Madison House Presents, the team behind world-class music festival Electric Forest, is dedicated to “never do the same show twice.” Their fans know it too, walking away from the last festival day already talking about returning for the next magical year. Madison House Presents plans all year, working on refining, improving, and devising innovative new experiences for tens of thousands of attendees. It is their biggest event and sold out three years in a row. We caught up with Kayleigh…

You’ll find superheroes, villains, and anime characters at CaperCon. Or at least fans dressed up as their favorite characters from various games and shows! During the three-day convention in 2018, CaperCon brought together nearly 1,000 people while organized completely by volunteers. This annual pop culture event in Cape Breton is like a smaller, local version of ComiCon, the enormous multi-genre entertainment convention. Fans play games, attend panels, meet guest stars from shows, dress up as favorite characters and showcase artistic tributes…

Festivals are booming in Australia. During the six years Marcato has been in the music festival scene in Australia, we’ve seen an explosion of growth. More awesome festivals, artists, and fans. In the last year, Australia boasted 10 of the Top 100 grossing concerts in the world. Among those ten were two mega festivals: Byron Bay Bluesfest and CMC Rocks Queensland. Now we’re excited to announce our account executive Mark Sparrow will be in Australia this November as a delegate…

We all know it. It’s mid festival season. In retrospect, we should have published this blog before it even began but after the burnout starts to hit, you think of all the things you should have done before the season started. And in this case, it’s really not too late to take some of these into consideration before it’s all over. Although we’re not festival organizers here at Marcato, we work with and speak to hundreds of them every year.…

What is GDPR? The General Data Protection Act (GDPR) is a European regulation designed to protect the privacy of EU citizens and to give them control over their personal data. The GDPR not only applies to companies within the EU, it also extends to foreign companies that collect or process the personal information of European citizens. Penalties for non-compliance can surpass 20 million euros. Why is this important to Festivals and events? In the festival and event industry, we collect…

We talk to a lot of festival organizers on a weekly basis. Many of them are in search for a better solution than the generic systems they’re using, like spreadsheets or word documents. But one of the common questions we get asked: “Is your software solution only used by music festivals?” And our answer is always of course not! We’ve been working in the festival & live events space for a decade now. Over those 10 years, we’ve had the…

This blog was written by Brooklynn Boyer. Brooklynn is the Manager of Marketing and Customer Success at Socialpeeks. Ticket sales for your event can come from multiple sources. Your Instagram follower account may be high but you notice that very few sales actually come from your profile and/or followers. So, what’s up? Here’s a reassuring thought: Social selling is hard. The ratio of social selling professionals to those brands who aren’t selling on social media is 50/50. Meaning: You’re not losing…

Our support team has been supporting festivals and live events for a combined 20 years and we’ve helped over 1500 events successfully use and benefit from our product. With these statistics come an expertise that is unmatched by any other support team in the event management software industry. Basically, what we are trying to say is: we know what we are doing and we want to help you feel the same way when it comes to festival management software. The…

We’ve covered a lot of different topics in our blogs. From how to build a successful festival website, a guide for maintaining festival sponsorship relations through to how to manage your festival’s artists and talent. Now, we’re trying a different approach. At Marcato, we work with festivals and live events (over 300 of them!). In doing so, we’ve seen a lot. With the help of our amazing support team, we created a list of some common festival planning mistakes that…

Awhile back, we wrote a blog about the value of succession planning for your festival or live event, as well as its importance for building a festival legacy. We’d like to expand upon that concept even more and delve deeper into some other points to consider when handling the gruelling job of creating a risk management plan for your team. Even just talking about a risk management plan usually causes an immediate sense of resentment. Let’s be honest: It’s definitely not the…