events. More than 26,000 in-person, virtual, and hybrid events use RunSignup's free and integrated solution to save time, grow their events, and raise more. Find out more at https://runsignup.com/.

Racecheck can help you collect and showcase your participant reviews on your race website, helping you more easily convert website visitors into paying participants, with the help of their Racecheck Review Box. Download yours for free today at https://organisers.racecheck.com/.

You can find more resources on anything and everything related to race directing on our website RaceDirectorsHQ.com.

You can also share your questions about event sustainability, zero waste or anything else in our Facebook group, Race Directors Hub.

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In all walks of life, people love to stress the importance of data - knowing the hard facts and using evidence to make better, more informed decisions.

So, how well do you know your participants? How well do we all in this industry understand who runners are, what they really want out of our events, and what motivates them to choose one event over another?

Well, we’re going to be shedding some light into all that today as we go through the latest findings from Running USA’s 2022 Global Runner Survey with the help of my guest, Running USA COO Christine Bowen. It’s a great pleasure to have Christine join me for this discussion, as we touch on a number of very interesting data points, including how runners choose to enter events, how they perceive the value they receive from events, and how much price and other factors affect which and how many races they’ll be entering in the near future.

In this episode:

• Runners' expected event participation in the next 12 months
• Runners' favourite racing distances
• Top reasons why runners choose a race
• Runners' attitudes on swag, travel to events, VIP race experiences
• Runners' attitudes towards race fees and price increases
• Gen Z runner attitudes and what this means for the future of racing

Many thanks to our podcast sponsors, RunSignup and Racecheck, for supporting our efforts to provide great, free content to the race director community:

RunSignup are the leading all-in-one technology solution for endurance and fundraising events. More than 26,000 in-person, virtual, and hybrid events use RunSignup's free and integrated solution to save time, grow their events, and raise more. Find out more at https://runsignup.com/.

Racecheck can help you collect and showcase your participant reviews on your race website, helping you more easily convert website visitors into paying participants, with the help of their Racecheck Review Box. Download yours for free today at https://organisers.racecheck.com/.

You can find more resources on anything and everything related to race directing on our website RaceDirectorsHQ.com.

You can also share your questions about race trends, event participation or anything else in our Facebook group, Race Directors Hub.

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Last week, if you happened to join us for part one of our two-part Facebook Ads podcast special, we set the scene by looking at Facebook marketing strategy, understanding sales funnels, planning and structuring ad campaigns, and mastering audience targeting.

This week, in part two of the discussion, it’s time to switch gears a bit and look at some more advanced topics around ad creatives, ad performance monitoring and optimization, and the very important, highly-converting area of ad retargeting.

Joining me again this week to discuss Facebook Ads is EventGrow CEO, Andy Reilly - and what a great pleasure it is to have Andy back on the podcast. 

In this episode:

• Focusing on the desirable "after state" in your ad creatives
• Picking aspects of your race to highlight in your ad copy
• Aligning your ad copy with your ad images
• Creating video ads
• Incorporating important race info in your ad
• Deciding on, allocating and front-loading your ad budget
• Running price-increase ad campaigns
• Understanding your baseline target acquisition cost
• The perils of shutting down your campaigns too soon (in less than two weeks)
• Monitoring your ad KPIs: click rate, conversion rate, ROAS
• Retargeting campaigns: spending little for high returns
• Excluding registered participants from your custom audience campaigns
• Lookalike audiences and why they often don't perform well for events
• Common mistakes people make when running Facebook ads, and how to avoid them

Many thanks to our podcast sponsors, RunSignup and Racecheck, for supporting our efforts to provide great, free content to the race director community:

RunSignup are the leading all-in-one technology solution for endurance and fundraising events. More than 26,000 in-person, virtual, and hybrid events use RunSignup's free and integrated solution to save time, grow their events, and raise more. Find out more at https://runsignup.com/.

