Roger wrote:
Perhaps one of the regular Parkrunners like AngryHaggis knows more.
I think the £5000 quoted above is more of an average cost that parkrun central office incurs, rather than a franchise payment to them from the local event! From what I understand, they are funded entirely by their four sponsors - there are now three employees. I believe the events do have UKA/EA permits issued, which they do have to pay for like any running club. They also buy the professional timing equipment, finish tags, signs, barcode scanners etc and provide it to the volunteer organisers for each event (not sure about laptops). They would of course seek funding from the local authority or health organisation that "benefits" from each local event, to help get it off the ground, but I don't think this is a prerequisite to having such an event. Sport Scotland, for example, have contributed in kind by promoting the events heavily themselves and also providing start/finish banners. I would imagine also that parkrun would shy away from a local authority or other land-owner wanting to charge the event.
(Caveat - the above is my uninformed understanding, any or all the above may be incorrect.)
parkrun has been very successful, I think, in part because of the lack of entry fee (and lack of club joining fee), simple "same course, same place, same time" idea, wide variety of locations and good use of social networks (Twitter, Facebook), but also because it has steadily built a formidable automated computer system, that processes all the results, creates the personalised results emails (generally issued within a few hours of your run) and newsletters, marshals, thanks and records the contributions of volunteers. The occasional freebies are also quite nice!
parkrun has hosted 2436 events so far. Tomorrow morning at 9am (9:30am in Scotland) 38 more free 5K events, with an average of 125 people at each, are taking place in England, Scotland and Wales. I'll be one of the 600 or so running at Bushy Park tomorrow morning in South-West London.
