Upcoming Convention Schedule January 29, 2012
For most of our customers, late November through February is the “off-season”. For us here at HQ, this is often our busiest time of the year. The phones and inboxes are pretty quiet but we’re heads down working on sales and marketing programs, deploying major updates to our service that would be too disruptive for the middle of the season and we’re also on the road a lot visiting and speaking with customers.
Here’s our travel and convention schedule so far for the 2011-2012 off-season:
- Professional Motorsport Circuit Owners & Operators Convention – Nov 27-28, Orlando, FL
- SCCA SouthEast Division Convention – Jan 20-22, Jekyll Island, GA
- SCCA Southwest Division Roundtable – Jan 20-22, Ft. Worth, TX
- BMW CCA Chapter and DEC Congress – Feb 24-26, Ft. Worth, TX
- SCCA National Convention – Mar 1-3, Las Vegas, NV
In late February we’ll be presenting three sessions at the BMW CCA DEC and Chapter Congress. The following week we’ll be in Las Vegas for our 5th SCCA National Convention and we will be presenting two sessions.
There’s also a chance we’ll be back in Texas in early March to help oversee the first SCCA Majors event in the country.
Let us know if you would like us to present or attend one of your organization’s events!
Strategery January 26, 2012
No, it’s not really a word, but it’s something you should be doing. Most of us are way too busy with jobs, life and trying to have fun with our hobby/passion/pursuit to think long-term. This is natural. But every once in awhile, you see someone else stepping up their game and you think, “huh.”
Those people are BMW CCA Puget Sound Chapter in Washington.
First, their website is excellent. We already talked about that on our Facebook page (you’re a fan, right?) Second, they are thinking long term about how to not just survive, but to thrive as the landscape changes around them. Behold:
Research and advice performed by two graduate students, this is the long-term thinking that separates the winners from the losers. You don’t have to do it all overnight, but you better be taking one small step at a time. If you’re not moving forward, you’re moving backwards relative to your competition.
Think about the competitive landscape in amateur club racing 20 years ago. SCCA was the game in town. You want a license? You want to get on track? You want to race? The SCCA was pretty much your only option that wasn’t a Skip Barber or Jim Russell Racing School.
What’s happening today? They are facing competition from dozens of groups including large-scale players like NASA and local organizations who run more casual or alternative race formats. On the far end of the spectrum, everyone is getting poached by completely new (and perhaps insane) options like the 24 Hours of Lemons and Chump Car.
You can’t take the Puget Sound report and apply it to your club unless you’re Puget Sound. But you could definitely give it a quick read and think about how it applies to your organization and what you can be doing to move your strategic ball down field just a couple of steps.
Oh, and they made this diddy to promote their track days. Jealous yet?
Baby steps. Before you know it, it’ll be 2032.
Google Analytics Integration December 20, 2011
For those nerdy number crunchers out there on our Premium Plan, we have an early Christmas present for you: Google Analytics Integration. You can hurry to your Account Options screen and input your Google Analytics Property ID (looks like UA-XXXXXX-Y). Once saved, we’ll immediately start using it to record visitor statistics on the following pages:
- Private landing page (e.g., http://YourOrg.MotorsportReg.com)
- Advertisement
- Requirements
- Order form
- Attendee list
- Profile Add (add organization to profile)
- Results
If you use an email service provider who supports Google tracking parameters or you build your own links, you can track how many people click a given link and from what source. This opens up endless opportunities for measuring your efforts and dipping your toe into the water with A/B testing.
At this time we can not include your tracking code on the receipt/confirmation pages because those screens may feature more than one event from multiple organizations. We hope to solve this soon so you can close the loop on your marketing.
If you aren’t yet a Google Analytics user, we strongly recommend you head over and open an account. It takes only a couple of minutes of cutting and pasting a few lines of text to get your website started and you on your way to a more productive, informed 2012!
Kart Makes and Hotel Updates December 6, 2011
A few changes that we want to mention as we head into the quiet winter. The first is that we’ve added fourteen common kart chassis manufacturers to the vehicle dropdown list to help make it easier to add karts to your garage. While any driver can always use the “Other…” option to enter anything they want, seeing their brand listed provides a warm fuzzy that no blank text field can match. We curate this list to keep it reasonable in length but please let us know if we’re missing any major brands. Karting, both indoor and outdoor, is become a major event category for us. We just recently helped Performance Racing Industry manage the Red Bull Kart Fight event that featured top karters and international race stars!
Also released last month was an update to our hotel program. We have been trialing a different layout for events held at Thunderhill Raceway in Northern California and have rolled out those changes to all venues. The sidebar now lists potential hotels with a thumbnail, quality rating and estimated price for the dates of the event being viewed.
Occasionally we received reports of hotels coming up that were nowhere near the venue. In one instance, a poor HPDE participant booked a hotel an hour away because our partner did not have any inventory near the track! As a result, we switched to a geolocation API that allows us to make sure the hotel is within a close radius of the venue or otherwise does not return any listings.
This work was primarily done by a new member on our team, say hi to Josh!
October Updates October 18, 2011
We’ve been working away on many things including a new hire which we’ll introduce shortly but we wanted to let you know about a few small updates released over the past month:
- Filter reports by registration date: You’ve been able to sort reports by registration date for some time now but we’ve added the ability to filter by a start and/or end date to limit the number of results in your report. This request came from organizers who wanted to print reports in batches, especially detail reports. Now you can limit the report output from the Filter, Group and Sort screen using a new field at the bottom.
- We’re upgrading our hotel program to use Expedia’s recent improvements. The latest template has an improved user experience, a map-based view that allows attendees to see where the hotels are located and integrates TripAdvisor.com ratings as a filter.
- Internet Explorer 9 tweaks – we’re constantly finding ways that IE9 doesn’t play like it used to and making small changes. The latest fix restores the autocomplete functionality for adding members to an event.
- Removed formatting and line numbers from Excel reports. Line numbers are redundant in the Excel output. We’ve stripped out some of the report formatting like cell borders to make it simpler and more easily customized to your preferences.
- We’ve added quite a few validation rules over the summer. You can now validate most vehicle fields including year, make, model, color, official weight, tire brand, GCR/rules page number and log book number. We also added a variant of the membership verification rule that lets you check if the member is valid at the time of registration rather than the start date of your event. This is useful for events with long registration periods.