Creating the EE Glastonbury Festival App

The client 

EE is the UK’s biggest and fastest mobile network, boasting over 26 million customers. It has been an official sponsor of Glastonbury Festival for over ten years, delivering an informative and engaging app geared towards giving festivalgoers a ‘plan your festival app’ resource for their music-packed weekend. 

EE first approached us in 2011 to enhance the 2010 version of the Glastonbury Festival app. The network wanted to give attendees a ‘brand in the hand’ experience, adding enticing new features to make its content more shareable with people further afield than Worthy Farm. 

The brief

EE briefed us in to design a snazzier, more functional festival planning app that was just as engaging and useful offline as it would be when connected to 4G. The project set out three main goals. 

Event updates had to be carefully planned and executed to ensure that festivalgoers could access reliable, up-to-date information at all times. 

They also wanted to make sure that, as event sponsors, the Glastonbury Festival app captured the brand’s essence, design, tone of voice, and signposted towards other promotions on the ground, such as a festival map directing users to various mobile phone charging points. 

Finally, we were tasked with providing inspirational features to make the app more exciting for Glastonbury Festival fans at home. EE wanted the app to include event itinerary creation capabilities and a fantasy lineup feature, encouraging users to share their dream festival headliners list with friends. 

What we delivered

Glastonbury Festival is the largest greenfield festival in the world, with over 3,000 acts and nearly 100 stages, posing quite a feat for EE and Future Platforms to ensure we could deliver frictionless event services for music fans.

To ensure connectivity before, during and after the event, we had to incorporate vast amounts of data and features that provided a seamless, fun and helpful user experience into the festival app. We completely refined the UX and app design to give users more power and functionality for handling unprecedented page loads in a small geographical location. 

Our innovative design and creative digital solutions enabled EE to deliver an app that’s now considered a crucial part of the festival kit and a core part of the event. We achieved our mission of creating an experience that allowed festivalgoers to make the most of the festival app and ensure everyone found their way to an EE charging point and back to their tent.

Through testing, we learned that hosting EE’s Glastonbury Festival app data on Google Cloud would ensure that the platform could handle many data requests and scale functionality easily. We also installed an innovative caching mechanism in the app’s design that minimised data usage to make sure that anyone connected to the network could get the updates they needed quickly and still utilise the other app features offline.

We integrated signposts to BBC live streaming and televised event coverage, making it easy for people to watch and rewatch their favourite artists from their mobile. This feature, along with the fantasy festival lineup, delighted festivalgoers and non-attendees alike. Weeks after the event, we discovered that the number of downloads exceeded the number of tickets sold, proving that Future Platforms helped deliver a highly engaging ‘plan your festival app,’ as well as a ‘brand in the hand’ experience for EE. 

• Total number of downloads exceeded Festival attendees
• 264% uplift in active user sessions 
• Offline event guide capabilities 
• Delivering up-to-date, shareable content