Hull’s biggest arts event, Freedom Festival, has been reinvented as an interactive, year-round experience.
The festival won’t be going ahead this year, due to Covid-19, so instead it’s enlisted the help of Sauce to develop an app through which it can broadcast a programme of events.
“We needed an app that would be informative and have all the right times, dates and details, but it also needed to reflect what we are – intuitive, flexible and creative. That’s exactly what Sauce are too, so it has been a perfect partnership,” said Mikey Martins, Artistic Director and Joint Chief Executive of the Freedom Festival Arts Trust.
“The app will be a brilliant product for us to use over the festival weekend but it will also become a platform through which we can deliver performances throughout the year. We’ll be able to stage something whenever we feel it’s appropriate and we’ll be able to communicate with our audience any time we wish to.
“It is a real positive to have come out of this whole situation and, longer term, will prove to be a huge benefit for us.”
Sauce’s app will be used to host interactive performances not just over the festival weekend, but throughout the year. It will also be used to enhance audience engagement to inform and influence future festivals.
“The Freedom Festival team were already looking to develop an app to improve the overall experience and enable the festival to be more interactive,” explained Jim Wardlaw, Chief of Product and Design at Sauce.
“The project changed pretty rapidly as soon as we went into lockdown because everyone realised we had to plan for a very different festival.
“We redeveloped the app to be able to host performances and, working in partnership with Freedom, we were also able to provide consultation about the best ways to stream different types of events and performances.
“Freedom Festival will now be able to reach audiences via the app throughout the year, not just over one weekend. It will also allow Freedom to engage more with audiences in the long term. They’ll be able to use push notifications to get feedback and gauge opinion, which they’ll then be able to act on.”
