Getting your event live: Laces

From nothing to a race page selling entries, on your phone: what Laces needs before you publish, what can wait, and the decisions worth making early.

You can have a race page taking entries in an evening. This guide is what to do in that evening, and, just as usefully, what to skip.

You do not need a laptop, and there is no laptop version to miss out on. Everything an organizer does (creating the event, taking payments, running the kit tent, reading the money, exporting your data) happens in the Admin App.

1. Start from something, never a blank form

Laces gives you three ways to begin, and all three beat an empty page:

A template. Pick the kind of event you are running, a road race, a fun run, or a trail event, and the distances, kit setup, sign-up questions and FAQ arrive already filled in. Change what does not fit.
Clone last year. If you ran the event on Laces before, clone the previous edition. Distances, kit configuration, collection points and FAQ all come across. Year two takes about twenty minutes.
Start from your existing details if you already have a flyer’s worth of information ready to type.

The point of all three is the same: you are editing something, not inventing it from nothing at 11pm.

2. The five things Laces needs before you can publish

Everything else is optional. These are not.

Your organisation’s handle and your race’s handle

Your organisation has a permanent address, laces.run/yourorg, and every race you run lives underneath it: laces.run/yourorg/yourrace.

Choose both carefully: they go on printed flyers. Three to thirty characters, lowercase letters, numbers and hyphens. Your organisation’s handle stays the same across every race you ever run; your race’s handle stays the same for that one race, permanently. Running the same event again next year means creating a new race with its own handle, not reusing this one.

You can change either handle once every twelve months and the old address keeps redirecting, so last year’s links and printed posters do not break. But it is much better to pick good ones now.

The date, the time and the place

With a real timezone. Runners plan travel around this.

At least one distance to sell

Each one has a name, a price, and, worth doing properly, a capacity.

Capacity is what powers the “441 left” counter on your race page, and that counter sells entries. It also stops you selling 1,400 places when you have 1,200 shirts.

You can also set a cut-off time and a start wave per distance.

A refund policy

Laces will not let you publish without one. This is deliberate.

An event on sale with no stated refund policy is the most reliable source of disputes in this market, and the argument always happens at the worst possible moment: three days before the race, in a WhatsApp group, in public.

It does not need to be generous. It needs to be stated. “Non-refundable, transferable once up to 48 hours before” is a complete and perfectly reasonable policy. Write the real one, the one you will actually honour.

It appears on your race page, and it is what governs whether a refund is owed. Laces has its own separate platform refund policy covering how a refund gets processed once it is due.

A waiver

The text participants accept when they register. Laces records which version each person accepted and when.

Every question you add is a place where someone abandons the form on a slow connection. The defaults are the ones that earn their place:

Almost always worth asking: name, phone, email, shirt size, emergency contact name and phone.

Worth asking if you will actually use it: date of birth (age categories), gender (results categories), district or club (reporting, or an affiliation leaderboard).

Not worth asking unless you have a specific reason: anything you will not read, sort, or act on. If you cannot name what you would do with an answer, do not ask the question.

Medical information deserves a deliberate decision. If you collect it, it is treated as special personal data: only you and your medical staff can see it, and it is deleted shortly after the event. Ask for it if your medical team will genuinely use it on the day. Do not collect it out of habit.

Everything you collect is covered by the Privacy Policy, and your own obligations under Uganda’s Data Protection and Privacy Act 2019 are in section 11 of the Organizer Terms. The short version: use it to run your event, do not sell it, and do not hand it to a sponsor without asking the participant.

4. Kit and collection

This is where Laces does the most work for you, and it is worth setting up properly.

Products and sizes

A shirt is not one thing with a stock count: it is six things, and running out of L while XL sits in a box is the normal case. Set up your kit with real sizes and each size carries its own stock.

Collection stations

Stock is allocated to stations, not held in one global pile. Acacia Mall has 300 L shirts; Lugogo has 150. A station cannot issue what it does not hold, which is what makes the numbers at the end of the day mean something.

Set your collection points with their addresses and opening hours before you publish, since runners ask about kit collection more than almost anything else.

On the day

Volunteers scan a QR and issue items line by line. “Bib collected, shirt pending” is a normal state, not an error, and the app handles it.

It works offline. The scanner verifies a QR with no network at all and syncs when it gets one. Do not plan your kit tent around the venue having signal, because it will not.

Every issuance records which volunteer did it, on which device, at what time. That is not surveillance; it is what makes missing stock traceable to a shift rather than to an argument.

5. The page itself

Your race page is laces.run/yourorg/yourrace, and the design assumes the runner is on a mid-range Android phone on a 3G connection, because most of them are.

Worth adding, roughly in order of how much they help:

A clear description. What the route is actually like.
Your route files (GPX). Runners genuinely download these.
Collection points with opening hours.
An FAQ. Every question you answer here is a WhatsApp message you do not get. Start with the five you were asked most last year.
Photos of the shirt, the medal and the goodie bag. These sell entries.
Sponsors, if you have them.

Every page has an event QR code and a short link. Put the QR on your poster and the short link on the radio ad. Both open the same page.

6. Before you press publish

That last one matters more than the rest of the list. Go through your own checkout on a real phone, on mobile data rather than office wifi. You will find something.

7. After you are live

Watch the first day’s registrations. Where people drop off in the funnel usually points at one question too many.
Use broadcast rather than a WhatsApp group for anything official. You can message everyone in one distance, or everyone who has not collected their kit yet.
Send the collection reminder when collection opens. It measurably reduces the race-morning queue.
Check your statement as money comes in. See taking payments and getting paid.

Getting your event live