Hello Fellow Race Directors, The fourth edition contains a follou-up piece written by Sue Podolske on a subject called "T-shirt ordering…part 2". It will help you understand the challenges and options available when planning t-shirts for your event, again a must read. In this edition I will discuss search engine related topics. We also have a little promotion concerning a new service we are beginning to offer. Can you imagine the ability for any runner to run any event and raise money for virtually any certified charity in a seamless and secure method where technology does all of the hard work. Also imagine where any race director, also using technology, can setup a web page where any runner in that event can divert some funds to one or multiple charities associated with that event. The charity ends up the winner as it will receive the funds securely with minimal effort and full electronic auditing capability. We are very excited about offering this and are looking for a handful of fall events to help us launch this service. Search Engines - How to use them to help promote your event. We are depending more and more on the Internet as the most effective way to promote and manage our events. Just having a great web site, www.myrace.com, does not guarantee that the world will discover it. We need to use all possible methods to make people aware of the event and get the potential participants interested in the event. Once a commitment has been made to use a web page as the major promotional method, it's important to drive our current regular runners to use the web site for future races and to find new runners who might be interested in competing at your event. Search engines have a role in driving traffic to our events and some effort needs to go into seeding those search engines. There are approximately 80 search engines in use today but less than 20 are used by the majority of us. Most folks are familiar with yahoo.com, ask.com, google.com and lycos.com, and use them regularly as a starting point to research almost any topic. Rather than asking for a list of search engines, how about asking "what is the best search engine to do my job"? Makes sense! Well an aid to help us can be found at: http://www.noodletools.com/debbie/literacies/information/5locate/adviceengine.html. It advises us what search engines will give us the best result for any particular task. Have a look and have a play! What's a quick way to find out if your web site is present in some of the major search engines? Please visit http://www.marketleap.com/siteindex/ and it will tell you where your events stand in some search engine rankings. If the response is zero then nobody knows about you. For example if you type in www.coolrunning.com, you will receive a score of 117,000 plus and if you type in www.runnersworld.com you will receive a score of 35,000 plus. This is a great place to start, try it! There are other measures to gauge if your event is placed anywhere in search engines. Go to any search engine (see list above) and just type in the name of your event - "xxx Road Race" and see if it returns a hit. You might get hits on all the search engines you try, on some of them or on none. At least you have a starting point. Another test is to type the name of your town, region or state, and the word running or road race and see how you rate. Keep a note of where you are positioned with each of the search engines and keywords you tried so that you have a comparison point when you retest later. For example create a little spreadsheet with the names of all the search engines you used, the keywords you searched on and the position you found your event in the list of returned results. The goal is to be in the first page of returned results. How do promote my event within the search engines? The title element <title> identifies the content of the page in a fairly wide context. There may only be one title in any page and it should ideally be less than 64 characters in length, though it can be longer. An example for an event could be: <title>XXX Road Race</title>. On the information page it could be <title>XXX Road Race Information</title>, not <title>Information</title> which is too generic. The title tag is also used as the words to describe your page when someone adds it to their "Favorites" or "Bookmarks" lists. For more information refer to http://www.w3.org/2001/06tips/good-titles. Other important header elements: "Meta names" Include your description of the site or page in the "text" field. To maximize your search engine ranking, be sure to use keywords within your description. For example we use the following "meta name="Description" element for Cool Running: "<meta name="Description" content="text">Cool Running is the complete online resource for runners, offering the Web's most comprehensive race calendar, race results listings, training advice, interactive tools and a vibrant online community of runners." <meta name="Keyword" content="text"> <meta name="keywords" content="running run training marathon runners jogging jogger joggers runner run fitness exercise diet weight loss nutrition performance pr personal record marathon race calendar training log journal race results results calendar community forums runners"> This is just the easiest method to begin promoting your web site amongst the search engine community and determining its current state. Next time we will discuss other methods to promote your event amongst the search engines, including both fee and free services. T-shirt ordering…part 2 By Susan Podolske First off, let me pass along to you these comments from Mike Polansky. Mike makes some good points and we appreciate his feedback. For races with the budget and volunteer base, this is definitely an approach to keep in mind or is one that many of you are already using. If we run out of shirts, or shirts of a particular size, we take down names of those who we haven't been able to satisfy on race day, re-order what we need and mail out the shirts a week or so after the event. We send a nice letter with the shirts, apologizing for not having what they wanted on hand on race day, and publicizing our next event. The couple of dollars extra cost in mailing shirts is very well compensated by the friends we make, the increasing turnout in our events every year, and the fact that nobody is ever discouraged to register the day of the race. Yes, day of race registration can be a pain, but that's part of the business we are in! Mike Polansky, President Thanks, Mike! Now, on with some more thoughts on dealing with t-shirt suppliers- T-shirt printing is considered a low-risk, entry level business, meaning for a limited investment, just about anyone can print t-shirts in their garage. Whether this is the type of shirt that meets your needs is your call. If you decide you need a printer/supplier that will provide a good or top quality shirt, correctly printed and delivered on time, you may need to do more than thumb through the yellow pages. Speaking with graphic designer Regina Milan of Milan Designs in Massachusetts, I was given some suggestions for working with a printer/supplier.
