Allow Racecheck to use cookies on this browser?

2020 and early 2021 presented us with a period of enforced reflection, giving us the time and space to think about why we started this company, our values and goals, and what we want to achieve. Everything led back to reviews. Reviews as a tool for participants to discover great events, and Reviews as a tool for organisers to collect feedback and provide actionable insights.

The pressure to perform pulled us in all different directions and I’m the first to take accountability for this, but in the end anything beyond focussing on reviews just felt wrong. A distraction, a drain of resources, a dilution of focus. So we engaged a very painful wrecking ball

Racecheck is no longer a search engine for events, although participants can certainly still search for events to read or write reviews, and a great new “review diary” feature encourages participants using Racecheck as a memory vault.

There’s a lot of great companies out there, run by great people, offering great event search options, some of them also offering reviews, admittedly all super helpful for participants. But this can affect core incentives. The biggest issue being the potential dilution of impartiality of reviews or treatment of event organisers, when the majority of income is dependent upon race sales. While for many search engines this might not be true at all, it can create such a perception, as we’ve often been questioned by participants.

Because our income no longer depends on event commissions, we are free to unleash the power of reviews, including precious rich snippets from ratings, to benefit organisers directly. That means that our incentives are aligned 100% with the organiser, by directing all traffic to the organiser’s website and sales channels, even for collecting reviews, all done via the Racecheck Review Box. The results have been incredible, sometimes leading to 30x ROI.

We do charge a fixed monthly fee for a premium version of the Review Box, but the price is highly dependent on the size of the organisation , and we even have a free option for charities or organisers struggling with budget. The pricing model has also been overhauled in the past month, from a complicated “per box” price, to a simple free vs premium subscription regardless of the amount of races or boxes an organiser might need.

And as we no longer need to maintain a fully updated directory of events, we can divert all our energy and focus on constantly evolving and improving the product, and on how to make reviews a marketing powerhouse for organisers.

Our new release comes with a ton of new helpful features, which will be communicated to organisers directly.

I welcome all feedback so feel free to email me at alex at racecheck.com anytime.

Alex — CEO & Cofounder of Racecheck

Follow the Racecheck Blog here for insightful reports on feedback management and the mass participations sports industry.