Festivals have the magical ability to connect people from around the world. But beyond the venue of the event, festival-goers need a steady platform to connect and build lasting relationships that’ll blossom into communities.

Festival apps are emerging as the most efficient community-building platforms for festival lovers, and here’s how they are building stronger communities.

How Festival Apps Are Building Resilient Communities

1. Festival apps deliver bespoke digital experiences

Delivering a personal experience that suits each individual follower is of especial importance for today’s festival-goers. It can make the difference between a loyal follower and a lost one.

Festival apps are a hotbed of sophisticated marketing tools and analytics, that enable event managers to tailor the digital experience to each individual user. Today’s tech-savvy smartphone users have grown tired of generic content. By creating a bespoke experience, they’ll feel catered for, increasing their interest in the event.

The Berlin Festival of Lights is a great example of a customized digital experience, delivered through their festival app. The mobile app is generating interest by offering a high-level, digital preview of all the main venues, and an interactive map for ease of navigation.

2. Keep your audience connected

Statistics by London-based Second Screen show that in 2018, 87% of festival attendees downloaded event apps — making custom apps the most popular option for connecting an audience.

A festival app offers your audience the possibility to connect and build relationships. It can function as your event’s very own social platform, where people share their experiences. By integrating some of our core features, your music festival app will be equipped with social sharing functionalities, giving users a reason to connect in the metaverse.

3. Foster community interaction, even beyond the festival

The main challenge of organizing a sustainable music festival is by building a strong community around it that maintains its interest year after year.

A lot can happen in a year and maintaining the interest of your audience is difficult, but not impossible. A music festival app is perhaps the most efficient vehicle, for keeping the interest around your event alive. This is also supported by Viberate’s statistics, as over 60% of their users kept the music festival app on their smartphone, even after the festival.

A custom app can indeed give users reason to engage and reflect on their favorite moments from the event, and keep the flame alive year-round. And when the next edition is just around the corner, your audience will already be at the edge of their seats, waiting to secure their spot.

4. Supercharge event participation via push notifications

The efficacy of push notifications in community building is hardly a subject of debate for digital marketers in this day and age. If applied correctly, they can open entirely new frontiers of audience engagement.

Music festival apps with integrated calendars can send automatic push notifications for upcoming artists and events. Users can even customize their notifications and select the performances they wish to be notified about.

The secret behind the efficacy of push notifications is that they’ll reach your audience anytime, anywhere. And a quick reminder before the event can go a long way in increasing participation and making sure that participants have a copy of the latest schedule in their hands.

5. Festival apps are your brand’s own marketing channel

While some events are being marketed via social platforms, we all know that these aren’t the most reliable channels. Even multi-billion-dollar internet giants like Facebook can crash for hours — rendering communication with your audience impossible and creating havoc for event organizers.

Luckily, this can be avoided by building and owning your marketing channel, instead of relying on another platform. With a music festival app, you are the sole owner of your marketing and communication channel. This means that there won’t be any unforeseen server outages or DDoS attacks unrelated to your organization.

But there’s more. With a custom mobile app, you also own the precious user analytics and insights generated by your audience. In essence, this will help you understand your audience and cater to them on a personal level.

Best Practices for Festival Apps

1. Choosing the right features

Now, having a festival app is the first step, but choosing the right features is important for successfully promoting your event.

The Sibiu International Theater Festival understood the importance of finding the best features while building FITS App on Eventya’s no-code app builder platform. By implementing an interactive map to help users find the event location and main points of interest, users had a reason to download the festival app — as it made event attendance much easier.

The key for custom apps is finding the features that offer event attendees the most value. While the peak utility of the festival app drives downloads, a community will steadily start to emerge around it.

2. Enabling in-app ticket purchasing

Enabling in-app ticket purchasing is among the best practices to increase sales and grow the attendance of your event. Statistics from the UK suggest that 57% of individuals between 25 and 37 years of age have purchased event tickets online in 2019.

As this trend is projected to grow, event organizers worldwide are adding online ticketing functions to their custom apps, so they won’t miss out on a significant portion of the revenue.

Tickety.es, an online ticketing app built with our no-code app builder, is enabling festival-goers to buy tickets from the comfort of their smartphone. Event organizers can easily post their events on the app, offering users a seamless and secure buying experience that will increase overall ticket sales.

3. Leveraging community-building elements

Given the peak-programmability of mobile app design, organizers can include an array of efficient community-building features and tools, to further advance customer relationships.

“Grab Your Guitar”, a community mobile app built using Eventya’s no-code app builder, provides some great examples. The custom app seeks to connect all guitar enthusiasts, by compiling educational material, relevant events, and promoting Sibiu’s most important event for guitarists.

In essence, the app is building a vibrant community, by giving guitar enthusiasts a reason to interact with the app and engage in a shared musical journey with all other users. This is how the community-building potential of festival apps can be fully harnessed.

Custom apps are currently some of the best community-building tools available for event organizers. But to be completely candid, festival apps can be a costly endeavor. However, the good news is that mobile app design doesn’t have to break the bank.

By leveraging no-code app builders, you can have a tailored music festival app for just $100 bucks, with the most cutting-edge features. You can get started today, by simply signing up for our free trial.

With Eventya’s intuitive app builder, you’re only 3 steps away from your music festival app, and building a loyal community that will keep your event alive.