This is what I received in response to a refund request:
Thanks for your message. We’ve heard from many runners, which we truly appreciate. Many have spoken directly to why this is decision is so extremely difficult for Grandma’s Marathon and it was not a decision we took lightly. In addition to our FAQ’s, I want to share a few more simple points from our team to help provide the full picture of our decision to not issue refunds or to defer entries to 2021:
The bottom line is there simply isn’t any registration money to give back. Specifically, the numbers are pretty simple. The finisher shirts and medals are ordered, along with all of our volunteer supplies, marketing and advertising is done, staff is paid for all their work on this year’s event, and it goes on to the tune of about $1.1 million in sunk costs since registration opened on October 1. Now we lose the revenue that was coming from Grandma’s Marathon weekend along with all of our sponsor revenue and contributions totaling right around another $1 million. Our registration revenue works out to just over $2 million. Refunding entry fees would literally be the demise of our organization, put 9 staff members out of work and put a huge economic burden on our local economy for years to come.
Some races can offer a deferment to the next year or a substantial discount because it drives more entries. It adds to the field of participants and revenue for their overall budget. Our races fill each year to a capacity based on our resources in our region. In a capped field of participants, deferring entries takes away from the revenue, decreasing the quality of our event and keeps other runners from being able to participate.
Some races are for-profit companies, and some can safely accommodate 30k runners or more. On a per-runner cost, we spend a much higher % on our runners and their experience without making a profit (we’re a 501c3 nonprofit) and without banking big money each year with an increasing field of participants. Our focus has always been on quality, not quantity. These are the things that have made Grandma’s Marathon so popular, but make it harder to recover from a loss like this.
As the numbers work out in our overall fiscal year budget, if we’re going to keep our staff and work towards the next marathon weekend at the quality runners have come to expect from us, we’re already out potentially close to $400K just by offering a 20% discount to over 18k runners that were registered so far, but at least it spreads out the damage into next year so we’re confident we can recover. And runners can still earn their medal, finisher shirt, etc. through the Virtual Races this year.
That's the important line: We’re confident we can recover, with the plan we presented. We understand your position, but we also have to think about an entire region of the country where our event has a $20.6 million impact, plus our 22 charity partners and our own internal charity - the Young Athletes Foundation. If we can’t return next year and our organization is no longer sustainable, the results of our actions will be far more damaging.
So ‘doing the right thing’ doesn’t mean the same thing at every event. There is nothing we can correct in the situation we’ve been put in. We’re just not like other marathons, for all the right reasons when times are good - but now things have been flipped. We have a great reputation for always taking great care of our runners, volunteers and our community, and the discount and plan we presented is genuinely the very best we can do for our runners under these circumstances. We’re worried about our future just like everyone else, but with support from our loyal runners like yourself in response to this crisis, we hope we’ll have the chance to try this again next year.
Thank you again for reaching out, it is appreciated.