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OpenTrack Appeal |
We’re asking for donations to help us keep improving our low-cost platform for grassroots athletics |
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OpenTrack was set up to benefit grassroots athletics. Our mission statement is to “save time for the volunteers, make athletics more fun for the participants, and help the sport to grow”. We aim to do this through a modern digital platform that dramatically reduces the work in organising competitions - so that people can organise more of them. We’re actively targeting the areas of the sport that can benefit most from a subsidised solution, such as leagues, schools and developing nations.
Our business model has always been, broadly speaking, find investors for our sport and work with Federations to cover the capital costs of building a system; and for the users to pay only the operating costs. We had fantastic support in our early years from an EU incubator, from European Athletics, and from various national governing bodies funding development of specific features.
We charge a small amount when somebody competes, or makes an entry. This covers our operating costs.
We want to go beyind this and keep investing in features, usability and infrastructure, so we can serve the sport even better. We want to keep supporting leagues, schools, and developing nations, where there is little or no budget.
This summer, we reached a milestone of over 100,000 users with logins. 80,000 of these are in the United Kingdom, and 65,000 of them have used us to enter a competition with an entry fee in 2022 so far. We helped take £1.1m in entries in the past year, and 90-95% of the funds from this have gone directly to clubs and counties organising competitions, helping to support themselves. Users benefit from finding competitions easily, transparent entries and (in most cases) rapid live results.
If just 10% of these users gave us £5 each year, we would be able to take the platform to the next level
So, we are launching an appeal in December 2022. If you are kindly able to support us, please consider a donation. Our target is to raise £50,000.
Any funds raised will go on staff resources. Depending on the sums raised, this could be a full-time developer, a number of specialist part-time workers, or both. And we’ll get to work on improvements and new features.
Our key targets for 2023 include:
A lot of the sport consists of matches between teams. This ranges from the National Athletics League, which we served successfully this year, down to lots of lesser leagues, and matches between or within schools. These are very different to championships and open meetings. You can run these in OpenTrack now, but there is a lot to set up, and it’s too easy to make a mistake. So our number one goal is to make it really easy to create “templates” for a match or series of matches, set the competition up with a click or two, and hide all the irrelevant options.
This will open the door to supporting leagues across the whole country and all age groups, working with the Association of Athletics Leagues.
We’re very conscious that leagues are often organised with little or no cash budget, and clubs taking turn to host, instead of paying any fees to the league, so costs need to be very low.
There are still a few small corners of athletics that we would like to implement, such as capturing the exact weights thrown for differing age groups and reporting them to Power of 10; disability athletics; and the various seeding methods for heats, semis and finals.
Our system is made up of hundreds of different web pages. It needs constant work to make sure they are all user-friendly and work well on mobile phones.
Software services like us always need to work on performance and reliability, so that every page and process respond quickly, and we can “scale up” automatically at weekends, to handle many simultaneous competitions on a busy summer Saturday all over Europe. This is a matter of developers constantly investigating and optimising our code.
If you have benefited from our service, and as an ardent fan of the sport you kindly wish to give something back to the grassroots, please consider a small donation to OpenTrack in the festive season