One of our Year End Wrap-up Blogs. Others include 2022 Availability Report, Company Strategy, TicketSignup 2022 Product Recap, RunSignup 2022 Product Recap, and TicketSignup Product Roadmap. Also, here is our 2023 Roadmap Webinar.
RunSignup helped our customers process $400 Million for their events in 2022. We have continued our growth in our core RunSignup endurance business, in our GiveSignup Peer to Peer business, and our new brand announced in 2022, TicketSignup.
We always take this time to share a recap of 2022 and our plans for 2023 (coming over the next couple of weeks). Since we document things openly, we can take a look back at previous years in review: 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, Q1, Q2, and Q3 of this year.
You can also review our Company Strategy for context on how we run our business at a higher level, our Availability Report for a technology infrastructure overview, and our Market Analysis for an overview of the Race Registration market. We will also publish our Race Trends report in early January for an in depth look at the endurance market.
The Numbers
Our key metric is how much revenue we help our customers generate from their events and related fundraising. We have helped our customers raise $1.89 Billion and will hit the $2 Billion Milestone of total transaction volume for our customers in March!
For the first time, we are beginning to break out our Registration, Donation and Ticket volume as each become more material and we focus on the three businesses of RunSignup, GiveSignup and TicketSignup. These roughly translate to the three brands and specific domains of features we create on our single platform to support our customers:
We are still using 2019 as a baseline as it was the last “normal” year. The data shows continued growth across each of our markets.
RunSignup Endurance Business
Our RunSignup endurance business faced major headwinds as participation levels have not yet returned to 2019 levels. On average for the year thru November, a 1,000 person race in 2019 was an 850 person race in 2022. Below is our data showing races over 500 that happened on our platform in 2019 and 2022 so we could compare levels equally.
We have been able to grow over 2019 and 2021 numbers due to more races moving to our platform, as well as an increase in the average size of races on our platform in spite of the decline. This can be seen by the total year number of an increase in the # of races by 20% over 2019 and an increase of 18% in registration count.
We had a very good Thanksgiving with over 750,000 people signing up for our customer’s Turkey Trots:
We also had a lot of large races on Thanksgiving Day that help us take a look at the current health of the market by race size:
One of the interesting things we saw in those Thanksgiving Day numbers was the negative impact on larger races:
All of our customers have had struggles with participation rates as well as their rising costs from inflation. Hardships seem to be hitting mid size and large races more than smaller races that typically are more volunteer driven. Large races also have a larger % of participants traveling, and that has also hurt the larger races.
As we look to 2023 and beyond, we see continued headwinds for races due to costs and the shifting market for attracting people to races. We do not expect a full return to 2019 participation per race levels in 2023. Our pace of new race and renewals continues pretty steadily and our churn remains very low, so we expect to continue to gain market share in this category. As we cover in other year end reports and our Market Analysis report, our strategy of providing the best technology at a lower price for the endurance community sets us apart from the competition.
We will be launching a new website for RunSignup in early January 2023 – https://info.runsignup.com/.
TicketSignup Business
We launched TicketSignup in early 2022 as a new line of business. It is actually the same Ticket product we had built as part of GiveSignup, and built on the same common platform as RunSignup. When we first built the ticket solution, we thought that since we had so many nonprofits, it would be a good solution for their golf outings and galas and other fundraising events. We realized around the last quarter of 2021 that there were very good opportunities for other events that were not being served well with technology solutions by other ticket vendors like Eventbrite. So we introduced TicketSignup and have begun exploring other target markets in need of our solution based products.
We found that we were particularly good for events that have timed tickets, or are multi-day and in particular held outdoors. Our ticket management features allowed for events held at farms like corn mazes and halloween haunts to give ticket buyers a self-serve solution for switching their tickets on rain out days. Our free email, website tools and referral rewards were also major improvements for their marketing efforts. The ease of buying tickets with our calendar views and customizable ticket tiles made sales run more smoothly. And our years of checkin experience has resulted in delivering the best Ticket App available – and can be used for both fast checkin as well as purchasing at the door via Square credit card readers.
We were able to win 10 Halloween events that had over 10,000 tickets each in our first year, and helped our customers sell nearly a half million tickets in our real first year of focused efforts.
As we look towards the next 5 years, the ticket market offers a huge opportunity for continued growth. More of our existing customers are becoming aware of our ticket capabilities and using us While still a small part of our business at 3% in 2022, it will become 6% of our business next year.
We have a full website for this important product released in late 2022 – https://info.ticketsignup.io/.
GiveSignup Business
We have refocused our GiveSignup business on Peer to Peer Fundraising. We realized we had gone a bit too broad after the nonprofit market, and have refocused our business on events. Our ticket platform is winning many nonprofit converts with features like donation discounts and ease of use for golf tournaments and galas. However, most of our business is coming from a relation to our traditional endurance business with fundraising runs, walks and rides.
Customers use our Registration platform along with fundraising and donation software we have had for some time and continue to iterate and improve on. For example, we added motivational gamification with features like badges and awards for hitting fundraising milestones.
We are seeing frustration from nonprofits who use old technology or non-integrated solutions between the event registration and the fundraising platform (like Classy and Eventbrite), and they like our solution. Nonprofits make change slowly, so we do not expect rapid growth in this sector, but our normal slow and steady way of doing business.
We measure this business by looking at our donation volume, even though donations come from all over. We have grown customer donations from $22 Million in 2019 to $50 Million in 2022, and expect continued steady growth.
We have a new website for GiveSignup that will launch in early 2023 – https://info.givesignup.org/.
Supporting Customers
Our company is divided about 40-60, with 40% of people doing development of our product and 60% helping customers. And we take helping customers seriously. For example, most of our marketing team and dollars we spend are for customer education. While we emphasize that event directors have full control over everything and can do things themselves, we understand how important customer support it. Here are some quick stats of how we helped the 25,000+ events who used our platform in 2022:
- 22,210 issues handled via our Online Support Team with an average response time of 1 hour and 39 minutes from issues customers log online or send via email to info@runsignup.com. It also includes the stats that our RaceDay team handles from Timers.
- 25,601 calls and email from our Account Manager Team – this is the team that is assigned to larger customers and handle more complex issues.
- 60,969 calls and emails from our Sales Team – this is a combination of conversations and voicemails checking in with customers, as well as working with new prospects on finding solutions to their problems.
- Dozens of Webinars and Videos
- Summer Symposium
Summary
We served our customers well in 2022. We yet again had 0 downtime as reported on a more in depth basis in our 2022 Availability Report. We helped customers generate revenue of $400 Million. And we positioned ourselves for a strong 2023 with our single platform with solutions for 3 markets that provide a combination of stability and growth for our employees and customers.