How one of the biggest literature festival used event site and branded app to deliver better event experience ?
Age Group
16 to 60
Participants
40,000+ in 2 different cities
Sessions
500+ sessions in 3 days
200+
Speakers / Hosts
Background
Gujarat Literature Festival (GLF), Gujarat’s (India’s western state) only literature festival that brings thousands of literature fans together for 3 days is held in two cities of Gujarat, Ahmedabad and Baroda. It’s a multi stage event with about 500+ sessions and workshops in parallel with various famous celebrities participating in the event. It’s essential for an event of this kind to easily communicate, broadcast and relay the most latest and relevant information regarding the event, session updates and more.
The Goal
As the participant age group varied widely, it was imperative for the event to choose a technology approach that’s most simplest to use, easy to adopt and works in real time. Goal was to provide users access to multiple communication channel so that information reaches out quickly with ease. One of the core agenda was to build audience engagement before, during and after the event without making it difficult for the users.
Challenges
The core challenge was to provide a solution that works for all participants without any tech barrier. The usability and learning curve has to be negligible. Information exchange should be quick. Platform has to scale with the event size and changing information landscape.
Results
eventRAFT platform enabled a tailor made dynamic event website and a premium branded event app for GLF event that works in sync. Having both website and app really made it easy for varied demographics to choose the channel of their choice to learn about the event and sessions.
As the event happens at grand scale and audience behavior is dramatically different, eventRAFT provided a sms based authentication on the app for verification. This took out the mandatory need of having email. Since scheduler was the most important element with ongoing changes, using eventRAFT’s web based scheduler made it easy to always have the same information on both site and mobile apps.
Key Engagement Features
App highlights that led to a better event experience and delivered incredible audience engagement.
- Web Scheduler – Real time self managed embedded web scheduler on the site that led to real time session update.
- Premium Branded Event Mobile App – A branded event app that builds better brand awareness and user trust.
- SMS Based Sign Up – Phone number based sign up to avoid any email verification bottlenecks. Authentication in real time with one time sms based password.
- Multi Track Sessions and Personalized Schedule – Ability to filter and view multi track sessions and build user’s own personalized sessions.
- Notifications – Push notifications added to the ease of communicating lineup changes.
- Audience Event Feed – Ongoing event feed where users can post their updates with photos helped to build a social community within the app itself.
- In-app chat – Ability to chat with attendees made it much easier for users to connect with fellow literature lovers.