Racecheck can help you collect and showcase your participant reviews on your race website, helping you more easily convert website visitors into paying participants, with the help of their Racecheck Review Box. Download yours for free today at https://organisers.racecheck.com/.

You can find more resources on anything and everything related to race directing on our website RaceDirectorsHQ.com.

You can also share your questions about paid marketing or anything else in our Facebook group, Race Directors Hub.

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When it comes to spending money on marketing races, Facebook Ads remains the most popular choice for race directors and professional race marketers, regardless of race size or type.

So how do you make the most of the opportunities Facebook Ads has to offer for marketing your race in 2022 and beyond?

We’re going to be going over all that in a special two-part show on Facebook Ads with the help of my guest, EventGrow CEO, Andy Reilly. You may remember Andy from the very very popular marketing psychology episode - that was episode 25 back in February  - and he’s with us again today and for our next podcast episode to really break down every aspect of Facebook Ads as it pertains to race marketing. 

Today, for part one of the discussion, we’re going to set the scene by looking at Facebook marketing strategy, understanding sales funnels, planning and structuring ad campaigns, and mastering audience targeting. And in our next episode we’re going to delve into some more advanced topics around ad creatives, ad performance monitoring and optimisation, and the very important, highly-converting area of ad retargeting.

In this episode:

• Why Facebook ads still offer the best bang for your marketing buck (even if the landscape has become more challenging for advertisers)
• Facebook ads vs Google ads vs Twitter ads vs Tik Tok ads
• Understanding ROAS (return on ad spend) and customer lifetime value
• Integrating Facebook ads into your sales funnel
• Picking the right landing page for your Facebook ad (website? registration page? Facebook event page?)
• Boosting posts vs using Facebook's Ad Manager
• Picking a campaign objective for your ad: conversions vs traffic vs reach/awareness
• Structuring and naming your campaigns, ad sets and ads
• Choosing between automatic and manual ad placements
• Pros and cons of using the dynamic creatives
• Using demographics, location and interests to target the right audience for your race
• Avoiding the pitfalls of over-targeting

Many thanks to our podcast sponsors, RunSignup and Racecheck, for supporting our efforts to provide great, free content to the race director community:

RunSignup are the leading all-in-one technology solution for endurance and fundraising events. More than 26,000 in-person, virtual, and hybrid events use RunSignup's free and integrated solution to save time, grow their events, and raise more. Find out more at https://runsignup.com/.

Racecheck can help you collect and showcase your participant reviews on your race website, helping you more easily convert website visitors into paying participants, with the help of their Racecheck Review Box. Download yours for free today at https://organisers.racecheck.com/.

You can find more resources on anything and everything related to race directing on our website RaceDirectorsHQ.com.

You can also share your questions about paid marketing or anything else in our Facebook group, Race Directors Hub.

Send us Fan Mail

Are you struggling to understand how you should approach and talk to sponsors? Is seeking sponsorship a task you dread or maybe have even given up on?

We’ve got an awesome episode for you today that is going to boost your confidence and reset your entire thinking around sponsorship. It’s going to help you understand what sponsorship truly is about, what sponsors really look to get out of it, and how, through some simple, disciplined steps and a change of mindset, you can transform your chances of securing sponsors for your event.

My guest in today’s episode is an industry leader I’ve personally followed for years. To call Kim Skildum-Reid a sponsorship expert would be something of an understatement. Through her Power Sponsorship consultancy Kim has helped countless blue-chip rightsholders and sponsors plan and execute effective sponsorship strategies, and through her best-selling books and online courses she’s probably done more than anyone to educate sponsorship practitioners on the fundamentals of sponsorship. 

So it is super-exciting to have Kim on the podcast today sharing her insights into the fundamentals of sponsorship, and the mindset you, as a sponsorship seeker, need to adopt to succeed in this challenging arena.

