Operations

Most festival attendees approach their big weekend expecting a perfect utopia of music, friends, food, and absolutely no hassle whatsoever. Rarely does it quite pan out quite so perfectly! As a festival organizer, there are many factors you can control that will influence the mood of your attendees. While it might be more fun to focus on the big items—artists and food, for example—you don’t want to ignore some seemingly “less important” things that can have major consequences later on. Here are some of the top things that everyone hates about festivals, and how you can avoid them at your ...

Whether you’re streaming music festivals, conventions, sporting events, or other types of events, streams have become a popular add-on at events in recent years. Why? For starters, live streaming apps eliminate FOMO (fear of missing out) among attendees who couldn’t attend your event by giving them the option to attend your event virtually from anywhere in the world. But even more importantly, in the age of Covid they have become integral to running hybrid events. In combination with robust health screening, these services will be a core element of the return to live events, while letting you connect with fans ...

As we noted in our 2020 event trend roundup, event sustainability will continue to have a bigger influence in how events are organized and promoted in the coming years. A core reason behind this trend millennial and Gen Z attitudes and responses to businesses that take stances on broad issues. Below, we take a look at some of the data behind why focusing on sustainability may be good for the festival business. Millennial Spending Habits vs. Company Stances Recent studies consistently show that millennials spending habits are heavily influenced by companies they consider to have strong moral compasses. Forbes reported ...

Below, we'll give you everything you need to calculate your customer acquisition costs, and how they impact your event. But first, why does this calculation matter? A strange paradox plagues event marketers. On one hand, you have a LOT of time to plan, analyze, and think about your event, and then face an unforgivingly short timeframe to actually execute on it. But on the other hand… All this time for analysis — a real luxury, coveted by marketers across every other industry — often ends up completely wasted. This may be a bitter truth to swallow, but it’s hard to ...

Audiovisuals is one of those things that isn’t fully appreciated until it’s gone. That isn’t to say that it’s overlooked, but that it’s tough to grasp just how important it is. If you have no audio or visual, then you don’t really have an event. The event landscape is constantly changing and the audiovisual technology even more so, as it slowly becomes more vital for events by the day, with inventions in event polling, new event apps that increase engagement and provide attendees with front-row sound no matter where they are in the crowd, and you can’t forget about virtual ...

Did you know that 80 percent of concert attendees feel ripped off by scalpers? Or that 52 percent of people feel like it's difficult to discern between resale platforms and authorized primary sale sites? Or that ticket fraud costs fans millions of dollars in losses?  Whether you’re hosting a trade show, festival, or a large conference, your event is at risk for ticket fraud. However, with RFID access control technology you can put an end to fraudulent ticketing behaviors, eliminating the risk to your event’s ROI and for your attendees.  We’ve created this guide to help you understand how using ...

Ticket fraud at festivals is costing fans millions of hard-earned dollars in losses, and in today’s market, digital tickets have become an integral part of any event’s ticket sales. So integral in fact, that two-thirds of tickets sold online are digital, a comparatively large figure to other online industries, and one that attests to how rapidly the market has matured. And it’s growing. This year, the e-commerce fraud prevention firm Riskified estimates the global online event ticket market value at $30 billion annually, and in the US, lost revenue is expected to exceed $10 billion. Riskified have found that ticket ...

Event planners are always looking for creative new ways to optimize attendee engagement without sacrificing event ROI. Luckily, event technology, specifically RFID wristbands can help planners do both. RFID wristbands have continued to prove to planners to be a powerful solution for live events. But what specific types of events should RFID wristbands be used for? Conferences? Festivals? What are some creative ways to utilize RFID wristbands? What Events Can Benefit From RFID Wristbands? Whether you're using RFID wristbands for gamification, cashless payments, access control, or for one of its many other benefits, the technology can be utilized for many different ...

When it comes to raising awareness about the broad conversation around festival harm reduction and drug safety, few people are as well versed as the Drug Policy Alliance’s (DPA) director of audience development Stefanie Jones. Known for bringing the frank and pragmatic perspectives of Europe to the North American festival scene, Stefanie has been a vanguard of progressive festival harm reduction methods and has brought her pioneering Project #OpenTalk and #SaferPartying initiatives to major events across the United States. Being such an important conversation in the festival community, we asked Stefanie to outline the most important changes that event producers ...

The global live event industry is continually growing and event producers are always on the lookout for new ways to improve the fan experience. Sometimes it's vital to not only look for what fans like but also what they dislike and what really frustrates them. In our State of Live Report, that's exactly what we looked at. The report has everything you're looking for. Below are some insights from the data we collected so you really know what gets your fans' blood boiling. The Biggest Frustrations Fans get frustrated with a lot of things at events, but there's one thing ...