Finding a reputable shirt supplier/printer seems to work best by following recommendations from other Race Directors. Look at race shirts that you think are really well done and get in touch with the director. While shipping costs do add to the cost of the shirt, it isn't so prohibitive that you need limit yourself to a local business. Word of mouth and hearing the experiences of your peers are a great place to start when selecting a company to handle one of the biggest expenses associated with your race. Regarding shirt quality, the obvious is to avoid shirts that shrink so much after the first washing, that adult XL is now an adult small! Again, look at your own or other race shirts and duplicate the weight and content that provide the best level of quality and fits your budget. You may want to try to avoid a shirt design with defined outlines, such as a square or rectangle. Fabric seldom hangs straight once it is washed and your perfectly printed shirt could look skewed after washing. Unfortunately, the lessons learned in selecting the wrong shirt supplier and printer, are often done the hard way. If you have suggestions you'd like to share, please send them along to us at http://www.coolrunning.com/engine/5/5_3/index.shtml. We appreciate your thoughts and will make every effort to share on-target remarks with our readers. Advertisement Provide personal fundraising pages to your runners
The service will enable runners to quickly and easily set up an online fundraising page that can be personalized with their own picture, text message, fundraising goal and page title. It enables them to send out emails to family and friends and enables them to make secure online donations with a credit card that are automatically processed and sent to the charity. Click here to see a sample page: http://www.justgiving.com/PFP/pages/default.asp?id=CGG/1036 You can offer this capability to your runners directly as a way to help them raise more funds for charity more easily. You can also enable your "official" charities to offer the service to their supporters participating in your event and is a great way to unite more charity runners around your event. The service can be set up to enable runners to raise funds only for charities designated by you or for any charity (the service includes a vetting process to ensure that organizations nominated by runners have a 501c3 tax status). We are working with Justgiving, an established leader in online event based fundraising, to provide this proven and award winning service. Earlier this year, the service was used to help over 3,000 runners of the London Marathon raise in excess of $2 million dollars for hundreds of charities. The service has no set up fees for you, your runners or the charities, there is only a small processing fee when donations are actually made so there is no risk. This personal fundraising service can help your event to raise more funds for charity, reduce effort associated with managing your charity program, will help charities get more participants for your event and can provide some great public relations opportunities. How to get started: FeedbackWe invite you to send feeback to us. We are looking at sharing some of your experience, advice and humorous moments with the rest of the race directors. We will also send a Cool Running hat every month to the most interesting submittal. Please be brief with your comments and send them to us for consideration.Parting Words Free calendar listing. Include your event in the Web's most respected and comprehensive calendar of running events. Submit your race now. Free race results listing. Post your race results on Cool Running. Submit your race results now. Online advertising. Promote your event with one of our event advertising packages, each carefully tailored for events of specific sizes and needs. Review our event promotion packages. Paid link. Include your website or race application page on our race applications page for a modest fee. Contact us for rates and information. Your own mini- website. Build your own web page and registration form in minutes with Cool Running's easy-to-use, automated event builder. Your site gets linked in the event calendar and on our race applications page. Try this affordable service now. Online race registration. Along with our partners at Sign Me Up Sports, we can help you manage your race registration more easily and more efficiently by moving the process online. Contact us for rates and information. Custom Web design. Engage our designers to build your page from scratch, tapping our years of experience with effective online event promotion. Contact us for rates and information. Consulting. Our management team has lots of experience with successful race management. Let us help you navigate everything from scoring to insurance to promotion to merchandise. Contact us for rates and information. To subscribe to the newsletter: Copyright 2003, Cool Sports, Inc. All rights reserved. |
Cool Running is introducing a new service to enable your runners to create their own online fundraising page. This service will help more runners raise more money and take the hassle out of the fundraising process.