In this episode:

• Leveraging your audience year-round
• Framing your audience reach to sponsors
• Helping sponsors "get" your vision through your sponsorship proposal
• The importance of understanding the sponsor's point of view
• Putting a value on in-kind sponsorship
• Writing a winning sponsorship proposal that "sells" your deal internally in the sponsor organization
• Inventory audits: putting together a list of all the benefits you could offer to sponsors
• Dealing with sponsors as peers
• Overdelivering for sponsors (and getting recognized for it)
• Sharing sponsorship reports with sponsors
• Firing your sponsors when they're underperforming 
• Why you should stop using gold, silver bronze sponsorship packages

Further reading:

• Kim's list of must-read follow-up materials: https://bit.ly/3AFMTx2

Many thanks to our podcast sponsors, RunSignup and Racecheck, for supporting our efforts to provide great, free content to the race director community:

RunSignup are the leading all-in-one technology solution for endurance and fundraising events. More than 26,000 in-person, virtual, and hybrid events use RunSignup's free and integrated solution to save time, grow their events, and raise more. Find out more at https://runsignup.com/.

Racecheck can help you collect and showcase your participant reviews on your race website, helping you more easily convert website visitors into paying participants, with the help of their Racecheck Review Box. Download yours for free today at https://organisers.racecheck.com/.

You can find more resources on anything and everything related to race directing on our website RaceDirectorsHQ.com.

You can also share your questions about sponsorship or anything else in our Facebook group, Race Directors Hub.

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Personalized participant video, where a participant receives an edited video of themselves in the race after they cross the finish line (often as soon as a few minutes after), has been a long time coming in mass-participation events.

So how far has personalized video technology really come over the last few years? What does it add to the race experience? How much does it cost? And is the cost worth it, compared to, say, offering just race photos, as most races currently do?

Today we’ll be looking at all these questions and more, through the lense of personalized video tech pioneer iRewind. iRewind has been providing personalized video services to races - either directly or indirectly - for years, including to such high profile events as the NYC Marathon, Paris Marathon and ASICS London 10K. So it’s a great pleasure to be able to hear from iRewind co-founder and COO, Salvador Garcia Zalduegui on how personalized video technology works and how it has rapidly evolved over the last few years to the point of now making it widely affordable for a large number of races.

In this episode:

• A short history of iRewind: from skiing video capture to mass-participation personalized video
• Participant personalized video: what it is, how it's captured, and what it looks like to the end user (=participants)
• Personalized video compared to race photos, and how the two work alongside each other to expand reach and enhance the participant race experience
• The evolution of personalized video technology, and why it's time has come
• Breakdown of a typical perzonalised video capture setup
• Uploading, sorting, tagging and editing participant race videos, using image and motion recognition technology
• How you can set up personalized video in your race, and how much it costs
• Getting your personalized video costs covered by a sponsor
• Engagement statistics for personalized video

Many thanks to our podcast sponsors, RunSignup and Racecheck, for supporting our efforts to provide great, free content to the race director community:

RunSignup are the leading all-in-one technology solution for endurance and fundraising events. More than 26,000 in-person, virtual, and hybrid events use RunSignup's free and integrated solution to save time, grow their events, and raise more. Find out more at https://runsignup.com/.

Racecheck can help you collect and showcase your participant reviews on your race website, helping you more easily convert website visitors into paying participants, with the help of their Racecheck Review Box. Download yours for free today at https://organisers.racecheck.com/.

You can find more resources on anything and everything related to race directing on our website RaceDirectorsHQ.com.

You can also share your questions about personalized race vide or anything else in our Facebook group, Race Directors Hub.

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Have you ever thought about trademarking your race’s name or logo? Trademarking your race and brand could help protect your business against trademark infringement, and the risk of getting someone else’s event confused with yours, whether that is done through malice or ignorance.

Today we’re going to be looking at all aspects of trademarks and the trademark registration process, with the help of no less than three distinguished guests - Brian Gallant of Sinister Sports, who had to defend his race trademark against a competing claim not too long ago, and intellectual property lawyers Suzanne Sjovold and Jon Deppe who will be bringing the legal expertise in today’s highly technical subject.

