Music Festival Uses Ticket Ballot Game To Fight Poverty

Coming off the news of Future Entertainment’s innovative new ticketing scheme, where fans are rewarded for their festival promotion efforts with cash and prizes, a similar rewards system for a music festival has emerged in the United States.

Global Citizen Festival, an offshoot of the Global Poverty Project, gave its punters the chance to earn their tickets by participating in social media promotion. Unlike Future Entertainment though, the Global Citizen Festival is fighting for a much more noble cause, namely to end extreme poverty rather than to increase their profits.

As Mashable reporst, the aim of the innovative ticketing system was to ‘gamify’ the experience and to push the engagement of attendees past the regular point of simply purchasing a ticket.

In order to be eligible for tickets, concertgoers had to promote Global Poverty’s mission through social media – tweeting, posting on Facebook, sharing on tumbler and so on – which in turn earned them points.

Gaining three points by using social media platforms in turn automatically put prospective concert-goers into the ticketing ballot.

Hugh Evans, CEO of Global Poverty, explained the idea behind the innovative new program. “If we can use the power of the citizens who are attending it and their social networks and their friends’ and families’ social networks, we can urge governments to donate over $500 million to the world’s poor through this event, which is what we are on track to receive,” said Evans.

“If we did it through a regular ticketing scheme and just sold the tickets through Ticketmaster or something like that, that would be a relatively expensive ticket, and that would be the end of their engagement,” added the Global Poverty CEO.

The festival, which is to be held on September 29 in New York’s Central Park, will feature artists such as Neil Young and Crazy Horse, Foo Fighters, The Black Keys, Band of Horses and K’naan. Keeping with the digital theme, the event will also be streamed online via various media partners who are promoting the event, including YouTube, Vevo and MTV.

Looking past the obvious benefits for charity events, the greater implications of ‘gamifying’ the ticketing experience for more traditional festivals are worth considering.

The ‘gamified’ actions of the Global Poverty Music Festival earned the attention of more than 70,000 active users, with more than 3.5 million pageviews on the charity’s website, despite the fact that – legally – Global Citizen could only honour 27,000 pairs of tickets to the event.

As the Australian festival scene continues to grow, promoters are increasingly looking for ways to stay competitive. Being able to offer concertgoers rewards for their promotion is a clever way to increase ticket purchases as well as to build consumer relations that keep concertgoers returning year after year.

Although increasing profits is nowhere near as noble as increasing awareness of important global issues, ‘gamified’ ticketing schemes definitely give festivals a unique edge that may become more prominent in the future.

Perhaps it’s something the charity-based One Great Night On Earth music festival may even be looking at implementing, assuming the festival is still going ahead at all that is. It’s getting crunch time for the festival to sell its projected 10,000 tickets before its December showing, and the lineup hasn’t even been announced yet.