On-Demand Webinar: The Future (and State) of Festival Technology

Custom event apps and RFID wristbands are now expected by attendees at major festivals. But adding these technologies does more than reinforce your credibility. Beacons and RFID open the door to a world of new opportunities.

But which technologies are right for your festival? How can you best use your current tech to make a better experience for attendees?

Check out the webinar transcript and get your questions answered by resident experts Biasha Mitchell, a music business strategist at Eventbrite, and Drew Burchfield, the Co-Founder of Aloompa. The two of them have helped festivals like SnowGlobe, Boots & Hearts, and Governors Ball upgrade their technology.

Read the webinar transcript below to learn:

1. How to optimize your current festival technology and what to consider when evaluating new vendors
2. How to create a seamless onsite entry experience with RFID, and strategies to use Beacon audience data to optimize operations for the future
3. Creative ways to use festival technology on-site to connect fans and sponsors

TRANSCRIPT:

Greg Hollander: Thanks, everyone, for joining today. Welcome to Eventbrite and Aloompa’s live Q&A session on the rapidly evolving world of festival technology. You’ve probably all heard about many different types of technology that are out there in the market today. So, we wanted to spend a few minutes to talk about what this technology is and how you can use it to take your festival to the next level. I’m Greg Hollander. I’m a senior product marketing manager at Eventbrite, and I’ll be your moderator for the next hour. I’m very excited to be here today with two fantastic panelists, who spend every day thinking about festival technology and the impact that it can have on your business. First we have Drew Burchfield, who’s the co-founder of Aloompa, the leading festival mobile app technology in the U.S. In the past year, more than 100 events have used their technology, including major festivals like Governors Ball, Coachella, Bonnaroo, Ultra, Electric Daisy, and many, many, more. So, he knows a thing or two about how to transform your festival technology. Welcome, Drew.

Second, we have Biasha Mitchell, a colleague of mine at Eventbrite. She’s in charge of designing and deploying technology solutions for our largest and most complex festivals, especially in the music space. She’s got over 20 years of experience in the event industry, and is now heavily focused on how festivals can use technology to achieve their business goals. Welcome, Biasha. Between them, these two have decades of festival experience and will no doubt have a ton of great insight for you today. I’m going to kick off with a few questions, just to get things rolling, but really want this session to be as interactive as possible. So, please put your questions in the chat window as we go along, and we’ll get to as many as time allows and also try to incorporate them along the way. So, our first question is for both of you. Just to get the audience on the same page about what we’re talking about here today, what are today’s top festival technologies? What have you seen out there in the world and what do they do? Drew, let’s hear from you first.

Drew Burchfield: Sure, yeah. I think some of the main technologies are what we’re talking about today, with our proximity beacons, but one of the ones that I’m really excited about in the festival space is around virtual reality — the ability to capture that content and view it in a way where it’s actually interesting to view at home. I think now that I have two kids and don’t travel as much to festivals, which I actually do get to travel to quite a bit still. I’m always looking for live content to consume, and I think virtual reality, for the first time since I’ve seen it, has really offered this really interesting look into what the live concert looks like and having an experience similar to what would be…a lot of events are appreciating VR content now. We don’t see it yet coming online, but almost every major event this year is using content that will be distributed pretty soon.

Greg Hollander: Great, and Biasha, and what have you seen out there?

Biasha Mitchell: Well, I think VR is really exciting, and it’s really tied into streaming and streaming technology. I think every major festival’s going to have a livestream or has a livestream or should have a livestream, and that’s really exciting, because it makes that festival more accessible to people who cannot go to the festival and creates a sense of “fear of missing out,” or FOMO, that Drew is experiencing a lot these days. The other one, I think, is — and there are two, is really electronic ticketing in general. I think people are still pretty tied to paper tickets, and I think we’re going to see and continue to see the move to 100% electronic ticketing. Then also, cashless transactions. The ability to pay for merchandise and food and beverage onsite with either RFID chips or wristbands or through your phone, through a Bluetooth connection, or NFC.

