January 5, 2016
So you want to put on a run? By now you’ve likely Googled a half dozen articles on ‘How to Put on a 5k’. Crash course tips are great, but they don’t really tell you anything about what to avoid if you don’t want an abject failure on your hands.If you plan on producing an event that will be a growing success year-after-year, you will want to think long-term. Consider ways to retain your registrants and even get them to bring a friend or two next year. Unfortunately for those tips, you’ll need to find another article. But if you’d like to go out in a blazing ball of failure, execute the next nine items.
Make sure your parking is incredibly frustrating so your participants are in a bad mood before they even get started. Traffic delays when leaving the venue will be the last impression your event has with the participants that day. It will help seal the deal that they will not return.
Print your registrant lists in alphabetical order. Don’t staple them, they’ll get out of order more easily. Backed up registration lines will be a surefire way to build on the frustration from the previous parking fiasco. Taking 5 minutes to find people’s names is a great way to add even more frustration.
Train your volunteers on all the details surrounding your event just moments before your participants arrive. Or better yet, send them an email with the details and assume they read and memorized it. Registrants will surely have a memorable experience when they are misinformed by your volunteers or when their questions are returned with blank stares.
Don’t bother marking your course. But if you do, put arrows on cones that can easily be kicked over or are difficult to see. Maybe even use chalk paint to draw arrows on the dirt so after the first few people run over them, they will no longer be visible. Nothing will outrage a participant going after a PR like having a poorly marked course.
Kill the vibe by not having music or an announcer. Nothing says fun like a bunch of people in running clothes standing around like herded cattle waiting for their next command. If your event is boring and doesn’t provide a fun and unique vibe, you can bet participants won’t be opting to pay you to run on roads or trails they otherwise can run on for free.
You are dealing with healthy runners, so who cares if the weather is reaching 80 degrees and your water jugs go dry. If your event makes the front page of the paper for most dehydrated runners, you can just lean on the, “There’s no such thing as bad publicity” motto, right? Wrong.
For many of your participants, crossing your finish line might have required weeks or months of training and planning. For many, it could be one of their greatest fitness accomplishments to date. Make sure you do nothing to celebrate this monumental moment with them. If you share in their victory, you’re bound to make them happy. So make sure the finish is super boring.
It is a known fact that when the “5 minutes to start” is announced, some sort of alarm goes off inside of runners telling them they must go to the bathroom right away, regardless of if they just went moments ago. Don’t provide enough spots for your participants to ‘do their business’, and they’ll most definitely be doing business with another event next year.
Promising participants the moon, but delivering a lackluster event is the number one culprit we hear of why participants don’t attend the same event multiple times. Follow suit and registrants will be singing the same tune about your event.We hope you found the humor in this article. Our true hope is you will never actually commit any of the above race promoter ‘crimes’. But if you do, you have received a fair warning, that each one will cost you dearly in repeat registrants.