I am pleased to announce that RunSignup | GiveSignup has decided to take a $2.6 Million minority investment from Payroc, a payment processing company. The investment will help fund the continued rapid expansion of the RunSignup customer base and provide additional fundraising capabilities to the nonprofit market with GiveSignup.
In addition to the investment, Payroc will become a preferred payment processing platform, processing many of our transactions starting in April. There will be no impact on pricing or functionality for customers due to this change.
To answer a few questions that may arise:
Wow! That’s a lot of money. Did they buy you?
While it is a lot of money, they will own less than 10% of the shares of the company. The rest is still owned by our employees, including myself. Payroc will get what is called board observer rights, but they do not get a voting board seat. I remain the CEO and plan on being here for a couple more decades.
Why did we take outside investment?
There are three major reasons:
During these tough times, we wanted to make sure we had plenty of cash in the bank to service our customers and pay our employees.
We are seeing a huge increase in new customers and new events, and want to make sure we have the resources to meet their needs.
Serving nonprofits with GiveSignup is a very large opportunity. Many of the new customers coming to us are nonprofits and we want to ensure we are not diluting our endurance investments to continue to build out our GiveSignup offerings.
What will change for me?
Over time, better technology. Other than that, not much. Our team support and account management teams remain the same, and our development team continues to iterate and improve our solution for races and nonprofits.
Will you be spending any of the money?
Yes, we do plan on hiring a few people, in addition to the 3 new GiveSignup reps hired recently. Most hiring will be in development, but we might need some more support people if the high volume of new customers continues.
Is this an investment in RunSignup or GiveSignup? How do you balance the two?
Well, an investment in one is actually an investment in both!
A little secret - it is the same software. It is all a single database platform, and all the transactions and payments are done together.
On the RunSignup side, we have been focused on technology for endurance events for the last ten years. We believe that our success has come from our leadership in technology and our purpose-built platform, and that’s where we’re keeping our focus. There is still a ton of technology to build and we will continue to focus on rapid development and features that respond to our customers’ needs.
When we look at GiveSignup, we have a lot of great technology that we can already offer nonprofits, with thousands of nonprofit customers using our run/walk/ride and new technology for virtual and challenge events currently. We are expanding nonprofit technology for ticket events like galas, golf outings and pancake breakfasts, and creating amazing fundraising tools like integrated Facebook Fundraising and specific virtual campaigns like Giving Tuesday.
As we build the new GiveSignup technology, we do not want to take away from our development roadmaps on the endurance side, and the investment helps us add to our development team to keep both products moving forward.
If you’re interested in learning more about the investment, our plans for the company, and our expectations for 2021-2022, you can find a longer Q&A on our blog or view the full press release.
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