Event Planner

Festival Software That Can Help You Run a Great Event

  • Riley Manning
    by Riley Manning • August 20, 2021

Riley Manning has worked as a travel and entertainment writer for more than 10 years. Today, he writes about unique events and the technology that helps make them happen.

Festival Software

Orchestrating any event can be a major undertaking. Pulling off a great festival presents unique challenges, especially since some festivals take place over multiple days.

Whether your festival is something as laid back as an outdoor harvest festival, as intense as a big-stage rock concert, or you happen to be hosting one of the world’s biggest food fights, the backend logistics can be overwhelming to say the least.

One thing that shouldn’t be overwhelming is selling your tickets.

A seamless ticketing experience is crucial to your event’s success. The right festival software gives you all the tools you need to sell your tickets digitally, drive revenue, and make sure your festival will be an awesome experience for everyone.

The fact is that festivals are a crucial part of the culture in many cities across the country, and venues have once again begun to fill with festival goers.

Event ticketing software helps you meet their expectations with easy, contactless ticket sales for multiple days’ events, the ability to offer unlimited ticket types, upselling with addons like concessions and special parking, event reminders and personalized email campaigns, and many other features to optimize the festival experience.

Here’s everything you need to know about how SimpleTix’s festival software can help you run a great event.

Table of Contents:

1. Festival Software That Streamlines Ticketing

2. Promoting Your Festival with Mailchimp

3. Post-Event Reconciliation with Quickbooks

Festival Software That Streamlines Ticketing

There are many software platforms on the market for digital event ticket sales, but few offer the user-friendly customizability festival coordinators and their attendees need.

SimpleTix is an event ticketing app built for you to maximize festival ticket pre-sales and customize your entire ticketing process easily.

Several key features of SimpleTix make this possible.

Festival Mode

Most apps treat festivals as an afterthought, but SimpleTix offers features tailored to any size or type of event. A prime example of this is the way our software offers easy ticketing for multiple events or multi-day passes. Some apps require attendees to check out multiple times for each ticket type. SimpleTix allows attendees to purchase all tickets for multiple events or festivals with a single checkout.

If festival-goers need to change ticket details, they can do so themselves using the SimpleTix app, and their tickets will be color-coded for each day for easy identification.

Some other important festival features include:

Multiple ticket types and pricing such as early bird discounts, special prices for children and seniors, discounts for military or first responders, and bundle pricing for multi-day events.

Integrate upsells like concessions and special parking, discounts, and add-ons to your tickets.

QR codes for quick and contactless mobile entry and for your promotional materials.

Customized seating charts and other specialized reserved seating

Timed-entry ticketing and attendance tracking

Event web page customized for your event or an embeddable ticketing widget to use on your existing site.

The Bottom Line

Running a festival demands careful budgeting, which means you need festival software that doesn’t throw a wrench in your finances.

Apps like Eventbrite have costlier premium features, uncapped fees, and you may wait weeks to receive payouts from sales. Few apps can match the features offered by SimpleTix at the base-level fee of just $0.79 + 2% per attendee, and payouts happen the instant a ticket is sold.

Simpletix is festival software designed to maximize your pre-sales while offering a plethora of day-of payment options for your attendees, including integration with Square, Stripe, and other popular payment methods.

Promoting Your Festival with Mailchimp

SimpleTix integrates seamlessly with other software tools such as Mailchimp. As an event specialist, you’re likely already familiar with MailChimp as one of the most popular digital promotion and communications tools on the market.

As of 2019, Mailchimp boasted 11 million active customers and an audience of 4 billion.

There are many times you may need to use email to promote your events or provide important updates to festival goers. Email can be an important channel for things like early promotions, important reminders, confirmation messages, and health and safety guidelines. SimpleTix automatically adds purchasers’ contact info to your Mailchimp audience so your attendees can always get the information they need.

SimpleTix also connects to dozens of other apps, payment gateways, marketing software like ActiveCampaign, and CRMs like SalesForce. Our festival software lets you seamlessly move between managing all the different aspects of your event.

 

Post-Event Reconciliation with QuickBooks

Managing a festival budget can mean dealing with ever-shifting financial variables. Often, it’s only once your events are over that you can assess how profitable your festival was.

After all, you’re managing your cash flow, leveraging different revenue sources, and juggling the many expenses in your budget, including food and beverages, technical equipment, venue rentals, labor costs, travel and lodging, and marketing, to name a few.

Which revenue sources will help cover your expenses? What are your fixed costs versus your variable costs? How much cash flow do you need for pre-event costs like venue deposits and marketing materials?

Once the festival has ended and the dust clears, you’ll be reviewing your finances to see whether you met your revenue goals. Many event specialists use accounting software like QuickBooks to manage their finances.

It’s easy to connect SimpleTix festival software with QuickBooks, to automatically integrate ticket sales information with your financial data and give yourself a more accurate picture of your accounts.

For any type of festival big or small, SimpleTix offers festival software to make ticketing a simple process that integrates seamlessly with other elements of managing your events. Switch to SimpleTix to give your attendees a great ticketing experience with a tool that meets their expectations.

SimpleTix has offered an affordable, premium event ticketing platform that outperforms Eventbrite and similar apps for over 12 years. Compared to the competition, SimpleTix offers better options at a better price point. To learn more, call us at +1 (855) 550-3670 or email us at support@simpletix.com.

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