“We needed to change agenda items on the fly. The CrowdComms app gave us this flexibility.’
The Insomnia Gaming Festival has been running for 23 years and started as a LAN party. Although the festival has evolved and grown considerably, the action-packed LAN offering not only is the UK’s biggest but remains one of the most popular draws of the event. A LAN party, for those unaware, is where attendees are invited to bring their computers, access the LAN (local area network) provided by the event and play games together online. As Insomnia has grown in popularity over the years, gamers in their thousands are flocking to join in, creating a spectacle of over two thousand individuals plugged into their computers, playing and competing online while sitting together in an enormous conference hall.
The festival now incorporates an expo side, where brands, publishers and companies utilise the space to show off the latest tech and speak directly to their client base. Big stages have been introduced to allow for live competitions and demonstrations, as well as an interactive zone and cosplay – where delegates dress up as characters from films, books and, of course, video games.
Insomnia Gaming Festival is a decidedly community-first event. The organising team are constantly reaching out to their audience to find out what content they wish to interact with. They strive to provide opportunities for people to make connections and actively encourage sub-communities to come together.
Months of preparation and community-led research culminated in the adrenaline-fuelled 4-day event, held at the NEC in Birmingham in April 2022, which required a responsive and flexible event app to convey the wide range of activities and sessions available to attendees.
Supreme Flexibility Throughout the Event
The team behind Insomnia selected the CrowdComms event app as the ideal solution for communicating important information and updates to their attendees at key points before and during the event. The nature of gaming is fast-paced, and as such, agenda sessions and other components of the event needed to be updated and changed on the spot as competitions ended earlier or later than programmed.
Over the course of the event’s lifetime, the map has always played a central role and is under construction up until 2-days before the event begins. Not only was a physically printed map inflexible in the face of last-minute changes, but it also didn’t support the festival’s sustainability goals. The CrowdComms interactive map delivers from both the sustainability and adaptability angles, with the ability to respond to as many changes and updates as necessary with no printing needed! Pin-drops on the map can be linked to agenda sessions, sponsor pages and a wide range of other content to provide attendees with instant access to the information they are looking for.
‘We are always looking for ways to reduce waste and recycle. Having the CrowdComms app solves a big part of this problem.’
The CrowdComms’ Difference
This was the first in-person festival that Insomnia had organised post-pandemic and naturally, after a 2-year hiatus, there was a period of adjustment as everyone got back into the swing of things. The team appreciated the extra level of support that always comes as part of the deal when working with CrowdComms, and we were quickly able to get them up and running with their event app build. Whether there were solutions to be found or workarounds to be organised, even if they weren’t expressly related to our products, we were always on hand to ensure that our clients could deliver the event they had in their minds.
‘The CrowdComms support is amazing. You’re always quick to jump on and sort out any problems.
You’re all absolutely lovely people to work with.’
Thank you to Insomnia Gaming Festival for providing us with their feedback for this case study. If you’d like to find out more about their next event, please check out their website.
