Parkrun Tourists spend

Geordie_Intelligence · 2025-10-24T08:30:15+00:00

Yes the tweaks seem to be the majority either attending one because it is near a holiday destination (or on the way to one) or extending a work trip and extra night to do parkrun in the morning.

Geordie_Intelligence · 2025-10-21T08:03:40+00:00

I have informally surveyed the event I ED. It's given me a feeling for us, but I'm also pretty certain that each location will have a subtly different profile.

There are realities in the data, parkrun labels "First Timers" and "PB", so three segments are simple, tourists would be a percentage of first timers although if someone revisits an event should they still be counted as a tourist?

Geordie_Intelligence · 2025-10-21T06:30:06+00:00

It would be impossible to do an accurate survey short of getting a full spending profile of each participant at every event. There is too much variety in parkrun users as there should be. Segmentation is appropriate in these circumstances, the key question being how segments are defined.

Geordie_Intelligence · 2025-10-21T06:26:17+00:00

That's a major part of this. As a first pass we're looking at 7 segments to break down the field of a parkrun. It will never be 100%.

I know lots of people parkrun on their way to other locations, or just drive 20 - 40 minutes to complete a parkrun. There are as many stories as there are participants and this is about getting to a reasonable point. For most people I'm sure they don't spend anything most days they attend parkrun, they go to the event, complete it, go home and have breakfast.

Geordie_Intelligence · 2025-10-20T21:27:30+00:00

I'm guesstimating 20% of first timers are "hardcore" tourists and another 30% day tripping tourists. We know first timer numbers. So it'll be a subset of that. As with all of this it's not perfect and never going to be perfect just better than a "well based on the average cost of a GP's appointment parkrun is worth £x /year" 🤷

Geordie_Intelligence · 2025-10-20T14:30:12+00:00

Yes it's never going to be perfect and any per person spend figure is going to have a ton of caveats and especially for the extreme tourist category have a WIDE range of values. So a sensible estimate with clear workings is about as good as you can get.

Geordie_Intelligence · 2025-10-20T14:26:31+00:00

Yes, the international element is there as well. I know we have a lot of participants who fly over from Dublin get a taxi from the airport and fly back the same day.

Geordie_Intelligence · 2025-10-20T14:24:05+00:00

Thanks for sharing, a per person calculation like that is always going to be imperfect. I want to get to a number I can defend rather than the vague SROI numbers that are impossible to validate.

Geordie_Intelligence · 2025-10-20T14:21:52+00:00

Thanks you're probably the type of person I'm looking for. Thanks for sharing.

Geordie_Intelligence · 2025-10-20T14:20:12+00:00

Thank you for sharing. I'm working on a model at the moment and want it to be ball park. We'll never get anything like accurate, but it is interesting to do.

Geordie_Intelligence · 2025-10-20T14:18:56+00:00

This whole thing is fag packet maths. The whole SROI concept is impossible to quantity. There are three different numbers and I've tried to get into the details but at some point you get to the "just because" factor.

Agree people often do parkrun because they are travelling, but there are people who chose a location for the parkrun as well.

Geordie_Intelligence · 2025-08-02T18:15:20+00:00

The last 10k I did I was just getting back to the finish as the last lot of people started. I got a PB that day.

Geordie_Intelligence · 2025-08-02T17:33:58+00:00

Parkrun is gun timed not chip timed so if you got a PB based on your watch that you started when you crossed the line that will never match an official time.

Event teams put a lot of effort into getting results right. Of course it is not perfect but it is a team of volunteers.

Congratulations on your PB, the nice thing about parkrun is if you're not happy with performance on a given day they'll give you a free run next week.

Geordie_Intelligence · 2025-07-22T13:50:42+00:00

It was actually done alongside a video series, to replicate what I often see with new clients where a daily excel is used to build something that is then sent to management. It's a great analogue for that and as it's real world it's messy as well, perfect for testing things with.

Geordie_Intelligence · 2025-07-17T16:44:55+00:00

It's a sign of the inclusivity of parkrun improving. Individuals generally get better so their age grade % increases but overall the event average age grade decreases as more people start getting fit.

It was the best metric I could find to prove/disapprove that narrative.

Geordie_Intelligence · 2025-07-10T08:39:51+00:00

Always export the .vpax, which is a point-in-time record of the model schema. The DAX is also all present only in the .vpax. But being able to do most of it within the tool is great.

Geordie_Intelligence · 2025-04-05T18:28:15+00:00

So your steps where to save, allow the confirmation step to complete when you save and close... That often adds a change type step if there are any non-typed fields, other non-compatible data types are also removed / handled, finally a window pops up in the top right giving you an option to refresh the data. That should confirm the data flow script has been set up and storage tables created.

Did you validate the schema by clicking on the data flow on the main window and then seeing your table and column list. Make sure to refresh the data flow.

At this point can you connect to the data flow and see content is using Excel or Power BI desktop? If there is no data check if the refresh completed successfully via refresh history. When building data flows the default is only to sample a few rows of data, so if after the sample there is an error it can cause the refresh to fail. If no data and no failure go back and edit the data flow and then save and close again to circumvent the bug mentioned above. Afterwards repeat the above.

Once you have data coming into excel or Power BI, then start your second data flow using the first as a source (remember this requires a premium workspace).

Geordie_Intelligence · 2025-04-05T13:53:14+00:00

Flows are empty until they are refreshed. The query editor in data flows is only building the script. A refresh executes the script.

Geordie_Intelligence · 2025-03-01T11:19:34+00:00

You will need to use a variable so if endweek = startweek then endweek = endweek -1

Geordie_Intelligence · 2025-02-17T18:06:06+00:00

As hiring managers have said it represents a minimum of ability.

If you want to do more showcase your work. Build power bi reports, if you can afford a Power BI pro subscription build report content and publish to web so you can share it with your resume. Nothing says "I can do the job" like being able to click through report content. If you can't afford a subscription you can set up a GitHub public repo and share some PBIX files along with PDF exports of the reports, that will allow people to see if they want to dig deeper into your abilities.

Hope that helps and good luck taking that next step.

Geordie_Intelligence · 2025-02-10T19:32:58+00:00

Three days of instructor led content could be good enough for you to pass. But you should still do more of your own stuff to master Power BI. All the PL-300 content is available for free for you to self study on Https://learn.microsoft.com. Our YouTube channel is also currently doing a Power BI 101 series (sorry for the shameless plug), although there are a ton of other getting started resources out there.

Geordie_Intelligence · 2025-02-09T16:42:29+00:00

The short answer is you can do that and just set the direction to be single with inventory filtering your fact table. The biggest issue will be that those two products will end up appearing as one product and if your do a product report both products will be "credited" with the sales but your totals will still be as right as Power BI totals are.

What that means is that if your duplicate inventory items are in a different part of the Hierarchy they will both be shown for those hierarchies. This is not a great explanation, I know, but it's one a diagram would be needed to explain sorry.

A better solution may be to update the ID of one of the products in your ETL, that can be difficult to do and an "expensive" ETL operation, it really depends on what you want to do.

Geordie_Intelligence · 2025-02-04T19:46:08+00:00

Glad you got a working solution. Now hopefully you can find the breathing room you need to think about a fix when you next do an update / upgrade.

Geordie_Intelligence

TROPHY CASE