It’s probably not an overstatement to say that volunteers are the backbone of every successful race. They are the people that make much of race day happen and, yet, recruiting and managing volunteers, training them properly and retaining them for the long run remains a constant headache for race directors of all levels of experience.

Well, today we’re going to try and make everyone’s life a little bit easier by going over some great tips and strategies for streamlining your volunteer recruitment and fine-tuning all aspects of your volunteer management. We’ll discuss tips for balancing your volunteer load across volunteer shifts, creating mega shifts with enough buffer to make sure you’ve got all the people you need on race day, and some tried-and-tested tactics to mitigate volunteer attrition.

My guest for today’s discussion, Tim Bradley, is the volunteer coordinator for the McCourt Foundation, organizers of the Los Angeles Marathon and other marquee races. Tim has recruited and managed thousands of volunteers over the years and, as you’ll see, he has developed a very specific approach to running volunteer programs, based on evidence and experimentation. 

In this episode:

• What motivates volunteers to volunteer for a race
• Volunteer recruitment for for-profit vs nonprofit races
• The cost of recruiting and managing volunteers: donations, free entries, shirts, meals, transportation
• What volunteers can and can't do for your race
• Organizing your volunteer force: flat vs hierarchical team structures
• Qualities to look for in your group captains and super-volunteers
• Tim's detailed volunteer recruitment plan/schedule
• Recruiting individual volunteers vs recruiting volunteer groups
• Load balancing, mega shifts and diversification: making sure your shifts fill up evenly across the board
• The importance of mega shifts and shift buffers/padding for mitigating volunteer attrition on race day
• Working out how many volunteers you'll need for your race
• Recruiting volunteers through email, social media, paid ads, text messages, cold calling, volunteer marketplaces
• Building a volunteer mailing list 
• Signing up volunteers from your past race participants 
• Recruiting groups of volunteers from high school service clubs, sports teams
• How to link to your volunteer program/sign up page from your website
• Reducing friction throughout your volunteer signup process
• Singing in and briefing volunteers on race day
• Practical food/snack ideas for volunteers and how to distribute them on race day
• "Thank you" emails and issuing volunteer service verification letters

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/.

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On February 17, former president of the Portland Marathon, Lester Smith, was indicted by a grand jury on charges of wire fraud and tax evasion. In the indictment, Smith, who has led the Portland Marathon as both president and race director since 1982, is accused of embezzling more than $1 million dollars from the race’s coffers to fund his personal luxury lifestyle.

Today, we’ll be looking back at the story of Lester Smith and his time at the Portland Marathon, the legal cases brought against him and the impact events have had on the Portland running community and the Portland Marathon.

With me to discuss the facts and implications from the case is Jeff Manning, a runner and veteran investigative reporter from the Oregonian who has followed the Lester Smith case closely since it first broke in 2018. So stick around for a fascinating dive into the Portland Marathon story.

In this episode:

• How Lester Smith evaded detection to misappropriate more than $1 million from the Portland Marathon from 2012-2018
• Smith's track record at the helm of the race
• Details of Smith's $850k settlement with the Oregon in DoJ in 2018
• The allegations in the federal grand jury indictment brought against him in Feb 2022
• The impact the legal turmoil has had on the local community and the Portland Marathon

Thanks to our sponsors, RunSignup and Racecheck for supporting quality content for race directors by sponsoring this episode.

To learn more about RunSignup's awesome all-in-one technology solution for endurance and fundraising events, supporting more than 26,000 in-person, virtual, and hybrid events, visit runsignup.com.

And, to see how Racecheck's Review Box can help your race increase registrations by a massive 20%, using the power of race reviews and social proof, make sure to visit organisers.racecheck.com.

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What’s in a brand? Is it the sleek logo with the matching color palette and catchy tagline? Is it your organization’s mission statement and your event’s core values? Or is it every single thing that makes your event a memorable experience for your participants on race day?

Well, according to my guest today, event branding expert Peter Abraham, your brand is all of the above and a whole lot more. It is the heart and soul of your event, and what it aspires to be for your team, your participants, your stakeholders and the rest of the world. And, at a practical level, your brand is the North Star in every decision you make about your event, from your logo and the contents of your swag bag to your choice of sponsors and the design of your race course.

