Price list wrote:
How about an "a la cart" approach to entry fees?
Entry fee: $10
Want a t-shirt? Add $5
Want a tech shirt? Add $10
Want a finisher's medal? Add $5
Ect., ect., ect.
This is a little outside the OP's question...but this approach is what our company has gone to, for some races, and with limitations. For example, we have a 5k coming up in a few weeks. It's $17 to enter. We also offer a "2 for $25" entry fee. The goal of the race is to get people out running to start the year, promote fitness, etc, and we've found "2 for ___" entries encourage friends and family members who might not otherwise come out and run. If you want a tech shirt for this race it's an extra $14, which we make about $3/shirt (and that's if we end up selling all the shirts we buy and not eating a few, which we always seem to do). If you want a hat instead of a tech shirt you can get a hat for $12 (similar margin for us).
$31 for a 5k with a shirt might seem like a lot (or not, depending on your area), but after we pay venue rental, cops, portos, advertising, all the small costs like bibs, there isn't a lot left.
For what it's worth, when we went to ala-carte shirts and dropped our entry fees we got positive feedback from entrants. Plus our entrant numbers are up (or for the sell-out races we close entries earlier) although I'm not sure there is a correlation. We find that about 50%-60% of the entrants buy shirts when it's ala-carte. Doesn't seem to matter if we set the shirt price at our cost or our cost plus a couple $, that 50%-60% stays constant.
Turning the rest of the perks into ala-carte is something we haven't figured out how to do. I'd love to do it with medals, but how do you screen out in the crush of a finish line? How about on-course gels or Gatorade (for longer races). Some runners would opt out of that and carry their own, but how do you segregate on the course?
Ideas?