Giveaways & merch

Open the page

From your event's director dashboard, click Giveaways in the sidebar. The page has three parts: Event-wide giveaway settings (the policy), the Giveaways list (the items), and Giveaway insights (what's been claimed). An edition picker at the top lets you look back at past years after a renew. Past editions are read-only.

Creating a giveaway

Name & description

What it is (“Finisher t-shirt”, “Commemorative mug”) plus any pickup details.

Image

Optional, square. Shown in the registration picker, at check-in, and on the director list.

Price

Leave blank for free. Set a price and it's added to the registrant's checkout total, with the processing fee applied on top, the same model as entry fees.

Inventory

Total units available. Leave blank for unlimited. There's also a manual “mark out of stock” switch if you run out unexpectedly.

Variants

Turn on “Collect a variant at signup” for anything sized or styled, each row is a label like “M”, “Youth L”, or “Stainless”, with an optional quantity and an optional price of its own.

Who gets this?

Registrants, volunteers, or both. You can also limit it to specific sub-events or specific volunteer groups.

Free vs. priced

A giveaway with no price is included with signup at no charge. A priced giveaway is merch: the amount is added to the checkout total and paid in the same secure checkout as the entry fee. A size variant can carry its own price that overrides the base, so a premium XL can cost more than the standard sizes, or one “upgrade” option can be paid while the rest are free.

Inventory: overall or per size

When variants are on, you choose how inventory is enforced:

• Overall: one cap for the whole giveaway. Sizes are collected for your ordering info, but any size counts against the single pool. Use this when you're ordering by total count and deciding the size breakdown later.
• Per-variant: each size has its own cap (“we only printed 30 Mediums”). A size with no quantity set is untracked. The giveaway shows as sold out only when every tracked size is gone.

Claims are counted the moment a registration or volunteer signup completes, and released if it's cancelled. Registrants and volunteers draw from one shared pool, so the counts can never drift apart. Pickers show “3 left” when supplies run low and grey out sold-out options. The system won't let a size be over-claimed.

A cart counts itself, too. Someone registering two people against one remaining Medium can give it to one of them: the second registrant sees that size greyed out as “Only 1 left, and it’s in your cart”, rather than both picking it and the whole cart failing at payment. That wording is deliberate, it tells them the count and points at the fix (change the other registrant’s pick) instead of saying sold out when you still have shirts on the table.

Event-wide settings

Three switches control how people pick:

• Registrants must pick a giveaway: on by default. When no giveaways are offered to that person, the step is skipped automatically.
• Volunteers must pick a giveaway: starts out matching the registrant switch. Turn it off to let volunteers skip the giveaway (they can still choose one if they want). When no giveaways are offered to their group, the step is skipped automatically.
• Let people pick more than one giveaway: off by default (single pick). Turn on to allow shirt + mug. This applies to you too: when it is off, changing someone's giveaway from the Registrations page swaps what they have rather than adding to it.

Deleting a giveaway people already chose

Deleting is not just a delete: anyone who already chose that giveaway has to end up somewhere, or they are left holding something that no longer exists. So when you remove a giveaway, Run This first checks who has it and then asks what they get instead. You have two choices:

• Move them to another giveaway. Sizes carry over automatically wherever the names match, so a Small stays a Small. You only get asked about sizes the replacement doesn't offer, and each question shows how many people it covers.
• Remove it from everyone. For a giveaway you cancelled outright. Those people simply no longer have one.

Both registrations and volunteer signups are covered, and nothing is charged or refunded either way. If nobody has chosen the giveaway yet, deleting it is a plain confirm.

What registrants see

During registration, eligible giveaways appear as a list, single-choice or multi-choice depending on your setting. Picking a sized item reveals its size menu, with sold-out sizes greyed out and prices labeled. Volunteers get the same picker on the volunteer signup form when you've made a giveaway available to them, see Volunteers.

Insights

The Giveaway insights card reads the live claim ledger, the same counts that enforce inventory, and shows a breakdown of total claims per giveaway plus a per-size bar for each sized item, drawn against its printed quantity. Because the ledger counts registrants and volunteers together, this is your honest “how many Mediums are spoken for” number when you place the order.

At check-in

The check-in table sees each runner's giveaway and size, can swap a size (shared counts mean you can't over-give one), can hand a giveaway to someone who never picked, and can optionally track “swag collected” separately from arrival. Details in Race-day check-in.

Merch and your fundraiser total

If your event runs a fundraiser, the fundraiser card has a “Count giveaways / merch” toggle that adds paid-giveaway revenue to the public thermometer. Note that merch revenue counts gross. It includes your cost of goods, so it reads higher than what the cause nets. See Fundraisers.