Fun Fun Fun Fest made its first appearance on a cold Austin Friday evening at Waterloo Park in 2006. Using a unique approach to festival booking by filling stages with what is bubbling from the underground, what sounds great, and what is making an impact, regardless of what Pollstar or the mainstream media said was cool. What started out as a show for a few touring acts and local favorites became a movement, and a festival that fans and bands alike realized needed to be experienced year after year.
In gearing up for it’s 4th year FFF expressed a desire to grow not just the festivals attendance but to raise the national presence of the brand, retain loyalty of attendees year round and streamline their overall e-commerce and ticketing services. FFF set out looking for an interactive partner not just a vendor. The question was presented; How can funfunfun engage attendees year round and build on the marketing efforts year after year?
Although we see ground(ctrl) as a easy turn key solution for most partners, we are never afraid to tackle new development to meet a specific need. Utilizing ground(ctrl)’s artist software platform as a base we first assessed what features would be needed to power not just one artist community but to effectively power a multi-day festival with almost 100 performing acts, on multiple stages, spanning several genres.
A laundry list of development initiatives were set fourth including:
- Support for multiple artist profiles w/biographies, audio, etc..
- Multi day / Hour by hour real time event schedules,
- Ability to display events by stage rather than just venue
- Ability for users to build & share their schedule within the fff community as well as post to other popular social networks (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, & Digg).
- User / Artist twitter integration + various functionality, feature enhancements.
Working closely with the FFF team ground(ctrl) formulated a online & offline strategy for ticket sales, PIP Packages (“Pretty Important Person”, the more indie way of saying VIP), & Hard ticket sales for local vendors. Event credentials with unique redeemable codes for downloads after the festival were designed and produced to pull attendees back to the site after the festival. There they could download bonus content from the 2009 performances with the plan to add more content periodically over the the year leading up to next years FFF.
Assuming the role of a partner in the truest sense of the word ground(ctrl) expanded our offering handling not only the interactive strategy and development, but also providing an integrated social networking, e-commerce, ticketing solution, along with all design and production of hard tickets & credentials.
We flew the entire staff to Austin, TX to man early bird check-in locations, day of show will-call & box office operations, and onsite support. From the CEO, to the developers, to the telephone support staff we were checking people in, putting on wristbands, and providing onsite support. Our staff literally touched every attendee, and walked away with real knowledge about festival operations.
All of the hard work resulted in the most successful FFF to date (even despite a rainy and muddy Sunday), and a first-hand knowledge of the event, the customer and their needs. But more then anything it resulted in friendship with a client who genuinely cares about the customer and the quality of their event above all else. We love love love fun fun fun.