Greg Hollander: That’s great, thanks. I know we’ve got a few questions related to electronic ticketing, so I’d definitely love to come back to that later, but to start, I’d love to dig more into RFID and beacon specifically; I know those are two areas you both are really excited about. So, to help us bring this to life, can you give an example of what RFID and the beacons look like in action? What benefits they might have for a festival that deploy them? Biasha, why don’t we start with you this time?

Biasha Mitchell: Sure. RFID, or radio frequency identification, is a chip and an antenna that is embedded and it can be embedded, and most commonly it’s embedded in a wristband for festival uses. However, it can also be embedded onto a badge or in a race bib or another mode of transportation of that RFID chip. I’ll take the most common use case for RFID today, which is really a multi-day music festival with or without camping. Generally, attendees will buy their ticket online and have their wristband, as long as they purchased it before a certain date, actually shipped to them and that wristband will include an RFID chip inside that wristband, and they will apply that wristband to themselves and use that to scan into the gate. Once they’re inside the gate, they can also use that wristband in a number of ways, including scanning into internal areas such as the VIP area or a breakout session. For festivals with a lot of venues, they could use it to scan into multiple venues.

They can also use that wristband to do on-site cashless transactions and pay for things onsite. Some of the benefits for that kind of experience is really around the speed of entry, and especially reentry and multiple days of that event, as well as reducing stress for both the staff at the gates as well as the attendees, because it’s simply, a green light means you get to come in, and a red light means the staff has to do something with that and figure out what’s going on. You also see a reduction in fraud and people passing tickets around because they’re attached to their wrist, and RFID chips are very hard to duplicate. You also see an increase in data collection for RFID events, and there’s also additional potential revenue streams as people will tend to spend more when they’re using their wristband for transactions or you can use it for upselling items onsite.

Greg Hollander: That’s great. Thanks, Biasha. Drew, how about with beacons and proximity technology, can you give us some color of what that looks like at a festival?

Drew Burchfield: Yeah, sure. I think I can give you a good point of view on the technology in general. So, we use what we call proximity sensors, which are a combination of Bluetooth low energy, which is a small Bluetooth device that emits a frequency that can be picked up by a mobile app or phone anywhere from one foot to all the way to 200 feet. Then, a geo fence, which is a digital fence that the phones and GPS combined with the mobile app can actually detect that people are going across certain barriers. So, how that manifests itself traditionally was, this use case around if I place a beacon in a physical place and I walk by it, then I’ll get deep content that’s relevant to what I’m doing. So, the core use case around marketing through identification. So if you were to deploy 200 beacons out on a festival site, around different points of interest, you would then have the ability to deliver content based on those contexts as well. Second main use case is around sponsorship, the ability to analyze engagement as people are physically walking up to certain areas and enabling certain functionality, maybe within the mobile apps or within an experience physically near them, and also operational insights and the ability to look at a heat map, get insight into how long people are spending at a certain area, what your current delay time is at the box office, which is how many people or how many minutes the people wait.

Greg Hollander: Great, thanks. Well, you both have mentioned a lot of different benefits that these technologies can provide. So, I wanted to spend time digging into a few of them. So, first, I’d love to hear you both talked about the data you can get from these technologies. What kind of data or operational insight can this technology provide? Drew, let’s start with you this time.

Drew Burchfield: As far as operational insight, all of the data around proximity being collected through the mobile apps is all collected in real time, so that allows for us to get some really actionable insights based on the data coming in, and that could be everything from digitally viewing what the festival looks like, to if the wait time is too long out of certain gates. We can send someone out to the pat-down line and bag check and check out how things are looking.

One of the interesting things that we’re trying to wrestle with that has been really insightful for the operations team and the mobile apps; the units we have, what people said they were going to go do and how they pre-schedule their events, and this intersection between action and intention. So, what they said they were going to go do and what they actually go do. I think with beacons and proximity, we’re actually able to make that correlation to where you can, as people intend to go see a certain artist, you will definitely get an education on whether or not you have everything stacked correctly. Then, on the back end, or in real time, we’re actually able to see how conversions happen. So, super interesting to look at that.