Today,  we have a lot of unpacking to do. We’re going to be looking at understanding what your event’s brand is and how you can develop it, we’re going to be discussing your organization’s mission statement (and how to come up with one, if you don’t have one already) and we’re going to be tying all that back to laying out your marketing plan and finding your event’s unique voice.

In today's episode:

• What makes up a brand
• Why your brand needs a point of view
• Avoiding the trap of being all things to all people
• Consistency as a cornerstone of your branding
• Don't be different for the sake of it - be different for a reason
• How is your brand solving you participants' problems?
• The importance of having a robust mission statement
• Using your mission statement to make decisions on everything you do: designing a logo, mapping your course, conducting yourself in public
• Writing a good mission statement: What do you do? And how do you do it?
• Going from your mission statement to a marketing plan
• Telling the story of your race experience through your marketing campaigns

Thanks to RunSignup for supporting quality content for race directors by sponsoring this episode. More than 25,000 in-person, virtual, and hybrid events use RunSignup's free and integrated solution to save time, grow their events, and raise more. If you'd like to learn more about RunSignup's all-in-one technology solution for endurance and fundraising events visit runsignup.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 branding, marketing or anything else in our Facebook group, Race Directors Hub.

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Why do some of your marketing campaigns work and others don’t? Why do you yourself as a consumer respond a lot more favorably to some types of messages and not others? At the end of the day, what makes us all take our wallets out and pull the trigger on that next purchase?

The answer to all those questions more often than not comes down to psychology. We are programmed to respond to certain queues - what our peers say about a product, how scarce that product feels, or how likeable the brand selling to us appears - in ways that we ourselves often don’t fully understand.

Today we have an absolutely fascinating discussion for you on all those triggers that make marketing campaigns work, and how you can bring the best of those lessons to your event marketing. We’re going to be touching, among other things, on using race testimonials as social proof, early-bird pricing & price increases, the role of influencers and celebrity runners, and how you can use freebies to increase your registrations and grow your mailing list.

My guest today is Andy Reilly. Andy is the CEO of event marketing company EventGrow and the President of race listing site, Raceplace.com, and he is super-passionate about the subject of marketing psychology and its foundational importance in developing an effective marketing strategy. 

In this episode:

• Why do people buy stuff? What influences their purchasing decisions? 
• Robert Cialdini's 6 psychological influence triggers: reciprocity, commitment & consistency, social proof, authority, scarcity, likeability
• Reciprocity: winning over participants by giving something of value to them for free 
• Reciprocity in practice: leveraging free training plans and exclusive discount codes to grow your mailing list; using freebies to increase your race survey response rate by 20%
• Commitment & consistency: aligning your messaging with your participants' goals 
• Commitment & consistency in practice: supporting people's fitness aspirations; promoting your race's PB potential
• Social proof: converting people through the power of peer influence
• Social proof in practice: making the most of past participant reviews; showcasing testimonials on your site; including social proof stats in your ad copy
• Building social proof: collecting testimonials from race surveys; encouraging participants to leave reviews on race review sites
• Authority: recruiting authority figures to promote your event
• Authority in practice: leveraging the power of celebrity participants; using influencers to promote your race; projecting brand authority through high-profile sponsorships; showcasing event awards
• Scarcity: using loss-aversion (aka FOMO!) to drive registrations 
• Scarcity in practice: early birds & price increases; the "100 spots left" playbook
• Likeability: making your brand more likeable
• Likeability in practice: speaking your audience's language; aligning your event with good causes; recruiting likeable personalities to your event; engaging with your participants online 

Thanks to RunSignup for supporting quality content for race directors by sponsoring this episode. More than 25,000 in-person, virtual, and hybrid events use RunSignup's free and integrated solution to save time, grow their events, and raise more.

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 marketing or anything else in our Facebook group,

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When you want to know what’s happening and trending in the endurance events industry by the numbers, where do you turn to? Well, for me and many people I know, the definitive source of event data for the industry is, and has been for some time, GiveSignup|RunSignup’s annual RaceTrends report.

