Wow, we’ve now got 2000 users!

In just under 2 months we’ve gone from nothing, to over 2000 parkrunners with the Chrome extension installed. To be honest we have been overwhelmed by the way the community have taken it to heart, and to hear it being referred to in casual conversation on Facebook and Twitter makes it feel like it has just become part of parkrun!

When we found parkrun founder Paul Sinton-Hewitt had liked our announcement post on Facebook we were chuffed, but to see parkrun COO Tom Williams and Xempo casually discussing who might have achieved the most Groundhog Days - that really made us smile.

Stats are a core part of parkrun; whether it be for knowing how many runs you have completed, age-graded scores, or average finishing times, and tracking the uptake of this extension is no exception :)

We don’t add any analytics to the extension itself, so we don’t know how many people have added a home parkrun, where those parkruns might be, or how many badges we had displayed for people - but the Google Webstore does show many installs/uninstalls of the extension have occurred, and therefore how many active installations there are.

Two months of installs̨

Over 2000 Users̨

There have been 3 main boosts to the number of installations, and we believe that they correspond to the following:

  • 10th March, announcement on the UK parkrun Tourists Facebook Group
  • 26th March, one of the Event Directors posted about it in the UK parkrun ED Group
  • 25th April, The extension was featured on the first episode of the Free Weekly Timed podcast!

It is not only UK parkrunners that have been adding this extension to their browser though. We also have users all over the world, with Australia forming the largest userbase outside of the UK. The top 3 are:

  • 74% - UK
  • 16% - Australia
  • 4% - South Africa

This has thrown up all sorts of interesting questions and comments, but the most frequent one from our fellow runners in Australia was that they already had a Compass Club challenge, and that was to visit the most Northerly, Easterly, Southerly, and Westerly parkruns in Australia, compared to the current definition of runs with north, south, east, and west in the names - I think it is fair to say we weren’t expecting to have to cope with things like that when we started!

Also, we noticed that volunteering credits would not be applied for those parkrunners based in countries where the roles were displayed in the local language. Although a good proportion are in English, there was no credit for roles such as Assistant distribution des jetons, Instruktor nowych uczestników, and Руководитель забега - so we introduced a means to translate as many examples as we could find in version 0.3. Now even more people can get in on the fun!

We also recently launched this website, and a Twitter account - @TeamTCMakers, hopefully to keep everyone up to date with the new additions. As always you can contact us on our email account (link at the bottom of the page) if you want to get in touch.

Running Challenges in the Chrome Web Store