How Wanderlust Festival Used Automation to Eliminate “Months of Work”

Originating in New York, Wanderlust runs events focused on making mindful living fun and accessible to everyone, with the tagline ‘Find Your True North’. There are two main events hosted by Wanderlust:

• Wanderlust Festival — a 4-day retreat celebrating mindful living with yoga, meditation, live music, artists, classes, and food and wine experiences
• Wanderlust 108 — the world’s only ‘mindful triathlon’ featuring a 5km run/walk, yoga class, and guided meditation

Wanderlust brings together a host of brand partners and a strong music lineup to create modern, enjoyable events with purpose. Since 2009, events have been held throughout North America, South America and Europe. Jacque, a yoga teacher, and her husband Jonnie, a music festival organiser, brought the brand to the Southern Hemisphere from 2014 – 2017.

In their first year, Jacque and Jonnie were faced with the complexities and mammoth workload of running a large schedule of activities across multi-day events. In 2015, they partnered with Eventbrite to drastically reduce their workload and successfully ran two festivals and eight triathlon events across Australia and New Zealand by 2017.

“Eventbrite does so much more for us than just sell tickets” explains Jacque. “The integrations and data available to us has taken away months of extra work, which has been invaluable to us in growing the event and entering new markets.”

Eventbrite ticketing allowed Wanderlust to:

• Offer a multi-tiered pricing strategy to drive early registrations
• Automate a heavy administrative workload with best in class integrations such as Sched, MailChimp, SurveyMonkey, WordPress, and Facebook Events
• Manage 200 festival activities in a simple, user-friendly way
• Integrate ticketing and event scheduling into their own app and website, increasing ticket sales by 53% and eliminating paper waste
• Offer bookings for partner activations, providing a better attendee experience and reducing lengthy queues

Want to use Eventbrite to power your festival? Contact us by getting in touch here or calling 1800 820 172 (AU) or 0800 448 422 (NZ).

Automation reduces staff workloads and provides a better attendee experience

Wanderlust Festivals are large, multifaceted events offering around 200 activities a day across eight or more venues within the festival site. This initially presented a logistical nightmare, with activities varying in capacity and some requiring an upgraded ticket at extra cost. In their first year, Wanderlust needed a full time staff member just to manage scheduling for attendees.

Solution

Eventbrite’s seamless integration with Sched turned scheduling into a fully automated process for Wanderlust Festival. Within the Wanderlust app, attendees could log in to their Eventbrite account to create their own schedule and instantly upgrade their tickets for premium experiences and exclusive classes.

Brand activations could also be booked, giving partners an idea of what to expect and cutting down lengthy queues for their free activities, such as the popular Beauty Bar by Aveda. Best of all, this information is instantly synchronised with Eventbrite, so organisers knew exactly how many people would be at each class or activity. Organisers also established rules to prevent attendees from overbooking their schedules, reducing no-shows and providing accurate information when planning resources for classes and workshops.

“Before using Eventbrite and Sched, we had one person who was literally employed just to manage the scheduling and capacity for our classes! Now everything happens seamlessly. When people chose to upgrade their tickets to a dinner or aerial yoga class, they can add it to their schedule and purchase through Eventbrite in one transaction, without leaving our app or website. The integrations within Eventbrite are invaluable to us — they have removed months of work from our team so we can focus on providing a great event.”
Jacque Halstead, Head of Business Development and Programming
Wanderlust Australia & New Zealand

Powerful analytics provides ROI for organisers and sponsors

When seeking financial support and council approvals for large events, organisers need to show their event is providing value to their sponsors. Wanderlust organisers needed easy access to data and reporting to apply for funding and retain valuable brand sponsorships such as adidas and Aveda. When growing a brand in a new market, attendee data also fuels growth by aiding more efficient and effective marketing campaigns.

Solution

Using Eventbrite analytics allowed Wanderlust organisers to secure and retain local funding by providing essential geographic data to show where their attendees are travelling from. Just 10% of attendees live in the local areas of the festivals, with the majority bringing tourism spend into town.

Knowing their attendees also helped focus their advertising and communication efforts. For example, organisers know most last minute sales for the Sunshine Coast event come from Brisbane and advertised accordingly. They also used attendee data to create lookalike audiences to drive effective Facebook promotions.