The report leverages GiveSignup|RunSignup’s extensive registration data from almost 60,000 events to point to trends in event participation, event pricing, participant demographics, marketing effectiveness, technology adoption and a myriad other things.

The most recent edition of the report was out just last week, and the data does seem to point to a strong, but partial, recovery from 2020, with some numbers starting to converge to 2019 pre-pandemic levels.

With me today to discuss all the numbers, the trends and their implications for individual events and the industry as a whole I’m delighted to have GiveSignup|RunSignup’s own, Johanna Goode. Johanna is the driving force behind many great things coming out of GiveSignup|RunSignup, including the ever-improving annual RaceTrends report, so she is just the person to walk us through the insights and recommendations coming out of the 2021 numbers.

In this episode:

• A return to normal? What 2021 registration rates are suggesting for market recovery and 2022
• Event attrition/churn through the pandemic
• The impact of event cancellations/postponements on participant loyalty, and ways to mitigate it
• Repeat participation numbers and trends
• Participation by event type
• The rise and fall of virtual races through 2020-2021
• Participant demographics by gender, age, event type
• Solving the lagging Millenial/GenZ participation puzzle 
• Registration pattern shifts (are participants registering later than usual?)
• Event pricing trends, and the effect of price increases on registration rates
• Mobile adoption trends 
• Facebook, social media and participant acquisition breakdown

*** To download your free copy of the RaceTrends 2021 report go to: runsignup.com/trends ***

Thanks to GiveSignup|RunSignup for supporting quality content for race directors by sponsoring this episode. More than 22,000 in-person, virtual, and hybrid events use GiveSignup|RunSignup's free and integrated solution to save time, grow their events, and raise more. If you'd like to learn more about GiveSignup|RunSignup's all-in-one technology solution for endurance and fundraising events visit runsignup.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 about the numbers in today’s podcast, registration trends or anything else in our Facebook group, Race Directors Hub.

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When you think of race expos, what kind of thing comes to mind? Well, if you’re like me, you’re probably thinking huge pre-race expos like New York or London, where you go to pick up your bib and race packet, and where you get to stroll around hundreds of booths from high-profile running brands showcasing their latest thing.

Race expos are actually a lot more common than you think, and, according to my guest today, absolutely every event can and should have one. And why wouldn’t yours? Race expos are an amazing way to elevate your participant’s event experience, a good way to add an additional revenue stream to your race, and just about the best way to activate sponsorships and expand the roster of your commercial partnerships.

My guest today, industry veteran Craig Mintzlaff, has been working on races and race expos for more than 20 years. Through his company, Endurance Sports Marketing Group, he’s been managing expos for some of the best-known events and event series in the industry, and he’s with us today to share some of the many things he’s learned from setting up, promoting and selling out hundreds of race expos on both sides of the Atlantic.

In this episode:

• How all events - not only larger races - can put on a successful race expo
• What vendors are looking for from attending a race expo 
• Figuring out how many vendors your expo can support
• Types of vendors to invite to your race expo
• The benefits of expo booth-swapping with other events in your region
• Putting a price on your race expo booths/space
• Balancing in-kind vs cash contributions from expo partners
• Negotiating partnerships with local vs national brands
• Unlocking the right contact to reach out to in vendor organizations
• The importance of securing a retail partner before going after the big brands (e.g. Brooks, Nike, Asics etc)
• Selling your race expo to vendors: understanding your event demographics, CPMs, focusing on race experience
• Making your expo partners' lives easier: offering to staff their booths on their behalf!
• How to lay out your expo for maximum lingering time (hint: put all the freebies, drinks at the back)
• Raffles, stamps, competitions and other tips for increasing participant engagement with vendor booths
• Taking your expo to the next level with music and an announcer

Thanks to GiveSignup|RunSignup for supporting quality content for race directors by sponsoring this episode. More than 22,000 in-person, virtual, and hybrid events use GiveSignup|RunSignup's free and integrated solution to save time, grow their events, and raise more. If you'd like to learn more about GiveSignup|RunSignup's all-in-one technology solution for endurance and fundraising events visit runsignup.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 expos, sponsorships or anything else in our Facebook group, Race Directors Hub.