Greg Hollander: Great, thanks. Biasha, what about the RFID front?

Biasha Mitchell: I think what’s pretty basic, but incredibly valuable, is attendee data collection in general. So, when most festivals put tickets on sale, they collect one name and one email address per order and often that order can contain more than one ticket, up to four or six tickets. So, what’s really great about RFID and when you ship out wristbands ahead of time is, the attendees are actually, sometimes required but definitely encouraged, to register each of their wristbands to each of the people in their party. So, you would get much more data around your attendees, sometimes 4X what you would have gotten if you weren’t doing RFID, and that can be incredibly valuable not only for your own internal marketing purposes and increasing the size of your list and your engaged fans, but also for sponsors and other uses. Other data that’s really interesting that you’ll be able to gather from RFID is around entry times, when are most people showing up to the festival, and also internal entry points.

So, when are people going into VIP? How often is the same person going into the free bar? That kind of a thing. Then, also for film festivals or other kinds of events where they might be breakout sessions or other events within the main event, you can collect data about which one of those sessions or film screenings are most popular and well-attended. Also, you’ll be able to audit how many free tickets are you giving out and really understand the fraud you might be seeing at your gate, which you wouldn’t have seen before. I know at SnowGlobe they didn’t realize how much fraud they actually were seeing at their gate until they actually got to see the data on the scans that were rejected because they were fraudulent.

I think the other really interesting data that can be collected onsite is around cashless transactions and understanding how much money people are spending on site, where they’re spending it, what time they’re spending it, as well as for your vendors, your food and beverage vendors, understanding which products are most popular, which bars are more popular, and when you need to actually restock bars. Also, settling with your vendors at the end of the day and understanding how much cash, how much credit, and how much RFID transactions they’ve actually brought in.

Greg Hollander: Great. Thanks, Biasha. Well, it’s clear that the data you can collect with RFID and with beacons, like Drew was talking about, can have a pretty major impact on your festival, both from the organizer and operational side, but also on the attendee experience. So I was hoping you could both talk a little bit more about how RFID and beacons affect the attendee experience overall, both before the event and onsite. Biasha, let’s go back to you to kick this one off.

Biasha Mitchell: I think there’s obviously a number of benefits, but really, by receiving your wristband in advance in the mail, you create this experience for an attendee that allows them to really enter that event in a much quicker fashion and also when folks receive that wristband in the mail, there’s also this sense of excitement around the festival and engagement; you wouldn’t believe how many pictures of the Boots and Hearts packaging were on social media when people received it. Our Governors Ball did a really neat tin that they sent they recipientsthat ended up all over the internet. So, that’s that sense of excitement that attendees get. Then, once they’re inside the event, just moving between VIP and GA, or moving between parts of the festival becomes quicker and easier with RFID wristbands as opposed to manual checkpoints. Also with cashless, you really don’t have to think about where your wallet is or pulling your wallet out.

You can use your wristband just to buy whatever you want onsite for you or your friends. I think something else that’s really interesting — a benefit of RFID — is around wristband ownership and the fact that, when somebody receives a wristband in the mail and they go and register it, that becomes their wristband. So, if they lose their wristband onsite or they misplace it, they actually can receive customer service and replace that wristband, whereas a paper ticket is treated just like cash, and if you lose it, you’re out of luck. That’s a really great experience for attendees, to be able to reclaim their wristband if they lose it.

Greg Hollander: Great, thanks. And Drew, how about on the beacon side of things? How do you see beacons really transforming that attendee experience onsite?