“Eventbrite reporting allows us to see a breakdown of our audience via city, state, and country — and it’s really simple to export — which is essential when we’re applying for funding. We ask custom demographic questions at ticket checkout to learn more about our audience for our festival and 108 events too. This pre-event information is invaluable when securing partnerships and generating PR for our events”.
Jacque Halstead, Head of Business Development and Programming
Wanderlust Australia & New Zealand

Simple, no-fuss checkout solution drives ticket sales

Wanderlust offered tickets to their festival events over six tiers, encouraging attendees to register early to take advantage of discounted pricing. For their first event, they didn’t advertise the ticket prices on their website, because they needed to update this manually via WordPress. This became confusing and frustrating for attendees who wanted to know pricing before starting the registration process.

Solution

As Eventbrite ticketing is embedded within the Wanderlust website, the prices are automatically shown depending on what tier is available. When Tier A sells out, Tier B goes on sale immediately, with no manual work or daily monitoring required. Attendees saw all Eventbrite information within the Wanderlust website or app, so they always had up to date information without leaving the site. As well as providing a positive customer experience for attendees, this reduction in barriers to purchase converts 4x more sales than the industry average.

“Our festival has multiple ticket types and attendees can buy a single or multi-day pass, or a music-only ticket. We also use tiered pricing to stagger ticket releases. We never used to include pricing on our website, because some tiers sell out within hours and we needed to update the website every time a new tier went on sale or a day sold out. Now we don’t have to worry because everything pulls straight from Eventbrite. This is my absolute favourite feature! It sounds so simple, but it has a big impact on us and our ticket sales increased by 53% in our second year.”
Jacque Halstead, Head of Business Development and Programming
Wanderlust Australia & New Zealand

Communication tools to keep attendees engaged

Wanderlust events work towards more than providing a one-off experience, wanting to ensure participants feel part of the global Wanderlust community. To communicate easily to attendees, they needed simple solutions to provide instant notifications during events, as well as tools to help build their community all year round.

Solution

Wanderlust used MailChimp to communicate to their attendees weekly, using Eventbrite data to segment their audience and send targeted messaging to optimise engagement. Emails sent within a week of their last event achieved an average pre-sale of 200 tickets while keeping attendee retention high — more than half of all festival attendees are repeat customers. Their regular eDMs see an average conversion rate of 35%.

They also have a strong global social media presence on Facebook and when an attendee purchases a ticket via Eventbrite, they are automatically invited to join the Facebook event, providing organisers with another channel to engage attendees.

For communication during the event, the Wanderlust app integrates the Eventbrite login, allowing attendees to instantly access their ticket information and event schedule, alongside event app features such as instant notifications, site maps, and waitlists for popular activities.

“Our event app uses Eventbrite’s information and the Sched integration, all branded within the Wanderlust app. Sustainability is one of our core values, and six months ago we were able to go paperless as an event — doing away with the waste of printed maps and schedules. It also ensures that everyone always has their ticket and can receive up to the minute information in an instant”.
Jacque Halstead, Head of Business Development and Programming
Wanderlust Australia & New Zealand

Key Results

1. Eventbrite’s real-time analytics and robust reporting solution gave Wanderlust all the data they need at their fingertips to increase revenue and sustain attendance growth of more than 20% YoY. Attendee data from ticket purchasing and activity check-ins helps Wanderlust secure funding and sponsorships, create effective marketing campaigns, and identify the most popular activities for ticket upgrades.
2. With Eventbrite’s industry-leading ticketing platform and powerful extensions such as Sched, MailChimp, Facebook, SurveyMonkey, and WordPress providing seamless automation, Wanderlust drastically reduced operational costs and administrative workload for their events.
3. More than half of all festival attendees have attended a previous event and targeted eDMs drove more than $80,000 worth of pre-sale tickets within a week of their festival events.
4. With Eventbrite’s mobile ticketing fully integrated into their event app, Wanderlust achieved their goal of becoming a paperless event — eliminating waste from site maps and attendee schedules.

Want to use Eventbrite to power your festival? Contact us by getting in touch here or calling 1800 820 172 (AU) or 0800 448 422 (NZ).