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Public relations (PR) is an integral part of running a successful brand and business. It is the art of communication and storytelling. It’s about appealing to communities and stakeholders, forging relationships with media and playing the marketing long game.

Yet, as my guest today - PR pro, Meg Treat, of Treat Public Relations - rushes to acknowledge, it often gets a bit of a bad rap. 

Well, hopefully we’re going to be challenging those perceptions for you today, with a really insightful take on public relations, earned media and the power of storytelling, that definitely opened my eyes to the vast opportunities events can unlock through a thoughtful and carefully implemented PR strategy.

In this episode:

• Public relations: what it is about and how it relates to your work as an event owner/director
• Paid vs shared vs owned vs earned media
• The importance of securing media exposure for free (=earned media)
• How every race is intrinsically newsworthy and can have a story to tell
• Understanding newsworthiness and unlocking/developing your race's unique story
• Leveraging newsworthy topics: human interest stories, event milestones, brand partnerships.
• Distributing your story/content through online and offline media outlets
• Deciding when to send out (and when not to send out) a press release
• Writing engaging press releases: quotes, the inverse pyramid approach, calls-to-action that work
• The four ways of mining media contact information!
• Crafting effective cover emails to journalists for increased media outreach success
• Understanding journalist lead times and planning your PR content accordingly
• Inviting media to your race using media alerts
• Post-race press releases
• Being your race's spokesperson: making yourself available for interviews and how to conduct them successfully

Resources:

• Meg's media alert template/example  & press release template/example for race directors: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/jzw8jv0qr21xfmd/AACdD1sj72NhEf3RMJk-jjaAa?dl=0 (make sure to listen to Meg's audio intro in the folder)

Thanks to GiveSignup|RunSignup for supporting quality content for race directors by sponsoring this episode. More than 22,000 in-person, virtual, and hybrid events use GiveSignup|RunSignup's free and integrated solution to save time, grow their events, and raise more. If you'd like to learn more about GiveSignup|RunSignup's all-in-one technology solution for endurance and fundraising events visit runsignup.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 public relations, earned media or anything else in our Facebook group, Race Directors Hub.

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If you’re listening to this episode as it comes out, it’s the middle of the holiday season and, hopefully, you’re recovering from some excessive meal or other - so, Merry Christmas to you!

Today, we have a very special end-of-year episode for you where we’re going to be looking back at a fairly challenging 2021 but also looking ahead to a - hopefully - much brighter, more optimistic 2022. We’re going to be talking about your expectations for the new year, and also touching a bit on the ongoing supply chain issues which we’ll probably continue to face in the new year.

I say “your expectations” because for the making of this episode, I had the pleasure of talking to many many of you. So many thanks to everyone who contributed: Dave Kelly of RunSeries, David Martin-Jewell of FrontRunner Events, Sarah Kozul of the Lakeland Runners Club, Andy Harris of the Columbus Running Company, Robby McClung of the Canaan Valley Running Company, Suzy Shain of the Technology Education Foundation, Briston Rains of Texas Outlaw Running Company, Terry Majamaki of New Global Adventures and Jon Conkling of Tris4Health.

Also many thanks to Matt Mercurio of Stride Awards and Kim Bilancio of Greenlayer for sharing their thoughts on the logistics situation, and also Johanna Goode, Bryan Jenkins and Bob Bickel from GiveSignup|RunSignup for their insights into what’s happening in the market as we head into 2022.

As we round up 2021, I’d like to thank again our friends and sponsors at GiveSignup|RunSignup for their solid support of this podcast, and I’d like to remind all of you listening in to check out all that this amazing technology platform has to offer for your event by visiting runsignup.com. If you are looking to make a fresh start with your event technology partner for 2022, there’s no better place to start than runsignup.com. 

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Sports tourism - you’ve heard the phrase, people traveling to places to participate in sporting - that’s a whole thing these days. And a very fast-growing thing at that.

So, how can your race capitalize on this trend and how can you position your event to attract more overseas or out-of-state participants?

