How Lightopia Festival succeeded amid the Coronavirus pandemic

With Manchester, England under Tier 3 restrictions at the time, Lightopia Festival, and it’s partners, delivered the COVID-secure month long festive spectacular the city was crying out for.

Lightopia Festival is an award-winning family friendly night time spectacular of light, lanterns, immersive installations and interactive exhibitions and over previous years has grown into a much loved part of Manchester’s festive calendar. The 2020 edition of the event (3rd December 2020 - 4th January 2021) at Manchester’s Heaton Park was the most ambitious to date. 

With the Coronavirus pandemic all but bringing the events industry to a stand still, and Manchester under Tier 3 COVID restrictions (the highest level of restrictions across the country at the time), the event organisers and partners were faced with a significant challenge to deliver the event series for the city.

Partnering with ourselves, Proud Events (production) and Mustard Media (marketing), the organisers tackled the challenge head on resulting in a huge success, bringing the Manchester public a 31 day long safe open air festive treat for the whole family at a time when it was needed the most.

Utilising COVID-secure Event Genius features including egTicketing Timed Entry (tickets valid only during specific time slots), mobile tickets, egAccess multi-gate access control and dynamic real time reporting, event organisers were able to stagger entry times and mitigate overcrowding risk, promote social distancing, reduce fan-staff contact and ensure attendees were managed safely at all points of ingress - whilst scanning over 141,000 tickets during the course of the month long pop-up event. 

Lightopia tasked Manchester based strategic marketing consultancy Mustard Media to formulate and deploy the marketing campaign. Using their Roadmap and Launch Hack products they strategised a campaign to position the event as the go-to festive activity for family and friends during Christmas time in the North. With an initial target of 15,000 ticket sales during launch week (compared to 1200 the previous year), a successful end-to-end marketing campaign saw over 124,000 hits during the onsale day with a robust and stable Event Genius checkout page returning 18,400 ticket sales on day one and 31,000 during the launch week, with an impressive conversion rate of 15%.

Across the event site, sanitation points were installed at regular intervals and pedestrian barriers highlighted walking routes and directions improving audience flow and creating a safe event space for attendees.  

The festival was a huge success on all counts and is a great example of how events and festivals can succeed, even under the strictest of restrictions, whilst mitigating risk for fans and staff to create a safer environment for all.

If you’d like to speak to us about your next event, how you plan to reduce the risks for your fans and staff and want to know more about how Event Genius can help you achieve those goals, get in touch today, we’d love to hear from you! 

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