Drew Burchfield: We did an interesting pilot with a few promoters this past year around analyzing wait times outside of the gate. So, this is before the ticket is given for entry or before the RFID wristband is scanned. I think many attendees spend a big chunk of their time parking and/or preparing to come inside the gates and then physically waiting. As a producer, I think you need to spend a lot of time on the experience and you want people inside the gates spending money and having a really great time. So, many of the areas that we’re focused on are around how to get people in the door as quickly as possible and give producers insight into how that may be impeded before they actually get to the gate. So, it’s a unique way of looking at line length at a particular gate, which will allow events to take a look that way; the pat-down is the longest area or the ID check and be able to reconfigure based on that. I think the main thing — and there are two things that we experience — is that people spend a large chunk of their time waiting to get inside the festival, and a lot of time finding friends. So, a lot of features that are framed around the attendee experience are really going to be solved with those two things.

Greg Hollander: Great. You’d mentioned a few times before this question about once those attendees get inside, the different types of sponsor activations and that beacons can provide and also they can prove new value to those sponsors. So, I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit to that and then we’ll go to Biasha on the RFID side afterwards.

Drew Burchfield: Sponsors have traditionally experienced an event through physical activations on-site. So, [missing audio] relationships that events typically happen a lot of time have been materializing at specific points that you can actually go attend. So, because of that, the sponsors have been looking at how they can interact with attendees, and it typically is also limited by the technology around identification. So, everyone’s [missing audio] an event. Typically, it’s really conservative about sending that stuff out to you because they don’t want to bombard you with all the event things that they could tell you, and every sponsor would love to send as many pieces of content to you that they could, but their use is pretty good at putting some barriers around that. I think one of the good things that opens up here with use of proximity is the ability to segment based on the area. So, that’s the [missing audio] on direct access to send content to people that are actually engaging with them versus actually put the burden on the event for blanketing the entire attendee set, which is good. It increases the access for the event. So, they can actually sell and create more engagement for sponsors along the way, and it’s definitely an interesting value proposition that one can go to.

Greg Hollander: Then, Biasha, from what you’ve seen…?

Biasha Mitchell: I’ll talk about particularly RFID and sponsorship in a second, but I think what’s interesting about what Drew is saying, kind of what we’re saying is, there’s this intersection between what can happen on the phone and what people do with that phone on-site and the digital experience of the phone. Then, what’s that physical experience with a wristband that may cover the gaps between when a phone dies or is that more foolproof way of ensuring that you’re getting check-ins from every single attendee that’s flowing through an area versus those that may or may not have their phone charged. So, I think there’s benefits on both sides for using both technologies in concert with each other. I think, for RFID and wristbands particularly, or badges, for a sponsor, it’s traditionally always been about that data collection and they want to know which attendees are engaging with their brand and they want to actually create attendee data collection, I guess, barriers as it were, or gates so that you have to collect attendee data in order to participate in the Malibu Lounge at Hangout Festival, or one of these sponsor activation areas.

Traditionally, that’s been done on a tablet or some sort of paper–and-pen data collection scenario where an attendee has to walk up, give you their first name, last name, email address, and maybe answer a question or two about their likes or dislikes in order to participate in a particular activation or experience, get on a water slide or that kind of a thing. Now, with the simple tap of a wristband, you can actually connect, give that data to that sponsor and have the attendee walk right into an experience that has less friction tied to it. So, I think that’s actually the biggest benefit of RFID for sponsor activations. I think that you also, because you’re collecting more data about attendees, sponsorship in general becomes an easier conversation because you have more demographic data. Often I see, during data collection for the wristband registration process or after someone gets a wristband in the mail, they have to go and register their wristband online, and we’re often seeing organizers asking for gender, age, things like that, that have been harder to get at when you have one person ordering tickets for multiple people, and you’re actually gathering that data and that becomes much more valuable and interesting to sponsors who are just sponsoring the event in general.

I think we will see a lot in the future with sponsorships and on-site engagement with RFID as the technology evolves and becomes more stable and advanced. Often, I think, the biggest barrier to using RFID onsite for actual physical sponsor activations, which Drew spoke about, is really the fact that you need, or have needed in the past, quite a bit of internet and internet connectivity, 4G connectivity as well as power and these other things you have to lay out at your festival. You’re already thinking about the gates, and now you have to all of the sudden think about those same sort of implementation of power and internet internally, and it becomes a lot harder to actually deploy that technology. As it gets more nimble and more flexible, we’re going to see sponsors using this technology in really, really creative ways in the future.

