A connected customer experience for a major arts festival

An event is more than the days it opens

The visitor experience starts with discovering the event and continues through booking, arrival and the questions that come afterwards. Artists and volunteers have their own journeys. The challenge is to make each part work together, with a small year-round team behind it.

Solharbor combines marketing delivery with the software supporting those journeys, from campaign content and ticket fulfilment to customer support and on-site sales.

The starting point

The festival is one of the largest juried fine art events in the United States. It runs for four days a year, but ticketing, artist applications, volunteer scheduling and visitor enquiries run for twelve months, handled by a small team and a large volunteer base. Each function had its own tool, and the gaps between them were filled by people.

What we built

Payment to ticket, automatically. Ticket purchases flow through Stripe. A webhook service acknowledges each payment in around 50 milliseconds, guarantees an order is only ever processed once, generates QR-coded PDF tickets and emails them to the buyer. Coupon codes track hotel partnership sales so the festival can see which partners drive attendance.

A phone line that answers. Visitors call the festival’s public number with the same questions: where is my ticket, can you resend it, what time does it open. An AI phone agent built on Twilio and OpenAI’s realtime voice models looks up the order, resends the ticket, answers the practical questions and can transfer callers to the office. Call summaries and outcomes are logged without storing transcripts.

Sales on the artist’s own phone. A native iOS and Android app lets exhibiting artists record sales through Square on their own devices rather than rented tablets. The same app carries their profile, event-mode information and community features.

Volunteers, scheduled. A volunteer sign-up application handles registration, waivers and shift selection, replacing a manual process that previously ran through email and spreadsheets.

Filling the event. We also produce the festival’s marketing operations: the website and artist portal, email campaigns, social calendar and television commercials generated from the festival’s own photo archive using AI video tools.

Operating it

We run these systems under an ongoing retainer, with releases timed around the event calendar and the application and ticketing seasons.