Q3 2022 saw several trends in the our RunSignup and TicketSignup business:
- Races are still down from their 2019 levels, but there seem to be some positive trends.
- Hurricane Ian had profound effects from Florida up to New York on races held between Sept. 25 – Oct. 2, which caused a slowing of registration volume that had been looking very good up until that point.
- RunSignup continued market share growth.
- GiveSignup had a record quarter in donations with several large Peer to Peer customers like Tunnel to Towers having good events.
- TicketSignup is still small, but accounted for 5% of transaction volume in September due to the focus on farms and the busy fall season for Pumpkin and Haunt festivals driving the surge on top of the small base of nonprofit ticket events like golf outings.
We share our high level numbers and thoughts on the market and technology advances on a quarterly and yearly basis – 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, Q1 2022, Q2 2022.
RunSignup Quarterly Numbers
We had a record quarter as we continue to benefit from strong word of mouth about our technology platform for events. It was the first quarter we helped our customers process over $100 Million, a major milestone.
As we covered in our Registration Market Analysis, and is obvious from the 24% growth in endurance related events on the first line above, we continue to pick up market share. While the financial impact from this is somewhat tempered by the 16% decline in participation rates in the quarter from past events (and probably from the new events on our platform). The combination is bringing some growth to the endurance business. We estimate that we are at about 40% market share in the endurance space in the US.
Our efforts with GiveSignup in the Peer to Peer market are also giving us and our customers faster growth. But this is a market that changes slowly and it will take us another 5 years to have material market share.
Our TicketSignup business, which we announced at the beginning of 2022 is going very well, although it is still small. In addition to the nonprofit ticket events like golf outings and galas, we are focusing a lot of farm events. This fall we are the platform for a number of large fall ticket events:
- Scaregrounds PDX, Portland, OR
- Haunted Forrest at Panic Point, Raleigh, NC
- Jack O Lantern World – Multiple Locations
- Terror on the Farm – Richmond, VA
- Pumpkin Glow Trail – Indiana
- Lake Joy Trails of Terror – Georgia
We are learning a lot from these early customers and are quickly building unique features that will help farm events to grow their events and operate them much more efficiently. This market has many types of events over the course of the year, and we hope to grow as we learn more and word of mouth brings us new customers. The overall market is actually larger than the endurance market and offers our company many years of growth in the future.
After a tough 2020, we are back on a firm financial footing and are operating efficiently and growing incrementally and positioned for hopefully many years of continued technology development for our customers.
Endurance Community Still Recovering
As we have discussed various times this year, the average race is down about 20% from their 2019 participant counts. We had been seeing signs of renewing strength in August and in early September and are actually hopeful the entire community is emerging from the effects of the pandemic on participation counts. However, Hurricane Ian brought registrations during the last week of the month down substantially across many states from Florida thru New York. Since about 25-30% of people register in the last week, this impacted the numbers and we are showing a 20% decline of races that happened in 2019 and 2022 on our platform. If Hurricane Ian had not happened, our estimate is that the numbers would have been down less than 10%.
The number of participants per race can also be seen in our overall race and registration count per month (these are races that happen in that month):
We have tracked “churn” – meaning races over 500 that used us previously and did not return the next year since 2017. We broke this into two segments – “No Race” churn and “Competitor” churn. Pre-pandemic we saw about a 5-6% “no Race” churn. We looked at 2019 races that did not return in 2022 by month and the rate has seemed to normalize after 3 years (about a 7-8% churn per year):
Technology First
We continue our “product led” business strategy by focusing on continuing to build out our technology platform with features that help our customers and target markets. In Q3 we had over 500 releases of our software and began a cycle of infrastructure upgrades like our database from Amazon Aurora V1 to Aurora V2. Here are some quick highlights:
Event Day Technology
New Mobile Timing App – this new app is an outgrowth of our relationship with Rowan University. It is useful for smaller races, trail and Ultra races, and as a backup to chip systems that our many timing partners use.
RaceDay CheckIn – Several new releases (we are up to 3.2.31.!) that bring continuing improved functionality, speeding checkin and making it simple to get volunteers productive on their own phones very quickly to make checkin fast. One of the favorite features was a label printer.
RaceDay Scoring – We made a number of improvements in time for the Cross Country season as well as automated data checks.
Email and Website
We continue to put a lot of effort into our Email and Website capabilities. This past quarter we improved the user experience for both with some major improvements in finding and picking send to lists, new components and email capture popups. We are getting great feedback on the new email system. Additionally, we are also working toward a Q4 release of the new Website capability for Partners. We are also doing a ton of work to get the new website capability ready for Races in the new year.
TicketSignup
We are releasing a lot of features based on all the new customer feedback we are getting, many of them pretty significant. We are a week or two away from releasing a convenient Copy function, which will be useful for our customers with many events that are similar to each other. Here are just some of the highlights:
New Info Website – We have rolled out a new and enhanced TicketSignup Website with tons of detailed information, use cases, easy links to resources like webinars, etc.
Sales Tax Automation – We now have full sales tax automation for events, which is something that many of the smaller ticket vendors do not have. This removes worry and overhead for many event owners.
Point of Sales with Square Ticket App – We released new versions of our Ticket App which can now be used for both checkin as well as point of sale purchases with Square card readers.
Ticket Bundles – Bundle add-on with a ticket purchase. For example, VIP Tickets include 2 drinks and Kid Tickets come with a free Corn Maze pass.
Reporting – We have released a great set of new reports for summary ticket sales as well as store sales. Watch for some major improvements on the base Ticket Reports in Q4.
Focus on Farms – We have increased our focus on solving problems for farm events.
Custom Ticket Tiles – Our ticket tiles not only make it easy and inviting to purchase tickets, they now have nearly unlimited customization options that your event can control.
SEO Optimizations – We have made a number of new SEO optimization enhancements recently, with adding features to automatically add ticket events to Google Events as well as a partnership that automatically distributes events to over 2,500 media calendars in the US via Evvnt.
Symposium and Upcoming Road Show
And finally, we held our first Symposium since January of 2020. You can see the Symposium Wrap-up with all the educational sessions. We so enjoyed being in person again with 150 customers.
We are heading to the road with our Roadshow this January and February and hope to see many of you in one of the 10 cities we will visit!