With festival season in full swing, fields upon fields of muddy party-goers will be clamouring to find out where to see their favourite artists, where the nearest 'facilities' are, and from whence their next cheeseburger will come. For events on such a scale, a mobile, digital festival app assists festival attendees in planning out their days and nights–making the most of the experience.

It's Absurdly Easy to Build a Festival App

With simple drag-and-drop interfaces and real-time updates, all of the information can be customised, branded and presented any way that you want. Gone are the days of hiring a developer or a team.

Your Festival-Goers Expect It

Festival audiences are young, tech-savvy, and permanently attached to their mobile phones. They're using digital devices to take selfies in their floral headdresses and apply filters to get that vintage glow. Paper programs and handouts are fully a thing of the past.

Here's how to give them what they want:

• Display information about the different artists performing, split into music genres in separate folders with customised icons.
• If a band’s coach has broken down or the front man has gone AWOL, broadcast last minute changes to the schedule via your festival app's push message system. Reduce the hassle of communicating information by loudspeaker or relying on all stewards to be up to date with the latest changes to the itinerary!
• Show festival-goers where and when their favourite artists will be performing, along with links to playlists of the songs being performed and relevant websites.
• List food stalls, merchandise stands and other important locations like as toilets. Build your festival app utilising the interactive mapping feature so your attendees know where they are all the time.

Social Tracking

"Think of the official event hashtag as a highway you want all your attendees to drive on. If you don't build a highway, the attendees will create a bunch of individual side roads and they won't be driving together on the same road to the same place," says Tom Spano, Head of Sales and Marketing at Goombal. "It's not enough just to build the highway–you also have to build signs so everyone knows where the highway is and that they should be driving on it." The best way to get your audience to use your hashtag? Pre-fill it into the social channels when you build the festival app. The app will promote consistent use of your festival hashtag, meaning you can track and monitor what your audience is saying.

No Cell Service? No Problem.

Getting mobile reception (and charging one's handset) is one of the biggest challenges at a festival. Your festival app will work natively on users' phones, meaning they can use it 100% offline after downloading it.

Goodbye, Litter

Stop printing leaflets! When you minimise paper printing, you save an enormous amount of money, reduce the amount of tidying the site requires post event, and position yourself as sustainable–an important topic for many festival attendees.

Give Festival-Goers a Voice

Ask for live feedback: Which band gave an unforgettable performance? Whose tent flooded? Who’ll be back next year? Feedback enriches the overall experience and provides a great way for you to harvest valuable perceptions about your event. It brings organiser, attendee and venue closer together. Looking to build a festival app? It's free with Guidebook. Sign up and start building now.