Brighton Fringe is a registered charity which facilitates a platform for international and local artists and audiences to experience Brighton and Hove through a diverse range of events and performances. The festival is completely open access, meaning anyone can register and put on an event, which allows for a level of fluidity in terms of event style, subject matter and audience experience. Having worked with Brighton Fringe for four years, they trusted Grandad to exercise
their digital expertise to deliver a site which unifies all areas of stakeholder experience without compromise or complication. Aside from providing a site which would generate ticket sales and awareness of the event as a whole, Brighton Fringe needed to have a digital presence which could service the needs of their many key stakeholders from one space with minimal intervention from third parties.
Trusted digital partners
Our CMS of choice, YouCreate, coordinates data from two external platforms to deliver a seamless experience to both performers and audiences. Event listings on the site are entirely user-generated and are done so on a platform called Eventatron. Performers submit a proposal through this platform detailing important information such as ticket price, performance dates, times and venues. Grandad coordinated the main Fringe website to automatically receive this data and minimise administrative work for the Fringe team, feeding events through to the YouCreate software for approval and acceptance into the festival’s repertoire of events for users to browse and purchase.
From an audience perspective, prospective event attendees are able to view performances based on an astonishing number of metrics. Thanks to a combination of unique functionalities from Grandad’s chosen event ticketing solution Red 61 and our intuitive filtering strategy, audiences can view events by date, price and even genre, and move through to purchase stage whilst remaining on the Brighton Fringe site. This simple, elegant, user-centric solution allows visitors to filter thousands of shows quickly and easily whilst maximising exposure of different performances to the audience most likely to engage with them. This culminates in a single, unified payment flow which allows users to book and purchase tickets effortlessly.
Driving comnmerciality
As a charitable organisation, a large proportion of Fringe’s funding comes from partnerships with local organisations to advertise their services on site. Grandad structured this functionality to be fully flexible, allowing Fringe full autonomy over what adverts are shown where and when dependent on context. This powerful capability means that they have full control with their commercial advertising model and the ability to obtain vital data on impressions and clicks for each advertisement, generating deeper understanding surrounding which adverts were more successful and using this insight to replicate successes in following years.
Meanwhile, donations to Brighton Fringe are promoted through mechanisms in the checkout flow which automatically recognise whether a user has or has not made a donation, with minimal interruption to their ticket-purchasing journey and gently persuasive copy. The impact of COVID-19 on Arts and Culture organisations is well recognised, and thanks to the adaptability of our partner platform Red 61, event attendees are able to pay in excess of the original ticket amount for different events to further support and monetise the industry.
Thanks to the infrastructure we already had in place for Brighton Fringe pre-pandemic, we were able to provide them with the capability to run livestream and pre-recorded events in quick succession with ease, by adding a few new functionalities which didn’t compromise on the quality of the existing user experience but enhanced it instead.
Targeted, relevant content
Similar to the style of Brighton Festival, the site changes depending on whether it’s in or out of season. This is reflected through changes to the site architecture and front end appearance, guaranteeing a refreshed, unique feel each year which reflects the new theme of the Fringe. The complexity of the organisation’s stakeholders means that there are many different user groups interacting with the site, who all require different content.
Grandad designed a system which provided this content to stakeholders in a clear and concise way, encouraging action and further research above all else by pulling in relevant content from other areas of the site (such as articles and guides) which may be useful to specific individuals. This concept of intuitive content is replicated in other areas of the site to make the user journey even easier, e.g. the promotion of the more popular events based on previous search data.
Plans going forward
The Brighton Fringe website consistently ranks at the top of Google and draws audiences back year after year, and is able to withstand thousands of users thanks to a rigorous, cleverly-designed yet simple interface. We are excited to continue our partnership with Brighton Fringe and look forward to how we can take their site even further beyond the ordinary next year.
Get in touch!
Book in a chat with Paul on 01273 944 400 or email by clicking the link below