Online "processing fee" for race = $20?

Did the same thing, ended up with $70.85 as well. OP did something goofy to get $20 fee.

Mr. Bill's new vest wrote:

But it's not a PITA to secure volunteers for before race day (and often DURING the work week), transport packets to a remote location, and transport unclaimed packets back?

It's tremendously easier to run advance pickup because you have a order of magnitude more time. You don't need as many people, and there's a lot less chance for error.

If I'm a race director, I'd rather ask for volunteers for one day (a weekend) and have them be a bit more busy than to ask for them over several days, including missing time from work. I think other posters had it right when they said this trend is all about driving more foot traffic into a local business by requiring bib pick up before race day.

They're going to be LOT more busy, and if you discount how hard it is to do race day you've never done it.

Sure, a local running store is going to get some business from a packet pickup at their location, but it's not the primary reason to do advance pickup. The trend is mainly because it's often physically impossible to hand out all the packets in the hour or so before a race. Say 30 seconds per person for pickup with 12 lines that's still 41 minutes, a logistical challenge any way you look at it.

Let's go through a typical race schedule:

a) You get equipment there 2-3 hours before the race, get someone to go out and double check the course, talk to the police, then you go in and pre-flight the registration staff.

b) Registration will open maybe 1.5-2 hours before race time and when it opens there's 5 people stomping around all impatient it's not open, then it's a ghost town for about 1/2 hour. If you open it up 3 hours before the 5 people get in right away, but then it's a ghost town for and hour and a half.

c) About 45 minutes before the race about 500 a**holes show up demanding it take no more than 7 seconds to register them because they're too important to have to wait like normal people. They slap down an illegible registration form partially filled out and stomp away before the volunteer can read their age or birthdate.

d) About 30 minutes before the race all those same a**holes are queued up over a porta-potty. They must remember to complain about not enough porta-potties later.

e) About 15 minutes before the race complaints start that they didn't have a chance to put stuff in their car that's parked a mile away because they came 45 minutes before the race and they want you to hold things for them and why the h**l don't you have a bag drop like real races?

f) While the race is going on the scoring team tries to decipher the illegible entry forms and decides what to do with people the don't put down ages or genders. At some point they give up and start scoring the race in order to get results out on time.

g) After the race about half the race day people complain that their name is spelled wrong in the results, or that they're a guy not a gal, and that they should have got an age group award but their age was wrong. We also should have known that they were a masters now because they race all the time.

h) Later that day the race organizers get a bunch of angry emails complaining about everything in g, plus the results were late, and there weren't enough porta-potties.

i) Later in the week the race committee meets and decides because they can't add to the size of the race site, they can't support very many race day registrations or pickups, and vote to add $10 to the race day fee and implement a race day packet pickup fee to discourage the practice. They also find out their volunteer that was doing data entry won't come back next year and they don't want to pay the race management company to do data entry so they impose a $5 mail-in fee to cover that and hide the online processing fee in the entry fee to encourage people to enter online.

--

So be careful what you ask for. More race day means more errors in results and they come out slower. It's that simple. Complain about speed of results and accuracy, race committees fix it by cutting off registration sooner.

Complain about race fees, races try to make the race fee look smaller by separating the online fees. With credit cards charging 2-3% and online firms charging 6% or more it starts to look better on the banner page to post a "feeless" race charge just like they do on TV (only $39.99 plus $12.95 postage and handling!).

Lots of these race committees are remarkably averse to criticism but the critiques often don't result in the outcome you expect because they are often contradictory leaving the committee to take the path of least resistance.

As said earlier, if you don't like it vote by keeping your feet at home. Staying at home and telling the race organizer why is even better. If cost is the problem offer some suggestions on what you'll live without. Saying you want a lower entry fee plus chip timing and a tech shirt or a race cap plus the ability to late register isn't going to send a message anyone will listen to.

Since no good rant would be complete without this, I'll also note that if you want more races that do "X", then helping those that do by volunteering (or organizing them yourself). That helps everyone. As long as races are organized by those who primarily want to raise money that will be the priority and race day logistics and runner satisfaction will be a distant 2nd.

You are funny wrote:

I'm surprised this thread has made it this far without a Keith Stone meltdown.

Sorry I'm late...

If your race is under 1,000, race day packet pick up is not that hard. It takes maybe 4-5 volunteers to handle it. If the event is pushing 2,000 and up, it gets very difficult and requires a lot of people. And if the volunteers are slow or understaffed, you can get lines down the street with people missing the start of the event or delaying the start.

The fact of the matter is that many events that are cutting packet pick up have no trouble filling up with participants. Which is also why races are getting away with huge "processing fees". People will pay the fee because they want to run the race.

