Selecting a theme for your event is a great way to create a strong and consistent brand identity. Everything from your event logo to marketing creatives, fundraising achievements, medal designs, and more can be centralized around your theme, seamlessly tying every piece of your event together.
Whether your theme is based around a holiday or something else, Race Roster has a number of great tools you can leverage to play up your theme.
Virtual challenge maps
Your themed event may be a stand-alone virtual challenge, or perhaps you are using a virtual challenge to engage with your participants as they train for your event. Since challenge maps are used to indicate participat progress and do not represent the actual route that participants are covering, you can be as creative as you like with your map shapes!
For instance, if your event is St. Patrick’s day themed, you could offer a challenge option covering a ‘pot of gold’ shape, another option covering the shape of a shamrock, and another option covering the shape of a top hat. Your options can be a variety of distances to ensure participants of all fitness levels can select the challenge that’s right for them.
Pre-recorded audio cues
Audio cues are a fantastic way to connect with your participants as they track their activity using the ASICS Runkeeper™ app. Audio cues can be pre-configured to play at a specific duration, distance, or geolocation, ensuring your cues are heard at exactly the right moment!
There are a lot of great ways you can bring your theme into your audio cues. For example, if your theme was a Christmas themed event, you could work with a “Santa Claus” voice actor to record your audio cues and include other Christmas themed sound clips. Perhaps you could even turn your audio cues into a Christmas carol!
Listen to this great example of an audio cue:
This audio cue was used to motivate team relay participants of the ASICS World Ekiden 2020 event – a Japanese relay that’s all about teamwork, rivalry, and competition. Runners pass along their tasuki (or sash) as fast as possible, and while each leg is run separately, teams compete as one. This was the first of 6 audio cues that were played to encourage each team member to complete their individual leg, learn more about the history of Ekiden, and make it to the virtual finish line.
Interested in creating audio cues for your event? Learn how to set up audio cues.
Digital medals
Digital medals allow you to provide your participants with a commemorative keepsake they can hold onto for a lifetime. You can simply upload your custom medal design and award it to your participants upon completed segments (which works great for virtual relays and triathlons) or a finished race. The choice is yours. Either way, you have maximum control over your medal’s design, allowing you to create beautiful digital medals that compliment your theme!
Fundraising badges & themed fundraising pages
Themed fundraising badges are a great way to motivate fundraisers to try and hit your pre-set milestones! Once a milestone is met, the corresponding fundraising badge will be displayed on your fundraiser’s page and they can share it proudly. This is a great way to inspire more people to give!
Themed event merchandise
Our products tool allows you to sell event merchandise during registration and inside your online participant store. This is a great place to sell exclusive items that are in-line with your theme!
Branded email campaigns
Send custom email campaigns to participants, donors, people who abandoned your registration page, and more. You can build your own email templates or select one of our pre-existing designs and customize them to match your event’s theme. Having your email campaign reflect your branding is a great way to tie everything together beautifully.
You can even create fundraising emails campaigns and include a stylized progress indicator to show how close you are to your fundraising goal!
Customizable event details pages
Don’t forget to make use of our various event details page customization options to highlight your event theme! Add a captivating cover photo, adjust colours, add images, engaging videos, and more! Check out our best practices for designing a great event details page.
Custom branded results pages
Great experiences don’t end at the finish line. We believe the result-viewing experience is just as important as every other step in the participant journey. That’s why we have given you control over various elements on your results page. To play up your event theme, you can create a fully custom finisher certificate, upload a background image, set up custom display messages, and add some fun banner images!
Your custom display messages and banner images can link anywhere you like. This could be a great way to call attention to the next step you’d like your participants to take. For example, you could remind participants to submit their entries for your themed photo contest!
For more information, check out our guide to creating engaging results pages.
Themed photo contest
On Race Roster, you can allow participants to upload their own pictures to your event photo gallery. This means you could engage your participants with a fun themed photo contest! For example, if your event is “International Women’s Day” themed, your photo challenge could require each participant to take a photo with a woman they admire.
Awards tool
With our awards tool, you can create and assign a variety of awards for your participants. You are able to leverage any of the data included in your participant list – such as a participant’s response to a question asked during registration. For example, if your event is dog themed, you could create an award for the ‘top finishing person running with their dog’. This can be done by analyzing the results of participants who answered ‘yes’ to the question, ‘will you be running with your dog?’.
Bonus idea: Create a themed event music playlist
Questions
If you have any questions, we’re here to help! Contact us at organizer@raceroster.com or timer@raceroster.com.
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