Fall 2022 - Adventure Enablers & Enabled Tracking News
Thank you all for your interest in and support of Enabled Tracking over the past year. We are really looking forward to 2023 and hope to be able to work with you again to bring your event to a wider audience and expand visibility into your event both from a race director standpoint and for participants, friends, families, and sponsors. 2023 already looks like it is going to be a busy year. If you are interested in tracking or timing your event, please let us know so that we can get a proposal sent out to you and your dates locked into our calendar. Even with our expanded tracking fleet, we have a set capacity, especially when it comes to onsite events. For onsite event support, RFID chip timing, and SportIdent timing, we do need to come onsite, so getting that set on our schedule as early as possible helps guarantee our availability.
A few key highlights from our 2022 tracking and timing season
We tracked just over 60 events this year, ranging from adventure races and trail runs to bike races and motor sport events. In total, we tracked over 3500 participants and had just over 63,000 people tune in to watch dots with more than 300,000 page views over all the tracked events.
We added an additional 200 trackers to our fleet. This brings the total number of trackers we have on hand to 900, allowing us to track much larger events but also track more events on a single weekend. Our new trackers also allow for faster charging times and tracking down to 1-second intervals.
We added additional PDA timing devices that allow for barcode scanning for timing and simple event management on the go.
We worked with the United States Adventure Racing Association (USARA) to provide tracking for all their regional qualifying events, bringing live tracking to even more adventure races.
We expanded our remote communications capabilities through Starlink and hardware upgrades for our cellular communication devices.
What’s coming in 2023
New promotional opportunities for your event: This year we will be posting to our blog and Endurance Sportswire regarding the events that will be utilizing our tracking and timing services. You will also get a post on our social media sites, which have more than 11K followers, and a link on our website. We will post about your event once we have confirmed you will be using our tracking services, and also at the time we track your event. It’s a great opportunity to get some free advertising around your event to endurance sports-minded folks.
Improved reporting: In the past, we have provided post-event reports that show what your dot-watching audience looked like. In 2023 we are moving to a new style of Google Analytics reports that show your audience in real-time and provide additional metrics. We also changed the way we pull metrics to provide more accurate numbers for the actual numbers of users watching your event, impressions on the page, and where they are located. You can view a sample report for all our events in the past year here. Your reports will be limited to the data from your specific event. This is a great tool if you want to onboard sponsors and provide data on how their brand is being promoted.
Additional timing features: We hope to be able to stand up BLE or Bluetooth timing for some of our trackers in 2023. This allows for capturing times and updating participant locations in areas where there is limited cell service. The system works by capturing tracker location similar to RFID chip timing and sending times back via Starlink or a wired connection. The advantage of BLE timing is the small footprint of the hardware required to capture times and the chips are packaged with the tracker. We traveled to the UK and worked with OpenTracking, the brains behind our platform, for a 2200-person event in a remote part of the UK and were impressed with what they have been doing in the BLE space.
Resources for race directors and participants: We will be revamping our website over the winter to provide a single landing page of resources for RDs and participants for everything they need to know to set up, manage, and use our trackers. We will keep you posted when this is available.
RaceDay Scoring integration: We will be moving our primary chip timing platform to RaceDay Scoring and begin moving away from Race Director to provide an even more seamless integration with RunSignUp and their registration platform. This new timing platform also lets us provide detailed reporting and scoring from data collected through the tracking platform.
Once again, thank you for your support. We pride ourselves on providing excellent customer service on top of managing one of the best endurance event tracking platforms in the world and we hope that shines through. We look forward to our continued relationship, and please do not hesitate to reach out with any questions or request a quote to get your event tracked or timed in 2023. Thanks, Mark __________________________ Mark Harris, Owner Adventure Enablers & Enabled Tracking