Well, maybe. It really depends more on the venue. It takes a lot of space to run 1000 people through a line in an hour or so. Considering that's probably 500 cars thats a lot of parking. So if you have a big area that allows lots of lines and has lots of close parking its not a lot of trouble, but lots of places that have that are also near major roads that people don't want closed.

Now if you were saying 500 I'd tentatively agree, but 1000 people takes way more than 4-5 volunteers. That's 4 lines max, and at 30 seconds a piece that 500 minutes of processing / 4 = over two hours to get everyone through. For 1000 you need more like 16 volunteers, more if you have race day registration.

So 500 people with 4-5 volunteers would take just over an hour to get them all through. Again, assuming no race day registration.

True. Very True. But remember that online registration is a big participation driver so races really want it and often ignore the fees charged by the provider as long as it's convenient to work with them. Online firms often help with promotion of races with semi-targeted email at no "extra" cost to the race organizer and that's considered a big plus. Sure, groups to take fees via PayPal and use something like contact contact to promote, but it's just easier to use active.com and not worry about it. They're volunteers mostly.

Also, I tend to see more complaints about on-line not being opened soon enough as opposed to on-line charging too much. The squeaky wheel syndrome tends to win.

I'm not that torn up by online processing fees. It's the combination of an online processing fee coupled with a mail-in registration fee that pisses me off.

Quick example:

The Indy Mini (500 fetival half marathon) has a $7.50 online processing fee. If you want to register by mail, there is a $6.50 paper entry form processing fee.

grrrrrrr wrote:

I'm not that torn up by online processing fees. It's the combination of an online processing fee coupled with a mail-in registration fee that pisses me off.

Quick example:

The Indy Mini (500 fetival half marathon) has a $7.50 online processing fee. If you want to register by mail, there is a $6.50 paper entry form processing fee.

It seems to me that if RDs really hate paper entries and want them to go away, they'd charge MORE for it than on-line.

E.G. Nog wrote:It seems to me that if RDs really hate paper entries and want them to go away, they'd charge MORE for it than on-line.

They already are in many cases, or they're charging more on race day to make race day go away.

People don't want to mail cash (and RD's won't cash coming in either) few get a cashiers's check, and with the Payment Card Industry (PCI) rules making it impractical to take mail in credit card info (legally) that leaves you with checks, and a race of any size has to deal with bad ones that cost more than the entry fee in most cases. So credit cards online look REALLY appealing.

Now race day you have people not making out checks correctly or completely because they're in a hurry, or you have cash. Both have control issues. I once found a cash box in our club's shed that someone had left the registration money and checks in. Banks often reject personal checks over 90 days old, so only the cash was still good. I've seen the same thing happen at charities, they have a dozen lines of people paying and someone puts an envelope in a basket of pens and signs that ends up in a closet until next year. Getting rid of race day looks REALLY good once that's happened.

Professional event organizers don't have a real excuse, many use their own registration services or negotiate favorable rates with the big ones. They have experienced staff working the data 365/24. They're also in the business to make money and need to make that money a limited number of days each year. That means risk averse, and charging enough to guarantee profit.

Smaller events are expected to offer everything the "big time" events do, chip timing, online registration, confirmations, tech shirt, scenic course, bl*w j*bs every mile, etc. Without the trained staff they end up paying for it elsewhere and that drives up the cost. They want to be bigger to help economies of scale, but then facilities and parking are overwhelmed.

I love the big events, but a nice well run 300 person race is great too. I wouldn't want to do away with the big ones, but I also wouldn't want ever event to be expected to offer everything a big one could or operate under that same logistical restrictions.

If a race is too expensive I don't pay the fee and run it anyway. I rarely do this, but sometimes if it's a local 5k which charges $35+ where the proceeds don't go to a legit cause, I will.

I also think races should have a reduced fee for those who just want to race and don't want a tshirt or "participant" medal or even a lousy bagel at the finish.

I'll tell you what haters you guys direct your own race and try and cover the costs without extra costs. Not so easy is it?

I think it would be helpful if someone could give us a true breakdown of the costs associated with putting on a race. I will defer to our race directors to give us a scale of the event (ie. 300 people/5K). There is nothing wrong with making a profit, but I think people would like to know what everything really costs.

I don't know what the processing fee is, but the entry for the Portland Half-Marathon is $115. Included in the entry fee is TWO t-shirts! Who wants two shirts? Add Saturday parking (no day of race packet pickup) the total comes to $11 per mile. No Thanks.

Make that closer to $10 per mile-I know a cheap place to park!

