What the boston marathon can teach your organization about data collection at scale

Every April, more than 30,000 runners cross the finish line on Boylston Street in Boston, Massachusetts. Behind each of them is a registration, a health waiver, qualifying time verification, emergency contacts, and corral placement — dozens of data points that have to be collected, validated, and routed accurately, often months before race day.

The organization managing all of it has a staff of 28 people. The margin for error is effectively zero. And for years, they were running it on paper.

The scale of the problem

The Boston Athletic Association (B.A.A.) is one of the oldest athletic organizations in the country and the Boston Marathon is the second-largest single-day press event in the world. Until relatively recently, the B.A.A. was managing its data across nearly 60 separate Microsoft Access databases — one per race, dating back to the early 2000s.

Every contact could exist in one of 60 places. There was no consolidation, no reliable way to track year-over-year trends, and no practical path for a small, non-technical staff to improve the system without developer help.

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"We had to adapt the solution and think about how you build for a staff that doesn't code," explained the consulting partner who helped lead the B.A.A.'s digital transformation.

This is the data intake problem at its most visible: high volume, high stakes, tight timeline, and a team that can't afford to dedicate engineering resources to keeping the lights on.

What digitization actually required

Moving off paper didn't just mean converting a PDF to an online form. The B.A.A.'s registration process involves meaningfully different workflows for different runner categories — qualified entrants, charity runners, invitational participants — each with their own logic, verification requirements, and downstream routing.

The intake workflows had to support real-time qualifying time verification, credit card authorization at registration, and direct data routing into Salesforce, all without manual data entry. They also had to be robust enough to handle race-day logistics for 10,000 volunteers, managed by just two staff members.

The requirement wasn't just digital forms. It was a structured intake process that could handle conditional logic, integrate with existing systems, and be managed and modified by staff who didn't have technical backgrounds.

How the B.A.A. solved it

The B.A.A. implemented FormAssembly to replace paper registration and health screening workflows, integrating directly with Salesforce. Staff could build, clone, and modify forms themselves and connector configurations carried over automatically, eliminating the rework that had previously made form updates time-intensive.

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The results were operational: registration data flowed into a single system of record, dashboards gave staff real-time visibility into year-over-year trends, and the dependency on outside technical help dropped significantly.

When the registration window opened, FormAssembly's infrastructure handled the load without issue. "The server didn't break a sweat," the project lead said.

What this means for your organization

You don't have to be managing a world-famous marathon to recognize this problem.

The same patterns — high intake volume, compliance requirements, tight timelines, limited technical staff — exist across healthcare, financial services, higher education, and enterprise operations. Any team managing complex intake workflows at scale is dealing with a version of what the B.A.A. faced: fragmented data, manual reconciliation, and processes that are one error away from a serious downstream problem.

The B.A.A. now runs paper-free at 30,000 participants with a staff of 28. The question for your organization isn't whether this is possible — it's whether your current intake layer is built to support it.

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Read the full Boston Athletic Association case study: formassembly.com.