Lollapalooza brings together the most popular artists in alternative rock, heavy metal, punk rock, hip hop and EDM bands as well as visual artists, dance and comedy performances and craft booths. And like all festivals, the Lollapalooza team wanted to attendees to have fun, while also being safe.

To celebrate this year’s festival (taking place July 28 – 31), we thought we’d take a look at how they’ve stayed connected with fans and attendees via mobile in the past.

The Client

Lollapalooza is Chicago’s premiere music festival, drawing more than 100 artists and 100,000+ fans every year to the city’s Grant Park. What first started in 1991 by Jane’s Addiction singer Perry Farrell as a farewell tour for his band, has grown immensely in the past 25 years. The app was a collaboration between Lollapalooza, Eventbase (event app platform specialists and trusted Urban Airship Partner), C3 Presents and Urban Airship.

The Strategy

With multiple acts going on at once on multiple stages, festival attendees need to know what time their favorite bands played and where to go in order to see them. To make this quick and painless for attendees, Lollapalooza used Urban Airship’s push notifications in the event app to keep attendees informed.

The Lollapalooza app provided a comprehensive guide to the festival, including maps, social tools, detailed set information and the ability to create a customized schedule. Organizers used push notifications to announce giveaways and contests, keep attendees informed of major schedule changes and alert users when their self-selected favorite performers were taking the stage. Lollapalooza also used location segmentation paired with push notifications to distribute surveys to those who had just visited events.

With such high push notification opt-in rates, Lollapalooza could rely on push notifications as an emergency communications channel. When a major thunderstorm approached on one of the festival days, concert organizers sent out an emergency push notification to alert all attendees to guide them safely out of the venue and then back in once the danger had passed.

A safety alert via push notification from the Lollapalooza app.

The Result

With a 90% opt-in rate for push notifications and lightning-fast delivery (pun intended), Lollapalooza was able to keep its event attendees quickly notified and safe from potential danger.

The immediacy of push notifications enabled organizers to move thousands of people and get the concert started again swiftly. Without push notifications, it would have been an uphill battle to bring everyone back in time to finish the day’s festivities.

Ben West, co-founder of Eventbase said, “for large events, you may have sponsors who have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars. If you need to deliver messages inviting participants to drop by a sponsor’s tent for a giveaway or some other event, you need to know it will be delivered when push notifications are used. Urban Airship’s mobile engagement platform provides the reliability and certainty that business requires.”

We Can Help

Whether you have a small, internal event or conference or a large-scale, public festival, we can help your attendees stay connected and in the loop with mobile engagement.

Interested in seeing how we’ve helped other brands? Check out our success stories. To learn more about how Urban Airship Engage can help your business (whatever your goals may be), contact us. Or, sign up for our free trial and see how push notifications can improve your app strategy today!