Executive Summary

Viva Las Vegas Rockabilly Weekend partnered with Whova in 2021 for their 24th annual event. The four-day-long event occurred in eight different venues for almost 24 hour days. Event-goers used the event app created through Whova’s all-in-one event platform to streamline how they interacted during the in-person event, and organizers used it to simplify how the event’s agenda was shared, manage concurrent content, and help attendees connect with each other. These factors made the rockabilly event more accessible to the event’s various communities than ever before.

Interview with the Organizers

About Viva Las Vegas Rockabilly Weekend

The Viva Las Vegas Rockabilly Weekend is an annual music festival, usually held in April. After the live event was delayed in 2020 due to COVID-19, it was successfully rescheduled for its 24th consecutive year in September, making it the longest-running music festival in Las Vegas. 

Partnering with Whova led to a successful event for attendees, organizers, and event sponsors. Over 2,000 attendees downloaded the Whova app to easily navigate the event and find performances they were looking for. Whova allowed attendees to meet up with others with similar interests, share hundreds of photos, and learn more about the event’s sponsors. 

Challenges

Organizers were faced with finding a way to safely hold the live event while keeping it as fun and interactive as previous years. With Whova, the organizers were able to address concerns such as:

• Holding a safe event in person

Organizers were tasked with finding a safe way to host a live, primarily indoor event during COVID. This was a challenging task, requiring activities to be held in multiple locations to avoid overcrowding.

• Creating an organized schedule

Several artists performed at the event in various locations, with music happening nearly 24 hours a day for four days. Additionally, other events were happening on-site, and vendors were present inside and outside the building. Organizers needed a way to create a responsive and customizable schedule for attendees.

• Connecting attendees

Organizers were challenged by finding a way to connect attendees at the live event. Since events took place over eight locations, they were spread across a Las Vegas casino and required a streamlined solution for connecting attendees to the program.

• Offering great ROI for vendors

With over 200 vendors participating at the four-day music festival, organizers were tasked with finding ways to provide value to vendors to throw a successful event for all involved. Since the event was significantly more spread out than in previous years, vendors needed a way to make their presence known and attract attendees.

• Increasing engagement

Organizers were looking for a way to encourage interaction between attendees and improve interaction with the event itself. Organizers were able to achieve this using the various gamification features of the Whova app.

Solutions

1) Organizers simplified concerns around throwing a safe event during COVID using agenda tracks and floor maps in the Whova app. Using the Whova floor map, attendees were able to easily navigate the event to find different vendors, meet-ups, and performances clearly marked through the app.

Whova’s multi-track agenda also helped concert goers manage the sprawling schedule by tracking events that interested them with colorful tags to search, separate, and add events to their in-app menu.

These features allowed event organizers to spread out activities over eight locations for safety while keeping attendees informed of what was happening. This meant that no event was overcrowded.

2) The Whova app gave organizers the tools they needed to create an organized schedule. When organizers changed the event schedule, this change would be immediately seen in the Whova app, allowing attendees to always view the most current version of the schedule.

The Whova app showed the time and location where each activity was occurring, and attendees could easily access this organized schedule through the Whova mobile app or the web, making it easy for organizers to maintain a complicated program with multiple concurrent sessions.

3) Attendees interacted with the event’s community in new ways through the Whova app. Attendees could use the Community Board, an in-app virtual bulletin board and forum to post discussion topics, join in on event-wide conversations, and even schedule meet-ups with other attendees through the Meet-up feature.

Attendees created many meet-ups during the four-day event, including those attending the event solo, the LGBT community, sober attendees, and more. This feature was powerful in helping solo attendees connect with their communities and provided a truly vital support network for sober attendees. Organizers loved these features because they allowed attendees, many of whom attend every year, to connect in new ways they never had before.

With Whova’s Meet-ups function, attendees could easily make new connections face to face

4) Using the Whova app, organizers offered a significant ROI to exhibitors and sponsors who could set up booth profiles in-app. Organizers gave extra ROI opportunities to sponsors by adding digital banners to pages throughout the Whova app for extra visibility. Over the four-day event, sponsors gained over 1.6 million impressions through the Whova app.

Exhibitors were also able to successfully retrieve leads with  Whova’s easy-to-use lead generation. They could collect lead information in several ways: attendees could enter their information into a exhibitor’s phone through the Whova app, have them scan their attendee QR code, or interact with the exhibitor profile in the Whova app by leaving a like or participating in a promotion.

Using virtual booths in the Whova app, attendees could quickly check out all vendors at the event, bringing some of the advantages of virtual events to an entirely in-person event. Attendees could still visit booths and talk to vendors in person, but they could also easily refer back to vendors through the app. Whova increased the ROI of vendors in these ways while promoting a mutually beneficial relationship.

5) Through gamification, organizers were able to encourage competition among attendees with the Whova Leaderboard Contest, where participants could compete to win prizes, encouraging attendees to participate in the Community Board section of the Whova app during the four-day event. These features lead attendees to further interact with each other and the event by participating in contests that brought out the competitiveness of event-goers.

The organizers further inspired attendees to engage with gamification through the Leaderboard Contest