Greg Hollander: So, speaking of creativity, within sponsorship, or outside of sponsorship, what are some of the creative things that you’ve seen or done with RFID or with beacons or any other festival technology? Inspire us with what you’ve seen out there.

Biasha Mitchell: I think with RFID; we were sort of talking about this a little bit before the webinar here is that, with RFID, there’s certainly a lot of really exciting things that you can do; scavenger hunts and connecting with your friends or photo boothing, which is a very common use. I know that in 2011, which seems like an eternity ago in RFID technology, Bonnaroo invested in a bunch of photo booths around their festival site to basically do Ford-branded photo opportunities on social media. They generated millions of impressions from that, and it was considered a smashing success for Ford. However, as we’ve moved forward in the technology, I’ve seen less and less of those kinds of activations, and I think it really is because of the fact that a, phones have taken over a lot of this interactive experience that people have on-site with events, especially in photography, but also the cost of implementing that technology across your festival site and making sure it works every time, because as soon as an attendee touches a sponsor activation that doesn’t actually work and their photo doesn’t make it to Facebook or it just doesn’t turn on when they tap their wristband, that’s the moment that that attendee disengages from the sponsor and it becomes a negative ROI on that investment, actually.

I think some other interesting things that are going on are, Tomorrow World has an interesting activation where two friends touch their wristbands, they can become Facebook friends. I think that’s really interesting. Again, it needs to work every time, because if you met the love of your life on-site at TomorrowWorld and you didn’t get to connect with them on Facebook because activation didn’t work because the technology didn’t work, that becomes, again, not a great experience. So, I think there’s a lot of opportunity for RFID and uses of the technology, but we’re still at the infant stages of that, and I think one final note for RFID in this piece is that we’ve seen a lot of really great uses in stable venues or Disney — Greg just came back from Disney this morning, and him and his family were using the Magic Band around Disney to upsell into fast pass sessions or get access to their photos. That was a really exciting and interesting experience. The benefit Disney has is a lot of budget spend on powering internet, again, and infrastructure versus a green field festival that may not have that kind of ability to spend or really the time to implement before their festival.

Greg Hollander: Yeah. I think that makes sense, and one thing that was really powerful to see in that full system in place, and obviously, they have the benefit of not only a lot of budget, but also fixed infrastructure. So, having the same point of sale systems all the time, the same entrance gates all the time. So, not that that translates immediately to an open field festival, but certainly, a lot of inspiration to draw on there. That was very cool to see take place. So, that’s covers the RFID front. Then, Drew, what have you seen out there?

Drew Burchfield: Yeah. I think probably my favorite use case to date was one that I briefly touched on a little bit earlier. We had one event that had a sponsorship relationship with a clothing line, and they deployed geo fences at the 300 stores in the United States and were able to communicate with attendees and understand what of their attendee base actually were in and around these stores and who physically converted and went inside. So, it was really cool use case that one might not think of when you think of proximity in general, beacons and geo fences, that that really leverages the ability for an event to use this functionality outside of events. As far as inside an event, I think you see scavenger hunts being used all the time, beer crawls. One of the use cases that we’re excited about here, that a few events is going to do is, be able to deliver exclusive content when a set ends. So, we’re able to segment, using the technology, we’re able to segment what attendees actually want to the show, and then as they are leaving, the cell phone towers reduce their strain. We can actually deliver a piece of content to them.

