Yearlong 5ks?

We keep ours up all year, the idea there is to get participants (and donors and sponsors too) to register while they're still charged from the current one. "Register for 2018 and get a 50% Early Bird discount!" 


But we build and open a NEW version for next year just before the current event happens, so both years are live for a few weeks. (Your idea sounds like a lot of soft-crediting will need to get done.)


This allows people to keep fundraising for the current year a bit after the event, so they don't miss their required DSP fundraising minimum. AND they can also register for next year right away, which means that we can get them to start recruiting quickly and fundraising a bit earlier too.


There's still a lot of idleness that far out of course, but there is stuff that gets accomplished. Our Event manager sets weekly recruitment and fundraising goals for the event coordinators that keep the efforts moving steadily and progressively. Before goals, they were REALLY idle for 8 months. The first year is a lot of guessing about the goals, so you'll tweak often. So counting down weeks till the event might look like...


Week 50: Recruit 20   Fundraising $0

​Week 49: Recruit 15   Fundraising $0

​Week 48: Recruit 10   Fundraising $50

​​Week 47: Recruit   4   Fundraising $120

​​...etc...

​Week 21: Recruit  2    Fundraising $325

​Week 20: Recruit 12   Fundraising $350

​​Week 19: Recruit 18   Fundraising $453

...etc...

​Week 03: Recruit  2   Fundraising $5,549

​Week 02: Recruit  1   Fundraising $5,689

​​Week 01: Recruit  0   Fundraising $7,365

​

After the first year, you can use the previous year to predict what goals are realistic. ("Predictive Analytics" - buzzword!) I do the "weeks till event" format so we can compare previous years and other events performance when tweaking weekly goals.

This is still a bit of an experiment with us, just getting into the second year of always up. Someone promoted the idea at a BBCon a few years back. I'm actually working on improving the Excel workbook we use to define goals this week, so I'll take a look at the activity trends and update this thread. I suspect this will settle down into an earlier recruitement phase that dwindles as fundraising grows around mid-year. I don't think anyone will really fundraise much 50 weeks out, but I'm hopeful that an early push will help converting a few recent donors/cheerers to new participants.


We do 5 different events more or less staggered through out the year, so we're trying to cross promote them more as well - and we also have a DIY for the overachievers.


We also put up a stay-updated survey previously, which is a good alternative. I wonder how many early registrations vs stay-updated responses we got. It will also be interesting to see how many of each approach wind up actually participating. Seems like registering early is more of a commitment. Might get less but better quality names with always up.


I hope someone else chimes in with a longer history of doing this so we can compare experiences.