I'm a race director too and I also would NEVER charge a processing fee of $20 for anything. I put on a high-quality, well organized race, and I charge $15 (up the cost as we get closer to race day) with no extra fees. It doesn't cost THAT much money if you do it right, we give out socks (same cost as a t-shirt), $500 in prize money, and still have over $1,500 to give to a charity and that's with only about 200 people at the race. The Manchester Road Race is one of the best races in New England and they still only charge $20

I can break down costs to whoever asked before about a local 5k with about 300 registered ...

Permits $0 (I don't know what everyone is talking about but I've never paid for a permit so we can throw that out the window, that's including at my real job with the MS150 bike ride that goes through 15 towns and 150 miles, never paid a dime for a "permit")

Police (8 officers x 4 hours of overtime x $52/hour)- $1,664, of course I also put on a trail race where we don't need officers so that is sometimes $0

School Restrooms (pay the janitor fee and you can use the school) - $165

Timing Company - $650

Socks (instead of t-shirts) $450

Online Reg. Fees $1 + 6% ($15.00) = $1.90 x 300 = $570

Marketing (between facebook, constant contact, coolrunning and a few newspaper ads you reach all the people you're going to, everything else is free) $300

Bib Numbers - $160

Honestly I don't think I'm forgetting anything... maybe some other rental equipment for PA (we just borrow ours) but we'll add in $300 for "miscellaneous" costs though I don't think there is much else and we are at $2,595 for a trail race and $3,959 for a road 5k.

So all told, you could charge $15.00, get 300 people and still make a profit.

Keep in mind you add in a few sponsors at $500 apiece and you're doing pretty well.

This is all based on

http://www.manchesterrunningcompany.com/events/finally-spring-5k

feel free to sign up

cekman wrote:

I think it would be helpful if someone could give us a true breakdown of the costs associated with putting on a race. I will defer to our race directors to give us a scale of the event (ie. 300 people/5K). There is nothing wrong with making a profit, but I think people would like to know what everything really costs.

Well for starters to keep on topic most of the "online processing" costs go to the online provider, not the race. For example active.com is $3.25 or 6.75%, with a decreasing percentage as the entry fee rises. Keep in mind that includes the 2.5-3% handling fee from the credit card company.

The short version can be found in a race planning spreadsheet at:

The long version:

Your average race is going to have a number of "fixed" costs that aren't totally participant based. You're going to need insurance, permitting, medical, and basic timing, and awards. In order to get people there you're going to need marketing.

Insurance costs can rise based on the number of participants but there's a significant "base" of $200-300, you may also have to pick up workman's comp insurance for police or sheriff's deputies. So for a road race where no alcohol is served and no wheeled participants are allowed (wheelchairs, baby-joggers) you're looking at $250-500. Allowing wheeled participants could raise the cost 100-200% (yes, I mean double or triple). Those costs will also rise with longer duration and more participants.

Permitting can get VERY expensive, or nothing. For example at one point the city of Greensboro wanted $50,000 for any event held downtown on city streets. Obviously all the races left. On the flip side small towns often offer police protection and use permits for nothing. A half marathon in town pays over $5000 for permitting covering the city streets and the university campus, roughly $2 per participant. We pay the city $3 per participant to use the local trails for an organized event. Ten year ago we used the trails for free and got the motorized patrol for free (8 officers), so it was possible to do a trail race or compact 5K with no permitting cost. It's not unusual to pay $100 per intersection for police support.

Medical can go from a few hundred for a single crew to a thousand or more for a longer event or a larger participant base. Often the size of the medical crew is dictated by insurance.

Basic timing and awards start at around $500. Say you have a 300 person race you may pay $300-500 for non-ship timing, and maybe $1 a head for a medal. An average 5K may have 66 medals, and that really doesn't change much as the races get bigger. You may send another $100 on the overall and masters awards. Chip timing is going to be at least $2 a head and often more if there are split mats, real time tracking, etc. I've seen rates advertised as high as $8 a head for timing that included multiple mats and "your name in lights" when you finish.

You're going to need another $200-$500 for supplies and signage.

Then there's marketing. That's going to be maybe $300 for a small race to something like a Race for the Cure which expects you have at least a $50,000 marketing budget. That means locally, our RFTC spends $5 per participant on marketing.

Variable costs would be shirts, refreshments, and porta-jons. In reverse order a porta-jons can be around $150. If you consider you can service maybe 75 participants with one that's $2 a head. Refreshments can be maybe $.25 a head for cups to put water in to $5-8 a head for on course GU and post race beer and pizza. The math there is pretty easy, 12 slices a large pizza, $6 in quantity, $.50 a head just for pizza.

Shirts can be $2-2.50 for a simple cotton shirt with a one color design to $15-20 for a tech with multi-colors. Smaller races get hit harder with this because there's often minimum charges or quantities. This is where the "saving" on shirts gets tricky. Say you offer small, medium, large, XL. You're going to buy 48 shirts or pay basically a retail price for the odd lots. Bigger events buy them in batches of 144.