So, it would be an unreleased song or an unreleased video that would just be initially delivered to those people who were at that particular show, which is very, very interesting for these guys. Then, I think the use case I’m looking forward to the most, actually, hasn’t happened yet, will be happening here in a few months, where we’re along that same use case of someone who’s at a physical show. The ability to deliver, or a physical place, deliver an individual inventory-based thing. So, individual bar codes or coupon codes, and limit it to a specific thing. I think that’s the crazy thing about giveaways at festivals is, you tend to have to give them, I think, really broad strokes, like first 10 people to come to this area win this. Well, you have to have a high quantity of rewards to give away, or you’re going to have a mob on your hands. So, if you’re giving away a car or something really significant, the ability to limit inventory and target who gets that piece of content is really important, otherwise you have fulfillment issues. So, I think we’re going to see some interesting things coming down that use case using beacons and proximity where we can verify that someone’s on-site and then verify they’re at this physical place or were in the past five minutes and deliver individualized content that’s limited in its inventory. So, obviously, I’m super excited about that one, personally, and it’s going to be looked at to do some cool stuff.

Greg Hollander: Awesome. So, we have one question left on RFID and beacons, and then one that came in from the audience around electronic ticketing, which Biasha mentioned earlier. If there are any other questions for the folks on the phone, this would be a great time to throw them in there and we’ll make sure they get answered before we jump off the line here. So, the last question related to RFID and beacons. You’ve both mentioned a lot of moving pieces and a lot of benefits of this technology, but also the importance of setup and making sure that setup on-site and beforehand is appropriate for the festival, whatever that situation may be. So, our last question is around, if I’ve decided that I want to use these technologies at my festival, how do I think about choosing a vendor, and what might happen if I go the wrong direction and what are some cases that you’ve seen of that? So, let’s start with Biasha for that one.

Biasha Mitchell: I get quoted on this a lot, so I’ll go ahead and just say it again, but I think that in RFID, it’s a fairly old technology, actually. It’s been around for 50 years. It’s in your room keys at hotels, and it’s in my badge when I walk into Eventbrite, but it’s actually still fairly new in the event space, because it’s essentially still kind of the “Wild West” of technology application out there. There’s been some pretty significant failures of the technology onsite at events, and that’s kind of the last place you want to have your attendees endure anything that’s negative. So, really, when you think about deploying RFID, it’s a costly endeavor, and you need to really have a lot of bandwidth to make sure you’re doing it right. I think the specific areas you should be really looking at when you choose a vendor is a few. So, offline capabilities, the ability for your RFID technology and your readers to continue to work. If there is a lack of power, internet, which happens; that happens at events all the time, and I think that’s why RFID is slow to arrive to the events space, is you are producing an event in a green field or if you’re Tribeca Film Festival, you’re going into existing venues that have their own technology, but not your infrastructure.

So, you need to make sure that the internet you’re putting in there and the power you’re putting in there is really good, but at the end of the day, that that technology does not fail if power, internet goes out at any time. During SnowGlobe, we had outages of both; at the gates and also the internal scan points. The technology, because Eventbrite is doing something with writing the actual access data to each chip that each person is wearing, and also each RFID reader, both the handheld and gate portal reader have an internal database. There was never a blip in the actual attendee experience, even though there was no internet or power to those locations. I think chip technology is really important, making sure that the chips that you’re utilizing are very high-quality, and coming from a known source. We’ve seen a lot of failures with the antennas being too small so that the read ranges are too short and it takes a long time to read those chips. Also, the flexibility of the system: can you easily deploy new gates or new handhelds at a moment’s notice if you’re seeing higher frequency of traffic than you were expecting? Can you remove gates really quickly? Can you remove gates so that can become your fire exit?

Things like that you should be looking at. How quickly can you deploy new handhelds out to new locations should you need to open an additional gate or a portal? Also, what happens when, if you’re the kind of festival that maybe doesn’t have the luxury of selling a bunch of your tickets in advance when you ship out wristbands, you have to stop shipping at some point or else people will not receive their wristband in the mail. So, how are you handling those folks that bought a ticket after what we call the ship deadline, or the deadline before you have to buy before you can get the wristband in the mail. What happens to those folks that actually are going to be delivered a print at home ticket or need to come to will-call, and how fast can your RFID system actually assign wristbands to them?

