When you ask a long-timers’ advice on what makes a good festival a bad festival it usually isn’t the lineup itself. The small irritations – not being able to tell when a set begins, not being able to find the restroom, standing in the wrong line, etc. – that get in the way. With the increase in festival size and complexity, festival organizers are increasingly relying on dedicated mobile apps to bridge that gap between the planning and experience.
Festival tech lagged behind most other facets of the events industry for years. Online ticketing came first, social media marketing came early, but navigating the site, finding the right stage, knowing when to move — all of that remained largely analog: everyone had to physically walk to print programs, static maps and information tents, respectively. This has turned around rapidly in the past few years and now mobile apps are the driving force behind the successful delivery of well run festivals.Â
The Attendee’s Perspective Is the Whole Point
Logistics — vendor location, security areas, staff changes, load-in times are all considered, of course. They imagine the day they are coming to: what time is the headliner going on, how do I get from Stage A to the food court, will it rain before the headliner? If that information isn’t clearly communicated on time to the person holding the wristband, a festival can be flawlessly organised in the back and feel disorganised to the person holding the wristband.
This is where mobile festival apps come into play. Attendees have the maps, schedules, alerts and direct line to organizers in their pocket, rather than getting lost in lots of paper schedules and info tents that go stale as soon as a set time turns. Once the time of asking a staff member or squinting at a piece of print, it’s now a few taps.Â
What a Good Festival App Actually Needs to Do
Not every event app is created the same, and traditional conference-style apps are unlikely to succeed at a festival, where thousands of people are wandering around outside, instead of in the fixed rooms with a printed schedule. A Festival app should have some components to be effective in that context:
Interactive maps
Participants must be able to move efficiently around vast outdoor areas, and not have to squint at a pdf that doesn’t recognize their location. A good map keeps up-to-date, displays points of interest, and guides people through a crowd of tens of thousands.
Personalised schedules
Each day at the conference will be unique. The app for a festival should enable people to create their schedules around the acts they are interested in, and not be rigid with a printed running order.
Push notifications
Alerts for set changes, weather or schedule change must be communicated immediately, and not over a PA system that half the group can’t hear. It’s one of the easiest features to write on paper, but on the flipside, it’s most likely the one thing that influences attendee satisfaction.
Two-way communicationÂ
But the best festival apps aren’t one-way broadcasts; they also allow the festival organizers to listen, whether it’s to learn about a lost item, a medical concern, or just feedback on a bottleneck developing at an exit.
This is where the BigLive event platform was designed for. It’s not an event app that has been adapted for festival use, but an app built to work for a large outdoor event, from scratch and for the format.It’s not an event app made to work for a festival, it’s an app made for a big outdoor event from scratch and for the event format.Â
Data That Feeds Back Into Better Events
An overlooked advantage of an exclusive festival application is what they disclose when the festival finishes. Engagement heatmaps identify areas that attracted, and failed to attract, visitors even when they were planned as successful areas. Analytics dashboards reveal the part of the session or set where visitors spent more time. Sponsor impression counts determine if a brand activation actually made contact with individuals, not simply guess at what has been seen from afar.
This makes every festival a loop, not a one-shot. Real data can help inform the layout of next year’s stage, positioning of vendors and sponsor packages — and can be a huge plus when organisers need to prove to sponsors, city councils and investors that the decisions they are making aren’t just based on their instincts.
It also alters the way an organizer plans their mid-event. If the data reveals that stage #2 is attracting a lot more attendees than predicted on day #1, the staffing and signage for day #2 can be adapted accordingly – and not after everyone complains about it.Â
Safety Benefits That Are Easy to Overlook
Festival apps aren’t simply a convenience layer; they’re an essential component of the safety plan. During an actual emergency, attendees are able to flag issues in the Emergency Chat that will automatically alert the Security or Medical team to deal with the issue, without needing to seek someone from a crowd, which can be valuable minutes. The push notifications allow the organizers to reach an entire crowd instantly in the event of a change in weather or in the event of an evacuation is required which is very important for outdoor multi-day events where a storm can roll in with very little warning.
It’s a subtle change in the way festival safety operates. Once the aim of passing on urgent information was through the radio and word-of-mouth, with some information being passed over different people in a chain that may have the wrong message, there’s one single app that everyone involved can use to get the same information simultaneously.Â
Why This Matters More Every Year
The expectations of the attendees have changed. As individuals use apps for their every need — from ordering food to booking rides to weather reports — they are also demanding the same convenience when they have paid for a festival. The printed schedule which expires as soon as a certain time period is reached, is out-of-fashion as soon as it is distributed a decade ago.
But festivals are also expanding, with larger venues, more stages, more simultaneous activities, and more festivals taking place at the same time. The bigger and more dynamic an event becomes, the more people need to find their way around and the more that an organiser needs to get to everyone.Â
The Bigger Picture
In a saturated landscape for festivals to become known, and for attendees to want to return, it is not only the headliner that defines a memorable day; it is also the feeling of a smooth or stressful day, and whether the day provided what they were looking for when they needed it. Great programming isn’t there to replace a well constructed app, but it is there to take the friction out of the way between attendees and the event they attended. If you’re looking at your tech stack, setting up an app for the festival is no longer a luxury, but quickly becoming the expectation of your attendees and festivals that make people keep coming back year after year.Â
