Gamification of Music Festivals.

One of the latest innovations likely to hit music festivals in the near future is gamification. This is the use of gaming technology to increase event goer engagement for the benefit, typically, of event organisers, vendors and sponsors to generate increased traffic and purchase revenues. 

The technology used to gamify an event has been developing fast in the last few years and could well emerge as a key element of many music festivals in the next few years. Vendors and sponsors are always keen to explore new ways to engage with potential customers and drive traffic to their site pitch. Event organisers should certainly explore what technology is currently available and as a minimum consider some kind of test to evaluate the potential benefit.

What is Gamification? 
In simple terms it is the creation of a gaming experience downloaded in the form of an app to mobile devices by event goers. Just imagine a more sophisticated version of Pokémon Go and event organisers can start to picture the possibilities. A music festival specific app that uses geo location technology combined with augmented reality with rewards is now entirely possible.

How to use Gamification. 
Coordinate with a reliable app production company that can brand the festival game app and incorporate sponsor and vendor specific promotions for which the event organiser can charge a fee. The common formats could include any of the following:  

Questions and Answers. 
The questions can be related to sponsor and vendor products and services and event goers can earn points for each question they answer. Points can be exchanged for discounts for example.

Treasure Hunt.
Ask event goers to complete a series of tasks around the festival site, this enables organisers to push visitor traffic to specific locations on site (related to sponsors or vendors). These can be spread over several days and a public leader board can be available with prizes for the winners announced at the end of the festival. 

Photo Contests.
For music festivals a good game is to upload photos of different performance acts. This can help promote lesser known artists and spread audiences between multiple stages and performance areas. To make it more competitive include different categories like day vs night, best selfie, best group picture, best picture with sponsor branding backdrop etc.

Creating something unique for a music festival event is a smart investment because it gives the organisers something extra to offer sponsors and vendors making the event more attractive and generating increased revenue. In addition, the extra engagement with event goers will make the festival that much more memorable and competition results can be announced at the end of the festival providing more marketing and PR opportunities post event.

Using an events software management platform like FestivalPro festival organisers get all the functionality they need to manage vendor and sponsor marketing initiatives. The guys who are responsible for this software have been in the front line of event management for many years and the features are built from that experience and are performance artists themselves. The FestivalPro platform is easy to use and has comprehensive features for managing gamification apps as part of the scheduling, planning and logistics with seamless links to marketing the game app via the festival website and social media.  

Photo by Rahul Pandit from Pexels

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