That’s exactly what we’ll be getting into today with my guest, George Kakourides, Marketing Director for the Logicom Cyprus Marathon. As you’ll hear, George has worked really hard on growing international participation for the Logicom Cyprus Marathon since 2014 with some amazing results, and has tons of tips to share on marketing your race internationally  and reaching new audiences through social media, micro-influencers, specialist publications, race expos, and other channels. So get your notepads out and get ready to take notes!

By the way, we’re going to be using the term “international” here a lot, but the lessons we’ll learn here today apply equally to a race that aspires to attract participants from a different country, as well as, say, a US-based race that wants to attract participants from nearby states. Everything we’ll touch on today basically falls under the category of marketing to participants that will travel to your event - so anyone besides your local crowd.

In this episode:

• Positioning your race brand for international appeal
• The importance of infrastructure (airport capacity, accommodation capacity etc) in being able to attract international participants
• How to pick the most promising international markets to target with your marketing
• Getting buy-in and material support from local government, local businesses and your local tourist board
• Partnering with local hotels and designing custom-made accommodation packages for participants
• Working with international specialist-press journalists and relevant influencers to promote the event in target markets
• Why getting Runners World and other high-profile mags to write about your event is easier that you think
• Measuring ROI on your international marketing efforts
• Why you want to translate key landing pages and your ad copy into the language of your target market participants
• Reaching international participants using Facebook Ads and suitable country/interest targeting choices
• Content ideas for engaging potential participants year-round through your social media accounts
• Lessons in building race partnerships from the Swedish Classic

Thanks to GiveSignup|RunSignup for supporting quality content for race directors by sponsoring this episode. More than 22,000 in-person, virtual, and hybrid events use GiveSignup|RunSignup's free and integrated solution to save time, grow their events, and raise more. If you'd like to learn more about GiveSignup|RunSignup's all-in-one technology solution for endurance and fundraising events visit runsignup.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 marketing or anything else in our Facebook group, Race Directors Hub.

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If you have built a business putting on races, chances are you would have thought of maybe selling some or all of those races at some point in the future. You may also have toyed with the idea of buying races from others as a way to grow your event portfolio.

Buying and selling races still remains a big mystery for most race directors - even very experienced ones. How do you go about it? How do you find events to buy, if you’re a buyer, and where do you turn to sell your event, if you’re a seller? What is an event even worth on the market? And how does a typical purchase and sale transaction go down?

Well, we’re going to be going into all that and more today, in a super-exciting episode with the help of my two guests, Tony Sapp and Porter Bratten. As you’ll hear in a minute, Tony and Porter have a lot of experience in buying and selling events, and they have tons of great tips to help you get a good feel for where you stand as a buyer or seller of races in this market, and how you can make the most of the opportunities available to you in this very peculiar post-pandemic environment we find ourselves in. 

In this episode:

• Finding suitable buying opportunities: matching type of event, time of year and race location
• What a good buying opportunity looks like
• Reaching out to race directors with an offer to buy
• Selling through a business broker: what business brokers bring to the table, picking the right broker, preparing your business prospectus
• The importance of instructing and consulting with a contract lawyer
• Buying event assets vs buying the events company 
• What assets go into an event sale: physical, digital, intellectual property, sponsorship and other third party contracts
• Purchase price allocation and tax implications of your event purchase
• Preparing for an event sale: organizing documents, keeping track of your business data, anticipating buyer questions
• The purchase and sale agreement: asset lists, exclusions, non-competes, indemnities, transaction timelines and transition periods, price adjustment clauses
• Additional provisions/considerations when selling a race mid-season
• Transitioning key contacts and making introductions with vendors, sponsors, volunteers
• How to calculate the value of your event as a multiple of your revenue and net profit
• Price negotiations and agreeing on a price
• Is this a good time to buy or sell a race?

Thanks to GiveSignup|RunSignup for supporting quality content for race directors by sponsoring this episode. More than 22,000 in-person, virtual, and hybrid events use GiveSignup|RunSignup's free and integrated solution to save time, grow their events, and raise more. If you'd like to learn more about GiveSignup|RunSignup's all-in-one technology solution for endurance and fundraising events visit runsignup.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 buying and selling races or anything else in our Facebook group, Race Directors Hub.

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