FestQuestby SupNoke
Your crowd found
one corner of it.
You spent a year booking every stage and every vendor. Then everyone picked a spot, settled in, and the rest of your event quietly stayed a rumor. FestQuest is the nudge that gets them walking.
The problem, in one map
Close enough to walk. Far enough that nobody bothers.
Here is an invented festival, Crosstown Music Festival, across four real Roanoke venues. Every one of them is a comfortable walk from the others. Almost nobody would walk all four, because walking twelve minutes on a maybe is a bad trade, and half the crowd does not know the fourth venue exists.
- 1The Exchange
- 2Elmwood Park
- 3Dr Pepper Park
- 45 Points
Walking times between them
- The Exchange to 5 Points13 min
- The Exchange to Dr Pepper Park10 min
- 5 Points to Elmwood Park9 min
- 5 Points to Dr Pepper Park7 min
- The Exchange to Elmwood Park5 min
- Elmwood Park to Dr Pepper Park5 min
Two thirds of a mile, corner to corner.
How it works
Scan. Wander. Repeat.
You pick the stops
Three stops, eight, wherever your crowd is not going on its own. We print the signs.
They scan one
Their camera opens it. Nothing to download, no account until the first scan.
They go find the rest
The map shows what they have found and what is still out there.
Finishing enters them
Hit the threshold you set and they are in the drawing. Nobody has to staff a table.
The reward
One threshold. Nothing to hand out.
At Crosstown Music Festival it would be three of the four venues. Hit it and you are entered, right there on your phone. No swag bag, no redemption table, nobody standing at a booth for nine hours. Your sponsors supply the prizes and get their name on the thing everybody is chasing.
One scan and they are in
Their camera opens it, they sign in once, and they are playing. iPhone or Android, and the SupNoke app makes it smoother still.
Sponsors fund the prizes
They get their name on the thing everybody is chasing. You get the foot traffic, and the prize budget is theirs rather than yours.
A live map, not a paper one
Your crowd can see what they have found, and what they have not.
You find out who came
Most free events end with no idea who showed up. Players can opt in to hear from you, so you finish the day with a real audience, and the map of where they actually walked.
It has run
Piloted at FloydFest. Proven at West Station Block Party.
The pilot ran four days up a mountain at FloydFest: eight checkpoints, several hundred players and close to fifteen hundred check-ins, with the average player finding more than half the mountain. Then West Station Block Party ran it in a single Saturday on three stages, where four out of five players finished the whole thing. That one was set up in an afternoon, and it is the shape most events want.
Neither had any advertising behind it. Both were word of mouth and a printed sign.
What you actually get
You move the crowd. Then you find out what it did.
People go where they were not going
This is the part that is hard to buy any other way. Signage asks. A map informs. A quest gives somebody a reason to walk twelve minutes to the far venue and arrive pleased with themselves rather than resentful. The vendor at the quiet end gets real traffic, the stage nobody found gets an audience, and your event feels bigger than the corner each person happened to pick.
It also lasts past the gate. Unfinished quests pull people back the next day, and the ones who finished tell the ones who did not.
An audience you can actually reach
Most free events in this town end with nobody knowing who came. No gate, no tickets, no list, and next year you start from zero again. Players sign in to play, and the ones who opt in to hear from you become a list you own: people who demonstrably showed up and walked your event, not names bought by the thousand.
Opt in means opt in. Nobody is handed your way for signing in to a game, which is also why the list is worth having.
The dashboard is the quiet mega win
Every scan is a timestamped fact about where a real person stood. By Monday you know which venue drew, which got skipped, how far people walked, how many came back a second day, and where the drop-off happened.
Players who found each venue
This is the chart that pays for itself: 5 Points is the one nobody walked to.
How far they got
Hosts get their own login, scoped to their event. Figures are aggregated, and small counts are suppressed rather than shown, so a dashboard can never be used to follow one person around your festival.
What it takes
Negotiable, and often in kind.
Community causes we do for free, and we are glad to. Everyone else, we work out. We have taken trade more than once: passes, camping, hospitality, a booth. If it is worth something to you and it is worth something to us, that is usually a deal in one phone call. You are not buying a web page. You are buying the hour your crowd spends walking to the vendor who paid for a booth nobody found.
Engagement
A reason to cross the event instead of settling into one corner of it.
Analytics
Which stops drew, which got skipped, which hour went quiet, and how far people actually walked.
Your audience
Players who opt in to hear from you, which for a free event is usually the first list you have ever had.
Gamification, optionally
Tiers, prize draws and timed drops if you want them. A single threshold if you do not.