Tech and art: can other SA festivals learn from the National Arts Festival app?

At the mid-way point, the National Arts Festival this year was already reporting excellent figures showing six percent ticket sales growth on last year’s numbers and a 12% rand value growth. Not bad for a festival in its 40th year, held annually in the otherwise sleepy student city of Grahamstown, Eastern Cape. But how can an established festival look for growth in an increasingly competitive leisure spend market? This one seems to be banking on innovation in systems as much as innovation on stage, and they’re investing in bringing the system to the continent too.

The one big birthday present the Festival gave itself this year was a whole new ticketing system called VIA, powered by Red61 — the Scotland-based development firm that created and runs the ticketing system for the world’s biggest arts festival, the Edinburgh Fringe.

Festival CEO Tony Lankester told journalists at the Festival that they have partnered with Red61 to bring VIA, under the name Ticket Hut to SA and the continent, and are going to be licencing the system to other festivals and events, including the newly announced Cape Town Fringe festival (25 Sept – 5 Oct 2014). The additional benefit for them is increased control and flexibility – like adding extra tickets and shows to the system, or giving discounts to drive sales. The producing artists also get a bigger slice of the pie than before.

On the new system, tickets are now sold through the Festival’s own website and their brand-spanking-new free app – launched on the opening day of the Fest, for iPhone, iPad and Android devices.

Look and functionality

The app has a very simple colourful look, opening to a highlight spot and four nav boxes: shows, venues, hopper (bus transport) tracker and My Festival. Like most apps – any good app – its purpose-driven. This one’s purpose is about facilitating your fest experience, or is it about selling tickets? The two are linked and don’t detract from each other, so no conflict there. To this end, all the necessary info is packed in. You can browse shows by a specific days or search for them, but you’ll need to be pretty accurate with the show’s title.

The app integrates nicely with the new website, especially the scheduling and My Festival functionality – so you can create a list of things you want to see online, and access and add to them on the app. The hopper tracker is a very simple but effective map view, allowing you to see yourself on map in relation to the various hopper buses making the rounds.

By contrast, the venues map is a bit weak. In it, Grahamstown and the myriad of little venues are laid out, but there is no search functionality that I could see and thus no way to find your desired venue without clicking randomly to find it.

The app also stubbornly continues to offer days gone by, rather than limiting you to the present and future, and clicking on the News tab from the menu crashes the app – every time. So, it is safe to say that there are still some niggles to iron out.

Ticketing

I found the app to be most useful using the daily view, which ordered results from the current time, so if you have a spare hour coming up during your festival visit you can see what is on and fill it. Additionally, you can buy tickets off the app. The limit to this is the paper ticketing system – you need to visit a box office venue to print these and take them with you to the venue. A dedicated queue or console for this purpose would have been lekker, as ticketing queues can get lengthy.

Finally, an innovative next step that I would love to see on the horizon (hint, hint) is a dual system: paper tickets if you want them, but venues that can accept and verify e-tickets too. Then we’re really talking next gen arts festivals!