Located just outside of Exeter in the UK, Westpoint is a four-day festival of musical acts, speakers, and many community-building activities. This event, which is more than a decade old, wanted to better serve its core audience by building a mobile app featuring detailed schedules, artist and speaker bios, maps, frequently asked questions, and more.
After evaluating a number of tools, both full-service and self-service options, Westpoint chose Grandstand for the August 2019 event.
The app was built to match existing print material and branding for the event, which eventually turned the print design (shown below) into a mobile app that heavility mirrors the overall branding. Catherine Butcher, Communications Officer for Commission Together and app lead, used the Grandstand tools to create a design in Photoshop and transfer many of the design assets into a workable layout in Grandstand. The end project featured the brand's iconic starry-sky background with large white icons. Westpoint used a mix of Grandstand's supplied icons with custom ones that they created to supplement.
Internal pages were built with the same custom font used in their print materials and carried throughout the app. Multiple schedules groups were created allowing the event to isolate schedule items for different audiences, such as kids, teens, and adults.
Since the event is held on top of agricultural ground, typical satellite maps don't help the user navigate around the event. Likewise a static PDF map doesn't help the user visualize their location. But with Grandstand, Westpoint was able to use a custom overlay that has a slight transparency. This allows the terrain of the region to be seen below the custom map and more importantly gives the attendee the ability to see themselves move around on top of the map. The map is fully searchable and allows users to view schedules for various locations on the map, see menus for food locations, and more.
Push notifications were also a major part of the 4-day event, and each alert was also shown in a news feed inside the app allowing users who download the app at any point to see previous notification messages.
Finally, the event also conducted a Livestream and served it up through the app.
The app was a resounding success and the 2020 version of the app is already getting started. Nearly two-thirds of the attendees downloaded the app, and the app was opened more than 100,000 times during the days right before and during the event. In fact, nearly 7,000 map pin clicks were recorded during this period.
Catherine Butcher told Grandstand after the event that "I actually can't believe how much of a success the app was - people loved it and I can't believe so many people downloaded it."
The event success was mirrored on Facebook where one attendee, David Goater, wrote: "This is so so good! I never have a clue what's going on during the weekend - problem solved!" Other users responded similarly.
The Westpoint app is available in both the Apple App Store and Google Play store. As with all clients Grandstand produces a promotional website to help with marketing.
Casestudy