We are going to be looking at the process of registering a new trademark, defending a registered trademark you own against infringement, as well as the many protections afforded to your brand by law even in the absence of a formal trademark registration, through the concept of common law trademarks. So stick with us to have all your trademark-related questions answered.

In this episode:

• Trademarks as a consumer protection device
• What aspects of a race can (and can't) be trademarked
• Trademark geographical limitations: federal vs state/regional protection
• Common law trademarks: what they are, and what protection they already provide for your race even without trademark registration
• Resolving conflicts between common law trademarks and registered trademarks
• Defending your common law trademark against a competing trademark registration
• Why using your trademark in trade is crucial for establishing trademark protection
• Registering a trademark, trademark registration classes, and trademark search best practices
• Establishing registration priority with intent-to-use trademarks
• The cost of registering a trademark
• DIY trademark registration: is it worth it?
• (R) vs TM: Understanding trademark symbols and when/where to use them 
• Renewing and defending registered trademarks

Many thanks to our podcast sponsors, RunSignup and Racecheck, for supporting our efforts to provide great, free content to the race director community:

RunSignup are the leading all-in-one technology solution for endurance and fundraising events. More than 26,000 in-person, virtual, and hybrid events use RunSignup's free and integrated solution to save time, grow their events, and raise more. Find out more at https://runsignup.com/.

Racecheck can help you collect and showcase your participant reviews on your race website, helping you more easily convert website visitors into paying participants, with the help of their Racecheck Review Box. Download yours for free today at https://organisers.racecheck.com/.

You can find more resources on anything and everything related to race directing on our website RaceDirectorsHQ.com.

You can also share your questions about race trademarks or anything else in our Facebook group, Race Directors Hub.

Send us Fan Mail

When it comes to marketing your race, email marketing is the granddaddy of all marketing channels. Forget TikTok, and Instagram and Facebook Ads, if you don’t have a sound email marketing strategy, you could be passing on a huge opportunity to grow your race - and also falling short of delivering the highest quality experience you can for your participants.

Today we are going to be taking a very close look at all aspects of email marketing strategy, from the types of emails you should be sending, and when and how often you should send them, to exactly what you should be saying to your participants and prospective participants through your email copy. And we’ll be doing all that with the help of my guest, marketing pro, and very passionate email marketing advocate, Hollie Light - or “Hollie from the emails”, as she’s come to be known.

In this episode:

• Why email marketing is so important for marketing your race
• Are you emailing your audience too often? 
• Segmenting your audience into converted (signed-up participants) and unconverted (everyone else) subscribers
• Newsletters: whom to send them to, what to put in them, how often you should send them
• Sticking to a regular emailing schedule: creating a content calendar, repurposing content 
• The importance of rewarding your email subscribers
• Selling your race through your newsletter
• Tips for engaging email subject lines (hint: it's not about you, it's about them!)
• Nurturing subscribers to signing up through staged email sequences
• Using email as a customer service/upselling channel for existing participants
• Marketing your shorter races as training events for your longer races
• Growing your mailing list with freebie/giveaway funnels
• Email design for optimal open rates and reader friendliness
• Using testimonials and social proof in your emails
• Productivity tools, email templates and other tips to help you optimize your email marketing

Many thanks to our podcast sponsors, RunSignup and Racecheck, for supporting our efforts to provide great, free content to the race director community:

RunSignup are the leading all-in-one technology solution for endurance and fundraising events. More than 26,000 in-person, virtual, and hybrid events use RunSignup's free and integrated solution to save time, grow their events, and raise more. Find out more at https://runsignup.com/.

Racecheck can help you collect and showcase your participant reviews on your race website, helping you more easily convert website visitors into paying participants, with the help of their Racecheck Review Box. Download yours for free today at https://organisers.racecheck.com/.

You can find more resources on anything and everything related to race directing on our website RaceDirectorsHQ.com.

You can also share your questions about email marketing or anything else in our Facebook group, Race Directors Hub.

Send us Fan Mail