Festival app with real-time voting support

I have organized festivals where I want to incorporate real-time voting by people actually attending the event – e.g., a People’s Choice award of products being exhibited. While many event networking apps (e.g., Whova) allow polling there is no easy way to limit voting to people physically in attendance at the event. Some exhibitors have stuffed the ballot box by getting people who are not at the event to download the app and vote for them.

Geofencing is one way to do this, another is to limit voting to a list of known attendees, but this requires close integration with a ticketing app. Whova does this (poorly) via the Eventbrite API, and it’s a challenge to sync ticket sales through the eventbrite app with onsite ticket sales where people don’t give up their email addresses. Maybe there is a more seamless way to do this using the Shopify pack?

Eventually, this capability would end up as one aspect of a packaged “festival app” which is a different beast from an event networking app because most of the people who attend a festival are not interested in networking. I could see using other Coda packs for tacking festival management tasks.

For the immediate future I am thinking of small festivals 2-3 day festivals with around 1-2500 attendees, fewer than 200 exhibitors, and fewer than 100 speakers/performers with maybe 3-10 admins.

If anyone is interested in collaborating on this in Coda please let me know.

Hi @Clay_Gordon,

This made me think of an idea @Paul_Danyliuk had posted dealing with attendance in class and how to keep people from cheating. You could create a list of codes, maybe 6 digit numbers, then pass out slips of paper to each attendee, if the code isn’t contained in that list, the vote doesn’t count. If you print them up like business cards, you could have a particular company sponsor, and pay, for the printing as well as include other info, ad or otherwise.

Thanks for tagging me @BenLee,

I’m interested, but I’ve been overworked for a few months already, and physically cannot take on another client to build a Coda solution for. Maybe in March the earliest.