Goodwood Motorsport Case Study

Putting the new Goodwood Motorsport app into top gear

Ever since Goodwood House was first built in the 1600s the Goodwood Estate has played host to a variety of thrilling events. In keeping with a long tradition of innovation, 21st century Goodwood also has bold digital ambitions. In 2018 Goodwood launched a dedicated motorsport app in time for the 25th anniversary of its Festival of Speed, an annual celebration of the motor car that takes place over four days each summer. The new app included Crowd Connected’s Colocator technology.

Meeting the Business Need

Goodwood’s Festival of Speed has become a must-attend event for car fans from around the world. In the absence of a regular British Motor Show, it is now an annual fixture for all the big car manufacturers, eager to show off their latest models to the public.

But the stands are just one element, if an important one. The growth of the event – which has expanded to include motorbike, rally car and even aviation components – means its sheer size and scale attracts a wide variety of visitors, numbering tens of thousands each day.

The success of the Festival of Speed, together with Goodwood’s other annual motorsport events, the Revival and the Members Meeting, mean there is a constant challenge in delivering the best visitor experience, every time.

It was recognised that if the visitor experience could be managed in real time this could benefit visitors by:

• Enhancing communications – for example by delivering timely information and recommendations
• Reducing lines and pinch-points around the site
• Ensuring people better found their way around, including to out-of-the-way areas
• Running a safer event overall

Goodwood also wanted to optimise visitor journeys from a business perspective – for example, driving footfall to certain locations or load balancing facility utilisation.

Critically, there was also a business requirement to measure footfall and dwell times. This included reporting on visits to manufacturer stands or for evaluating how the overall site layout might be improved.

The Solution

Goodwood’s digital team commissioned leading digital solutions experts Pulselive (a sister company to Hawk-Eye, best known for adjudicating line calls in tennis, cricket and soccer), to deliver a best-in-class mobile app experience, with the express aim of improving the real-time customer experience.

Designed to be “a must-have for the thousands of fans attending any of Goodwood’s three major motorsport events”, the app included Crowd Connected’s Colocator location tracking technology, embedded via a simple code plug-in.

Through a careful curation of features – such as interactive maps, custom itinerary builder and automated notifications – the app effectively delivered a personalised digital concierge-in-your-pocket service for visitors. That gave rise to excellent download rates and impressive levels of app utilisation.

The success resulted in a rich stream of location data from mobile phones running the app. XXXXXXXX updates were received and processed in the cloud by Colocator over the four-day Festival of Speed alone.

These raw location updates were transformed into data visualisation views accessible by the Goodwood team via the Colocator web console. This provided real-time monitoring of crowd movement via configurable heatmaps and customisable dashboards. Reliable footfall metrics for any area – such as visits and dwell times – were provided, enabling visitor traffic patterns to be evaluated for any location around the festival grounds.

The same data was also used to build location-based audience segments for precision targeted push notifications, a key element of Goodwood’s visitor communications strategy.

With access to the full suite of Colocator’s features, multiple groups within Goodwood management benefitted from the Colocator location tracking solution – before, during and after each event.

The digital comms team were able to use Colocator’s mobile customer engagement module to deliver highly targeted push notifications to app users both on and off site, specifically designed to enhance the individual visitor experience. Messages could be composed ahead of time and scheduled to trigger according to specific location/time rules.

These timely notifications included messages that:

• linked to relevant in-app content to advertise festival highlights
• promoted commercial partner showcases or specific facilities
• were practical recommendations (for example, mark the location of your car in the car park).

Where messages recommend a visit to a certain location, Colocator enables the effectiveness of the message to be determined. This impact analysis measures how mobile push notifications change real-world customer behaviour. For example, a message promoting a chance to meet F1 drivers Jenson Button and Mark Webber at Goodwood’s Festival of Speed delivered a 16% uplift in the number attending.

Goodwood’s operations team used Colocator’s visual tools for enhanced real-time situational awareness of visitors’ movement around the entire site. Heatmaps showed relative crowd densities for any area – enabling quick assessment of how busy any element of the festival was at any time. The team also created custom dashboards in the Colocator web console which provided real-time quantitative read-outs.

Post-event, Goodwood’s commercial team used Colocator’s footfall analytics data and associated tools to enhance the reporting provided to commercial partners. Almost 80 sponsor locations were drawn up on the intuitive mapping interface. For each of these locations key performance metrics such as visits, repeat visits, dwell times and conversion rates – all segmented by time of day – were output.

Our new mobile app has really helped people to see and do the things they want when attending one of our events. Integrating Crowd Connected’s ground-breaking technology has been a key part of that success. Not only has their Colocator software been instrumental in helping us deliver our vision – by enhancing the visitor experience and measuring how people journey around the site – but Crowd Connected has provided fantastic support to the Goodwood team.

Andrew Fellingham – Goodwood’s Head of Digital