What are the Advantages of Using Competition Management Software?

Why using a dedicated event management platform is a fair competitive advantage.

Winner holding trophy

Still unsure if you should use competition management software for your event? Here are six reasons why using a dedicated platform is the way to go. Call it your fair competitive advantage (see what we did there?):

 

Table of Contents

It’s easier

A good fitness event management platform will organize and manage everything in one place. This eliminates the need for other platforms, spreadsheets, or documents and allows you to integrate all your event and user data seamlessly.

Take, for example, building a website for your event. Look at the number of steps and other software you’d need to signup (and pay!) for  vs. just using one single competition management platform with website-building capabilities:

Website: Manual vs. Strongest Compete
 ManualStrongest Compete
  1. Buy and setup domain
  2. Buy and setup hosting
  3. Use a website builder like WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, etc., for your front-end
  4. Selling tickets? You’ll need registration or ticketing software like Eventbrite, etc.
  5. Planning on selling merch? You’ll need an ecomm/payment system like Shopify or Stripe, etc.
  6. Create waivers, distribute and get them signed.
  7. Use spreadsheets for your Schedule. Integrate and upload on your site.
  8. Find Leaderboard software. Integrate and publish on your site.
  9. Add Advertising space for your sponsors.
  1. Everything is built into one single platform. Create and go live with your website in minutes.

For more info on building an awesome website for your competition, check out How to Build an Awesome Website for your Fitness Competition.

It’s smarter

Creating your competition schedule can be tricky business. Not only do you need to calculate your workout duration, physical space, transitions and equipment changes – but you need to do it for every heat in every workout and every division. That’s a lot of formulas, calculations and spreadsheets.

To help competition organizers, we created a free GoogleSheets calculator to help with these calculations.

Even better, though: we created the most powerful Event Scheduler available for competition organizers.

With Strongest’s one-of-a-kind Scheduling Kit, you can easily create and update heat schedules, lane assignments and workout time blocks in seconds. See ya later,  spreadsheets and manual filtering!

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It’s more exciting

How exactly can event management software make your competition more exciting? Well, remember the epic Rogue Invitational Duels? Or the 2022 Max Log Lift? Strategic lane assignments and reseeding made it exciting and dynamic, constantly placing the best of the best against each other.

As you probably know, we love helping you tell great stories. One of the easiest ways to do this is by intentionally moving athletes around based on their rankings as they progress through the competition. This is known as “reassigning.” Yet, even though reassigning creates a more exciting experience all around, we see many organizers shy away from it because it can seem tricky.

Strongest Compete is the only competition management software with the ability to reseed in one click, meaning you don’t have to do any filtering or sorting at all. With the Strongest Scheduling kit, you can automatically rank (and re-rank) your athletes in each division by the leaderboard policy you choose (e.g. Placement, Points Table, Min/Max).

If you’re using competition management software other than Strongest, though, you’ll need to do some manual filtering and sorting – which does get tricky in the heat of competition. Read on to find out more about how to reassign and reseed manually.

Reseeding and Reassigning: Manual vs. Strongest Compete
 ManualStrongest Compete
  1. Enter and verify scores after a workout
  2. Sort your athletes by rank (worst to best)
  3. Drag and drop the bottom-ranked athletes (i.e. the athletes with the worst scores) into the first heats.
  4. Then, sort each heat into the lane assignment format you want: “swim lane” or “last place goes first.”
  5. Distribute the changes
  6. Repeat for all heats and divisions.
  • Enter and verify scores after a workout
  • Click on “Update from Leaderboard”.
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It’s more accurate

If you’ve ever scored a competition using a spreadsheet, you’ll know that there is high potential for scoring errors and inaccurate results when you use a spreadsheet. Correctly inputting multiple scores across multiple divisions and events is a challenge for anyone, let alone a scoring team during the day-of competition when everyone is breathing down their neck.

Scoring: Manual vs. Strongest Compete
ManualStrongest Compete
  • Mixing up athletes, heats and divisions
  • Overwriting of correct scores due to multiple access to the spreadsheet
  • Inaccurate placement calculations
  • No verification of scores
  • Having to re-publish on a separate leaderboard sheet
  • Only allow your scoring team to enter scores using a dedicated link
  • Populate the scoring sheet based on registration data
  • Enter scores based on heats schedules
  • See scores that have been modified in one glance
  • Preview the scoreboard before publishing
Strongest Scoring Entry Platform

It’s faster

There are some pretty common tasks in any competition – many of which can be automated to save you time.

Routine competition activities like:

  • Completing waivers
  • Getting t-shirt sizes
  • Selling spectator tickets
  • Getting Instagram handles
  • Printing out scorecard labels

…are all things your competition management software should be able to help you with.

It’s great for communication

Distribution

One of the most common challenges when managing an event is ensuring everyone is on the same page. Athletes, spectators and your event operations team need the most recent, most accurate information – quickly.

Having one source of data is key to staying aligned – and on schedule. Having options to distribute the data from that one point is key to staying organized.

Competition management software like Strongest can help you manage your data and distribute it. Distribute and publish your most up-to-date information to all audiences in just a few clicks.

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Staying in touch with former athletes and volunteers

A great strategy to kickstart athlete and volunteer registration is to invite past participants first.

With a competition management system like Strongest, you can easily invite past participants to your upcoming event using Strongest’s built-in email invitation system. The email you send out will include your personalized message and a registration link so your judge can register.

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The system will monitor who has opened your email and accepted your invite. Strongest Compete will even tell you if an email bounced back so you can be sure you have the correct email address for your judges.

It’s built to make you money

Sponsor ads

Your website is a key opportunity to show sponsor ads.

If you’re building your website on your own, leave room for sponsor logos on each page that you can offer as different advertisement packages. If you’re looking to use an event management platform, however (good choice!), make sure it can advertise on behalf of your sponsors.

For example, with the Strongest Sponsorship Kit, you can create and manage sponsor banner ads super easily across the different parts of your website. Learn more about getting sponsors with our [Free Template] How to get (and keep) sponsors for your fitness event.

Retail and Merch

Selling additional merch is a great opportunity to generate revenue during athlete registration.

If you’re using a third-party ticketing or e-commerce platform, you’ll need to see if they allow you to add additional merchandise upsells during checkout.

If not, consider using an all-in-one competition management system like Strongest Compete, which allows you to create and manage additional merchandise items to be offered at registration. You can set the name, price, and quantity of merchandise.

Competition event management software, FTW!