Registrant percentage online versus paper

[duf]

I was wondering if anyone had some rough numbers as far as how their registrations break out between online and paper forms?

I am trying to really make a push to push as many people as possible to online registration. Right now I am seeing somewhere around a 40/60 split online/paper.

I'd love to see it more along the lines of 80/20. What has been your experience?

[Cannon]

Our event (marathon/half marathon) runs 76/24 for preregistration. Expo registration (in person) drops this to more like 72/28. I've been tempted to join the "on-line only" crowd, raise the entry fee to cover the on-line cost and live happily ever after!

[Nico]

Our event in France do 42,5 % of online registrations for the half-marathon and 32,6 % for the 10 K.

Nico

[Doug R]

In our event (approximately 3,900 total registered participants) Our online registration is well over 90%, likely closer to 95%. This has grown quite a bit but it has taken several years.

One thing we did that really helped reduce the amount of paper registrations was that we completely eliminated the registration form portion of our printed brochures.

Our brochures used to be a multi-fold 8 1/2 x 11 affair, which included a complete registration brochure. Now we have switched over to more of a "hanger card" style - just a double sided heavy stock paper card where the only registration info tells interested people to register online via our website.

Not only did that greatly reduce the number of paper registration entries we received, it also reduced the burden we placed on our printing sponsor, who was able to print out a greater number of pieces for us while still staying within their agreed sponsorship commitment.

Of course, we still have a printable registration form available for download from our website because you will always have some folks who wish to register via mail rather than online.

The funny thing is that the majority of people who register using a paper form say they are doing it to pay by cheque to avoid the credit card processing charges that are levied on top of our online registration fees. Yet we actually charge registrants $10.00 MORE to register via the paper form, so even with the credit card processing charges, it's usually still cheaper to register online.

And if they register via a paper form, but still pay using a credit card, they are not only charged the extra $10 for using a paper form, they are also charged the credit card processing fees.

We try to tell them it's less expensive (and faster) to just register online, but if the customer wants to spend more money, who am I to stop them?

At this point, the bulk of the paper registrations that we have to manually enter into our database are the complimentary entries we provide to our major sponsors. If we didn't have those "sponsor comp" paper entries to enter, our manual data entry load would be even smaller.

Cheers,
Doug

[JimG]

I haven't printed a paper entry for an established event in close to 5 years. All advertising is done via website & email blast to 4,500+ runners, and all registration is online. I won't even mail an entry to someone who asks for it. For those people, there's a printable form accessible at the website that they can print out and mail.

As a result, our online percentage is probably in the 98% range.

The only drawback has been that for the few dinosaurs who mail in their entries, I sometimes forget to enter them into the database, so their bib isn't there on race day. My fault so I just treat them as race-day registrants.

For new events, you might have to do a bit more publicity via printed forms.

[joeconn4]

We're similar to JimG in how we handle our largest event, ~3500 registered runners plus about 4500 runners on relay teams. We had less than 25 paper registrations this year for the 3500 individuals. We do not allow paper registration for the relay teams. No race day registrations for this event.

We have a 500 runner race in April. 2 paper registrations this year. No race day registration for this one either.

We have a 600 runner race in January that does allow race day registration. Of the 450 pre-registered about 5% came in via paper.

Similar to the above responses, we charge an extra $10 if someone wants to register via paper ($5 for our January race which has a much lower entry fee), which covers the fee our online provider charges plus a little for our registration staff to deal with the extra work. Basically we just take the paper entries and type them into the online system so that everything is in a master database. So if you enter online it might be $60 plus a $5.50 processing fee, or you can enter via paper for $70 no additional fee.

[ecarmines]

We are a club with 17 races per year and almost 3000 members. We get 95%+. We offer mail in on our printed race brochures and download from our race website. We always encourage people to register online in large print. We use Raceit for our online registration. Our membership database is linked to our race registration database and can pre-load all of the runners info if they have registered before. We offer a discount to members also (the system does the checking for us). Finally we offer an option where people can register online and mail in a check. They avoid the fee. We just have to go into the system and indicate that they have paid. We get good data with little work.
Ed

[duf]

Wow well you guys certainly give me something to shoot for. It just makes sense all the way around to funnel entrants online.