Organize awesome events.Our all-in-one event management software keeps organizers sane & attendees happy.

Last week, we told you how we’re focused on setting up events faster with fewer opportunities for error. We delivered part of our fast goal with Supercharged Event Cloning. Today we’re releasing a simpler way to collect entry details including vehicle, class, run group and number.

More than 6,900 events are created annually on MotorsportReg.com. Even our most experienced event organizers, who love how our form builder can be customized to their specific needs, asked us to make it easier to get right on the first try.

Great news - we are converting our paid White Label Website add-on to a free feature on our Premium plan! 

As we roll out the update, clubs, racetracks and sanctioning bodies can choose a custom URL and upload a logo to enable a complete White Label Website. From first click, to registration form, to payment and confirmation screens, the branded site keeps the organization name and logo at the top throughout the customer experience when buying a membership, applying for a license or registering for an event. 

Customers who switch to MotorsportReg always report a bump in registration counts. We knew our tools and promotion played a part in growing participation but we never knew how much - until now.

Using nine months of click data, I analyzed how attendees find and register for your events and learned something surprising: most of our clubs, racetracks and sanctioning bodies are using MotorsportReg for free. 😮

Fresh off becoming part of the Hagerty family, we've headed to cold, frozen and snowy Traverse City, Michigan to spend the week together at our new headquarters. We're meeting our peers and plotting joint efforts for 2019 and beyond.

Roadmap Series

Your response over the last two weeks to our acquisition was overwhelming - we really felt the love! I had so many wonderful calls and emails with the opportunity to share our plans. I was thrilled to hear your enthusiasm match my own and understand how you'll benefit.

I want everyone to hear that same message so I'll be writing here on the present and future state of MotorsportReg. You will see how we plan to further help you automate tasks, improve accuracy and grow participation in a series covering:

• Marketplace performance - how we fill your events today and in the future
• Roadmap: Refining the core - improving existing features
• Roadmap: Streamline and innovate - making event day more seamless
• Roadmap: Scaling participation - growing your audience and attendance
• Roadmap: White-label registration - keeping your brand front and center

Each piece will dive into what you have told us is important and how we plan to respond.

Hiring

One of the most direct benefits to you is expanding our team to better service you and your attendees. It took a decade to get to ten full-time people and our framework calls for doubling that by the end of 2020.

Keep your eyes peeled for openings in a variety of roles soon. We love bringing on fellow enthusiasts to move us forward and hope you'll apply!

Customers, friends and fellow enthusiasts -

I have big news to share - today we are announcing that Hagerty has acquired MotorsportReg.com and RaceHero. The entire team, including myself, is staying in place and there is no change to our commitment to helping you organize awesome events or protecting your data. What will change is our ability to lean on Hagerty's resources to accelerate everything we do and deliver value to you more quickly in the form of automating tasks, improving accuracy and growing participation.

This is a major milestone for our customers, the team and me personally. It's been 16 years since I built a prototype to solve my own needs as a track day organizer with the Golden Gate Chapter of the BMW CCA.

What began as a hobby (and let's be honest, a tax write-off for my own racing - thanks Dad!) became a 12-person company managing 40,000 events and 2,000,000 registrations for two software-as-a-service apps. We did it without any funding, bootstrapping from revenue and obsessively solving the needs of event organizers. None of that would have been possible without the great team who joined me on this journey starting with Ann Maycock in 2009. Few teams - funded or not - ever achieve this success and I hope they are as proud of themselves as I am of them.

Although bootstrapping has been a wonderful challenge, it also slowed us down. We have been drowning in great opportunities that we simply haven't had the people or hours in the day to tackle. That's what drew my interest when Hagerty called.

While many of you know them for their classic car insurance, Hagerty is really an automotive lifestyle brand that motorsport enthusiasts love too. You can rent a classic or exotic car on their AirBnb-for-cars platform DriveShare. They offer HPDE insurance to protect your car on track. You can learn what a car is worth using their valuation database before buying or selling. You can join the Hagerty Driver's Club which features the world's 3^rd largest automotive magazine, roadside assistance with guaranteed flatbed towing, and gearhead-oriented discounts like Griot's Garage and Skip Barber racing schools. Or you can join their online community led by racers-turned-writers from prestigious backgrounds such as Road & Track and Car and Driver magazines.

We didn't know any of those things when Hagerty first approached us. But each conversation kept revealing more opportunities where we had overlapping objectives and unique strengths. Their growth mindset and obsession with customer service convinced us that they were the right partner at the right time who could help us accomplish outcomes we couldn't achieve on our own.