Because they still need to receive an RFID wristband in order to get to the festival. Also, something else that I think is really important is looking at what is the actual online registration process for the folks that receive wristbands in the mail? How quick and easy is that? Can it be done in the mobile app? Can it be done on your website? Also, what is the registration process for the cashless transactions? How easy is it to tie a credit card to your on-site cashless transactions or load money onto your wristband? What is that experience for attendees? Is it seamless? Is it mobile-optimized? Has your vendor thought through those things?

Greg Hollander: Then, Drew, how do you think about a vendor for a festival app or beacons, and what are some of the things that organizers should be thinking about as they’re selecting that for their festival?

Drew Burchfield: I think, for beacons specifically, I think that it’s just an area and a term that has been tossed around for a long time that perceptions are really different on. So, I would say the first, as you’re selecting someone to potentially leverage those three components, which would be marketing, sponsorship, and operational insights, I think it’s having someone on your team that understands the components that you would want to leverage. I think all of them cover different, in our case, in a sophisticated vendor space, they cover different areas of the event. So, I definitely think as you’re thinking about, “Oh, data would be cool, or these sponsorship features would be cool,” you want someone on your side to be able to bite off as much as you want to chew there. I think one of the bigger things would be choosing a vendor and asking a question, how autonomous are they? How much participation do they need from you as an event versus what’s the line of things that they provide?

So, my challenge would be that the conversation is really not around the word beacon. It’s really around proximity in general. So, someone quotes you in the quantity of beacons they’re going to give you, I’m not sure that that’s—I would look for vendors and partners that are talking more about the insights and the different features that you have versus the hardware. I truly think the hardware’s not really a focus of a sophisticated beacon or proximity initiative. In general, I think there are a lot of different options out there and everybody does them a different way, very similar to how Biasha was describing Eventbrite’s strategy for dealing with offline connectivity. I think that’s also a big component in the beacon and proximity space is: how is data collected? Is it collected offline? Do the apps need connectivity to be able to leverage the data? Things like that. So, definitely a squirrely world out there, but a lot of these are some good questions. So, if that helped.

Greg Hollander: That’s great. That’s fantastic insight. Thanks, Drew. Then, before we close, I wanted to talk about a little bit of a different topic, going back to just electronic ticketing in general, which Biasha touched on earlier at the beginning. A question that came through from our audience. So, the question was, “My festivals taking place near a large lake where cell service is spotty. I’m hesitant to tell patrons they don’t need paper tickets. Are there other options for me?” I’m going to let Biasha start with this to talk about how this organizer should think about their event.

Biasha Mitchell: I think, obviously, scanning technology has gotten a lot more sophisticated over time. So, in theory, if you have the right ticketing vendor, someone should not actually have to physically have a ticket in hand in order to arrive to the event because they’ve purchased it online. You have their data. So, ideally, yes, they have a bar code with them that they’ve downloaded to their phone or they have printed out before they get there, but at the end of the day, your scanner should be able to download all the data to every scanner. So, wherever that person shows up, they should be able to looked up by name and checked in or should be able to receive help at your customer service area, even if there’s no connectivity because all that data’s been downloaded to the scanner ahead of time.

The attendee should not feel stressed out if they can’t find their bar code before coming to the event. I think paper tickets actually causes a huge amount of stress for attendees who maybe can’t find it or they’ve put it in their special sock drawer and now they forgot which one it went into, and they should have that comfort of knowing they have their ticket all the time because it’s in their phone. People are going to have their phones. If they don’t, they simply bring their ID to a customer service area on-site and your technology should be able to look up that order, even if it’s completely offline.

Greg Hollander: That’s great. Thanks a lot. So, that’s it as far as the questions that we had and that were submitted ahead of time. Thanks again for joining. You can find out a lot more about our RFID solution at Eventbrite.com/RFID and about Aloompa and all the fantastic festival solutions that they offer at Aloompa.com. So, hopefully we’ll hear from you again soon, and thanks again. Have a great start to your week.