The athleteReg team hosted a webinar on March 27th, 2025 bringing together key team members to share insights, platform updates, and best practices for event directors. If you missed it (or just want a refresher), here’s a comprehensive recap of the valuable information shared during this insightful session.
Introduction: Connecting with the Team
The webinar represents a new communication channel for the athleteReg team to connect with event directors, putting faces to the names and roles of team members—from longtime staff to newer additions. As Kelly Matkovich, Marketing Manager, explained, registration is just one piece of the event management puzzle, which is why the team is launching this webinar series to support event directors in all aspects of their roles. Each speaker shared insights on topics they’re most passionate about, with plans to create more video content featuring specific themes, educational focus, and potential guest speakers from the industry.
The Origin Story: Understanding Both Sides of the Registration Table
Founder Steve Roszko shared athleteReg’s journey from its humble beginnings in 1999. As an active bike racer himself, Steve created bikeReg.com out of personal necessity—he was tired of manually entering paper registrations into Excel spreadsheets for his local cycling club.
“What began as a fun side project soon grew to where I was hiring employees, and this became my full-time job.”
Steve emphasized that athleteReg’s success stems from understanding both sides of the registration table—most team members are active participants and event directors themselves. This first-hand knowledge has guided the company’s growth from a basic registration system to a comprehensive event management platform now part of the Outside network.
Platform Highlights and Future Direction: Shaped by Your Feedback
Product Manager Evan Huff, who’s been with the company since 2010, revealed insights from the January event director survey and shared recent feature launches:
- New calendar map view to help participants visualize events near them
- USA Triathlon integration for instant license verification
- French language support for Quebec events
- Enhanced event day check-in tools
- Improved fee transparency and checkout flow (resulting in a 12% increase in checkouts)
Looking ahead, Evan outlined upcoming improvements based directly on event director feedback:
- Enhanced email functionality with professional templates
- A comprehensive results platform
- Improved analytics for better insights
“We can’t do this without your support. Reach out to us and let us know what you’re thinking—that’s what we use to build our roadmaps for the future.”
Strategic Pricing: Leveraging Peak Engagement Moments
Tim McMahon, with over 18 years in the endurance and online registration space, shared valuable insights on timing registration launches. His key recommendation: open registration during peak engagement moments, particularly race day or race weekend.
“There’s no day in the 365-day cycle where you’ll get more web traffic and activity on your site than race day and/or race weekend,”
This strategy capitalizes on the emotional high participants experience after completing a challenge.
Block Pricing: Transforming Early Birds into Guaranteed Revenue
Colin Reuter, Lead Software Engineer and active race director, advocated for block pricing as an alternative to traditional fee schedules. While fee schedules (where prices increase on specific dates) are straightforward, block pricing (where only a limited number of entries are available at each price point) creates beneficial uncertainty for participants.
“Block pricing creates uncertainty in participants,” Colin explained. “When I get a marketing email alerting me to block pricing, I don’t know what the other 1,000 people who got that email are going to do. So if I want to take advantage of the lower price, I might as well register right now.”
Colin shared data from his own mountain bike race showing that block pricing doesn’t necessarily mean giving away money. When adjusted for no-show rates (which tend to be higher for early registrants), the income per actual attendee was nearly identical between early and regular pricing.
Refund Policies: A Positive Customer Interaction
Contrary to common belief, Colin demonstrated that liberal refund policies can actually benefit events rather than hurt them. “Refunds are a positive customer interaction,” he stated, noting three major benefits:
- Getting people registered early (who might later need refunds) is better than them never registering at all
- Some refunded entries will transfer to other participants
- Even refunded participants remain on your email list for future marketing
Colin emphasized that refunds make customers happy and make you look good—both essential for effective marketing. He also noted that despite generous refund policies, very few participants actually request refunds due to adverse weather conditions on race day.
Participant Retention: The Reality of Turnover
Colin revealed surprising statistics about participant retention. Using his own event as an example, he revealed that 56% of participants from the previous year didn’t return—despite it being one of the ten biggest cyclocross races in America.
Key takeaways:
- Most events see around 50% year-over-year return rates at best
- The average participant’s career in a sport typically lasts only 3-4 years
- Approximately one in three people at an event are in their first year of the sport
This reality necessitates constant marketing, education, and adaptation: “You need to always be marketing because they’re new participants every year.”
Fundraising: Telling Your Nonprofit’s Story
Johnny Morin, Senior Customer Success Manager, shared insights on effectively adding fundraising to events. He emphasized the importance of storytelling: “You need to get to the root of what supporting that nonprofit means,” suggesting event directors collect testimonials from participants or nonprofit staff to inspire donations.
On choosing between simple donations or peer-to-peer fundraising, Johnny advised, “Your job as the event director is to train your participants to ask for donations and give them the tools to do so.”
He highlighted a case study where a simple three-email campaign doubled individual fundraising amounts and increased total fundraising from $27,000 to $71,000:
- A donation request letter template
- A social media sharing reminder
- A fundraising goal reminder with incentives
Johnny noted that athleteReg provides tools to automate this process, allowing event directors to set up the email campaign once and keep participants engaged throughout the event lifecycle without ongoing maintenance.
Support Resources: Help When You Need It
Patrick Sullivan, Account Manager and Customer Support Specialist, introduced the brand new Help Center, designed to be “so intuitive, so efficient, so user-friendly that you almost never need more than a quick search to get what you need.”
The new Help Center serves as a comprehensive resource with:
- Intuitive search functionality
- Separate sections for event director and participant questions
- Video tutorials alongside written instructions
“If you catch yourself forgetting how to do something in the platform, or if you’re spending more time than you’d like figuring something out, please seek support,” Patrick encouraged. He also invited event directors to provide feedback on the Help Center to continuously improve it.
Marketing Opportunities: Outside Network’s Ad Manager
Take advantage of Outside’s self-service Ad Manager solution – a tool that connects events directly with Outside’s global audience of 250 million active users. Event directors can advertise on popular sites including VELO, PinkBike, Trailforks, Trail Runner, Triathlete, and Women’s Running while maintaining complete control over their campaigns. The platform offers easy campaign creation, creative testing options, and performance reporting delivered directly to your inbox.
Looking Ahead
The athleteReg team is committed to creating more educational video content to support event directors. What topics would be most valuable for you? Share your feedback here to help shape our future resources.