To be clear, we didn't decide to sell. We decided to sell to Hagerty. There's an important difference. Our mission to connect event organizers and participants so they can live out their passion for motorsport fits completely within Hagerty's goal of creating a movement of 6 million enthusiasts by 2025 who will preserve car and motorsport culture for future generations. Unlike previous unsolicited inquiries, Hagerty didn't want to pillage our mailing list or aggregate our payment processing. Their executive team has great admiration for what we've built and want it to expand because people and vehicles coming together at events are the cornerstone of car and motorsport culture.

So, what happens now? It's mostly business-as-usual... with a turbo. Hagerty's 12-person marketing team will begin promoting your events to their audience (which reaches 10x more people!) to generate even more new members and participants. Our support number and email stay the same. Our team will quickly grow to extend our lead on delivering the world's best software and support for clubs, racetracks and sanctioning bodies. I signed a 5-year agreement to be the Managing Director of Hagerty Motorsport and continue obsessively solving your problems.

Back in 2003, I had no expectation this would ever be a business, let alone a business someone else would want to buy. It's incredibly humbling and impossible to sufficiently express my gratitude in a blog post so I hope we will meet at an event in the future. In the meantime, I want to thank every event organizer who has trusted us whether you are the Golden Gate Chapter - still with us 16 years later - or you just signed on last week. Being part of Hagerty uniquely positions us to be your partner in tackling the challenges ahead so you can keep following your passion in all forms of motorsport and have fun doing it.

If you have questions, I am hosting a Facebook Live Ask Me Anything tomorrow, Friday April 5th at 9:00am Pacific time at https://facebook.com/MotorsportReg. I invite you to come chat with me then. Otherwise, you can also contact our team and we will - as always - get you squared away.

We've all been there – walking around the paddock and you hear the faint sound of a voice reverberating over the PA system. Just as you hear the first few words, someone fires up an engine erasing any chance you had at hearing that important announcement. 

Or even worse, as an event organizer, you are trying to inform people about a schedule change or invite people to stay for the evening social and nobody can hear you.

Today we're announcing one of our most requested features – the ability to send text messages directly to your attendees mobile phones.

If you need a fast, reliable way to reach your participants, SMS is it. Dynmark reports that 90% of text messages are read within 3 minutes of receipt. You'll be surprised how easy it is to send a message to some or all of your attendees. Simply select the people you want to reach and select "Send text message."

You can also send messages just like you do today with Email Blaster.

Sending text messages to your attendees is not limited to event-day messages. You can also use text messages to send out important details before or after an event like a special discount offer to drive more registrations, last-minute schedule changes, or when registration opens for your next event.

Availability

This feature will roll out in the coming weeks. Our team is wrapping up the development and testing.

Pricing

Text Message Blaster is a premium add-on. You'll buy a starter package which gives you a unique phone number for your organization, the ability to send messages, and 3,000 message credits to get you started for 12 months. No monthly recurring fees.

Need more than 3,000 messages for the year? You can buy more message credits to use anytime in the year. 

To all the organizations who trust MotorsportReg, you just hit a major milestone years in the making: we processed your 2 millionth event registration! This milestone is no small feat. Two million participants have lived out their passion for motorsport through an event that you've organized. We congratulate you on your contribution to the sport and for creating a place for all of us to get our adrenaline fix and create lifelong friendships.

What's next? Together we’re partnering on a mission to accelerate the growth of the motorsport events community. Leveraging our tools, you've registered record numbers of people for motorsport events this year. Six highlights worth sharing:

1. Your events reached more than 1,000,000 web visitors on the MotorsportReg calendar and 1,300,000 inboxes via our monthly "Upcoming Events" emails.
2. You brought back 10% more people to your registration form using our abandoned registration emails that detect when someone leaves the registration form.
3. You filled over $100,000 of unsold seats using our Last Minute Track Junkies list, growing your contact list and keeping your events financially in the black.
4. You added 115,000 new names when people opt-in to your contact database before they view your registration forms.
5. You sent your members and customers 5,000,000 emails keeping them up to date and encouraging them to register for your events. Five million touch points!
6. All combined, our tools with your passion have increased average participation! The number of events attended per person per year has grown annually by 2.6%. Each of your average participants are attending 13% more of your events today than 5 years ago.

These are just a few of the ways that we support you in your mission to grow the motorsport events community. Our team is constantly finding new ways to automate tasks, reduce errors, and increase participation in your events. These tenets are at the core of every new feature we deliver and we're excited to see what you accomplish next! 

The MotorsportReg product team has spent the last few months developing a new look and feel for MotorsportReg. This new design is the foundation for many exciting new improvements coming this winter. Check out the sneak peek below. We hope you’re as excited as we are!