New runbritain partners for 2015 – lastminute.com and Virgin Money Giving

2014 was a good year for the runbritain’s online race entry service. We licensed 2,405 road and multi-terrain races online in England (up from 2,115). In total, 3,479 races were licensed across the UKA under our £50m insurance policy – an increase of over 300.  85,000 entries were made on the runbritain online entry service - a 30% increase over 2013, making us the fastest growing race entry service in the UK. Thank you if you were one of the runners who used the service last year. I hope you found it to be quick and effective. I know you will have found it inexpensive because there is no admin charge from us at all - just your card company’s own service charge. That’s the main reason that we are growing so fast. It is essentially free, so the sport generally, and runners specifically, saved more than £120,000 in admin costs by using us this year.  You can see the 2015 daily ticker for that on our website homepage.

Our principle responsibility is to offer a service to the sport, especially the 2-3 million regular runners and the race directors of the events that license with us this year, making a commitment to a safe and sustainable sport going forward. We have recently welcomed Welsh road races on-board the online process this month.  If you are a UKA-licensed race director and haven’t yet used the runbritain online entry service, contact Gavin Lightwood ([email protected]) to find out more for 2015.

 

We also choose to work with partners who have similar goals. We license and insure all 300+ parkrun events in the UK and we are now offering a charity fundraising platform with Virgin Money Giving in conjunction with the runbritain online entry service. As well as being a brand that is conspicuous in road running through Virgin Money’s title sponsorship of the London Marathon, Virgin Money Giving offers low admin fees for charity fundraising, so more of your sponsorship goes to your chosen good cause. Please give Virgin Money Giving a try, through our service, the next time you are running for charity.

We are also delighted to announce a new alliance between runbritain and lastminute.com. When you have entered your race, you can select your travel, accommodation, dining out and entertainment, all through the one-stop. More and more runners choose their half marathon and marathon race weekends to make it a family trip so we hope that you will find this arrangement useful when you select your next running adventure.  Virgin Money Giving and lastminute.com are supporting road racing and helping us to re-invest in its future. Here’s your chance to reciprocate.

 

Good luck with your racing as the spring road season gets into full swing.

 May all your runs be wind-assisted.

 

Geoff Wightman    MD, runbritain