Using Strava to Boost your Event
What is Strava and how can I use it?
Strava allows athletes to create profiles and use their sport mapping app to track their routes, speed and splits, then post them to the Strava newsfeed. Athletes follow each other, similarly to other social media platforms, and give each other ‘kudos’ which are the equivalent of ‘likes’ for posting their activity on there, ranging from their morning 5k to their toughest challenge of the year.
Here are a couple of reasons athletes might choose to use Strava:
- Their friends are using it
- It can bring a competitive edge to any activity
- It’s free
- It’s a friendly community
- Its powerful route builder
- To measure progress and improvements
- To become ‘King of the Mountains’
Engaging with Stravathletes
So how can you capture the audience of Stravathletes to make them aware of your event? You can do this by giving them a pre- and post-race experience by creating a club and race page. This can help people familiarise themselves with you and stand out amongst them, while runners give each other Strava 'kudos' for participating in your event.
Here are the steps you need to take to activate your Strava presence!
1. Create a Club
Find out how to create a club on Strava here.
By creating a club, you can add your races to the calendar, share training tips and race day info on here to engage with club members. You can then also re-invite athletes to take part in your future races!
You can send invites to people to make them aware of your club, by clicking on the Invite Athletes button. Here you can add the emails of runners who have attended your races previously and include a customised message to let them know you would like them to join your club.
2. Map out your Race Route
You can do this using the Strava route builder. To do this, you hover over the Strava Dashboard, and click ‘My Routes’, then choose whether you would like it to be a Running route, or a Cycling route, and click ‘Create New Route’. You can use one of 3 settings: ‘Use Popularity’, which will take you on the most popular paths and roads used for mapped out cycling/running routes, ‘Manual Mode’ so that you can draw it out yourself, which is sometimes useful for trail races without identified paths, or ‘Min Elevation’, which is self explanatory and will give you the route with minimum elevation.
3. Create your Event
Your club is now ready to create an event for your race/races! This will appaer on your club calendar and your members will get notified about it, if they have opted into notification emails from Strava.
To do this you need to click Add Club Event.
Enter in all the details about your event, and add the route you mapped out for it earlier.
4. Share content with your club members
You and your club members can create posts, by navigating to the Posts tab and selecting Create a Post. Your posts as the Club owner will appear on the newsfeed:
You can create posts to show people the race set-up, give updates on ticket releases and post links to race photos! It's as easy as posting on any other social media stream and will show up in your followers feeds. Its good to post on here in the run up to the race, so that people remember to track it on Strava if they want to which will give your event more visibility once they post about it! Make sure to interact with people by giving them ‘Kudos’ for completing your event after the race.
5. Get a Verification Badge
You can obtain a verification tick next to your club name, which shows people that you are the official race organiser or club to join. Once your club is built and you've made at least one post, you can request a verified badge using this link. This will give your club more credibility and help it look more professional.
Growing your club organically is no easy feat, but Strava can help get the attention of other running clubs, when they see their friends joining to spark interest in your races. So if you can afford to spare some time, it’s worth investing it into this platform full of potential race attendees, which is completely free.