So from a budgeting standpoint I normally advise charity races to set their fees to cover the costs per participant and use the sponsorship as profit. In this locality it costs about $3000 up front to put on a 5K on city streets, so you put your 3K up front often before you've taken in a dime, then hope to over your costs with entry fees, and get the profit from the sponsors. With sponsorship being flat or declining, and costs going up, events are making up the difference by jacking up fees.

I also see a trend to more "outsourcing" of work. Instead of Jane the secretary typing the entries into a spreadsheet you hire out data management at $1 to $2 a head. Instead of someone's kid putting up a web site on geocities they hire out one with a database, and online registration lists, and results for the last 10 years. Can't just tack the results on the wall of the gym, gotta have them posted online in a few hours or everyone goes ape s**t. Many places don't have people willing or able to do that, so they hire it out, and that costs money.

Not big money individually, but when you add maybe $4 for chip timing, another $1 for data management, $1-2 for marketing services that's like 1/4 of a $30 entry fee.

Road racing's a tough way to make money. I know several charities that do it mainly for the exposure and to obtain a list of people that they can solicit for donations. The don't make enough on the races for the effort, when compare to putting the same amount of work into a grant application for $25,000.

And from a for profit standpoint say a professional group makes $100,000 on a race. So for 5000 people that $20 a head in pure profit. Sounds huge. But when you consider there's a dozen to so people that get paid out of that profit they're going to need several of those a year to make a living. No excuse to do a sh*tty job, but it is one to charge a lot of money when you can get away with it.

Keith and anotherrunner have done a good job of listing some of the basic fees we get hit with. We have been producing our biggest race for 23 years, and have added a few other races the last 7-8 years. One thing that we find to be true is that when you have a successful race, over time the local community sees it as a cash cow and you can find that things you used to get for free you now have to pay for. "Cash cow" might be the wrong term, perhaps it's related to community fatigue from getting hit up by the same organization for the same event year after year.

I can tell you that in the past 5-10 years our city permit fee for our start and finish parks has over tripled. We now have to stipend a number of positions that used to be done purely by volunteers. (Well, we can stipend and pay for experience and someone we know will do it right, or we can go back to a volunteer and hope it gets done right...too much at stake to choose the latter). As our race has grown we have had to bump up police presence, especially for stuff like general crowd control at the finish.

For any race that puts on multiple events you also have costs to own basic supplies like cones, fencing, start/finish structures, banners/signage. (we own 1500+ cones, do the math on that). Want to buy a digital clock for your finish line, that is not small $. And then all the little stuff like supplies to mark the course, truck rentals if your course people who are going to put the supplies out don't own a truck.

Everything adds up. If done right, you can certainly make money, good money, from putting on races. But as I've learned over the years and as Keith points out, it's not as easy as scratching a starting line in the dirt, collecting $5/runner, getting 200 runners, and making $1000.

Back to the question from the OP...yes $20 for an online processing fee for a $65 entry fee is out of line high. The online registration provider we use would charge $4.25 for a $65 entry. For us that includes the credit card processing fee and the rest is their profit. From having worked with other online registration providers and done an internal RFP fairly recently I suspect a $65 entry fee could have a service charge directly from an online registration provider as low as about $2.25 and as high as about $8. As others have pointed out, Rutgers must be rolling some other costs into that $20.

I used to organize bowling tournaments. I would post the flyer, collect the money, and pay out all money to maybe top 5 or ten. Has anyone ever tried this for trail races? Could you just pay 5 bucks and go to local converted rail trail and race? I have the problem with trying to find races that I can afford. It would be ok with me to just meet and race anyone who showed up. You could just make it interesting with some prize money to pay for gas.

I used to wrote:I used to organize bowling tournaments. I would post the flyer, collect the money, and pay out all money to maybe top 5 or ten. Has anyone ever tried this for trail races? Could you just pay 5 bucks and go to local converted rail trail and race? I have the problem with trying to find races that I can afford. It would be ok with me to just meet and race anyone who showed up. You could just make it interesting with some prize money to pay for gas.

Actually our club does that on the track each spring. Five events every Wednesday in June.

Now we subsidize the timing equipment from other races, get insurance from RRCA, don't post results, and don't charge a dime.

Now the problem comes in when you charge. The minute you do that whoever's facility you use looks at you as a business. You do an event on a public facility you have to have insurance. With insurance comes rules, on and on.

So we can go to our local trail and do a race for free and no one says boo. We used to be able to do that on the XC course at our major University. But if we use the trail and charge money, the city wants $3 a head and proof of insurance. if we go to the University XC course they want a couple grand plus proof of insurance even if we aren't charging anything.