Ukrainian Fest Lanark — mobile event guide — Marketing MIX case

The brief

Ukrainian Fest in Lanark County, Ontario is an annual cultural festival celebrating Ukrainian heritage in the diaspora community west of Ottawa. The festival had grown to a scale where paper maps and a Facebook event page weren't enough — attendees were getting lost between stages, missing scheduled performances, and overwhelming the volunteer information booth with the same handful of questions.

We were asked to build a mobile web app guide for the 2024 festival edition, deployed on a tight timeline.

What we did

Mobile-first PWA, no app store

Progressive Web App accessible by short URL on any phone. No App Store / Play Store install required — a critical decision for an event audience that includes visitors from out of country with carrier-locked phones and limited app-install patience.

Schedule and stage map

Live schedule updating from the festival's internal calendar. Stage map showing performance times by stage, performer bios, and music samples where licensing permitted.

Vendor and food map

Geo-located markers for all vendors and food stations, with menus, prices, dietary information (vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, kosher/halal markers where applicable), and live "busy now" indicators contributed by volunteers.

Offline-capable

Service worker caching of schedule and map data — critical because cellular coverage at the festival grounds is unreliable. Visitors who loaded the guide before walking in had full functionality even with no signal.

Bilingual EN/UK

Proper hreflang, locale-aware content, language toggle in the navigation. Performers' names in Ukrainian as the canonical form with English transliteration for non-Ukrainian-speaking visitors.

Volunteer support pages

Dedicated pages for volunteer info, emergency contacts, lost-and-found, and the standard "where are the washrooms" content that drove most of the info-booth question volume.

What we learned

PWAs for events outperform native apps almost every time. The barrier to install a native app for a one-weekend event is too high; the conversion difference between "scan QR, open URL" and "scan QR, visit App Store, search, install, open" is a factor of five or more in our measurement. The other lesson: offline capability is non-negotiable for outdoor events where cellular coverage is unreliable.

For other event and tourism work: /development-of-corporate-websites. For the social-amplification side: /smm-promotion.

Project lead: Marketing MIX. Client: Ukrainian Fest Lanark County. Year: 2024.