Best Kept Secret is one of the flagship festivals of the Dutch summer season. Every edition brings together around a hundred artists across multiple stages and several days, with a programme that continues to evolve right up until the festival begins.
Behind that lineup lies a huge amount of operational data: artist names, biographies, genres, performance times, and stage information. All of this information must not only be accurate, but also published at exactly the right moment on both the festival website and the mobile app.
For an event like Best Kept Secret, this isn't a secondary concern, the lineup is the product. Any errors or delays in communicating it are immediately noticed by festivalgoers.
What was no longer working
Managing artists and schedules had become unnecessarily complicated.
There was no simple way to centrally manage artists, genres, and performances while linking them to stages and time slots.
On top of that, the festival app powered by Appmiral required its own separate data entry process. Every artist had to be entered twice: once for the website and once for the app.
This duplicated work consumed valuable time and inevitably introduced the risk of inconsistencies. If a performance time was updated in one system but not the other, visitors received conflicting information.
Best Kept Secret needed a single source of truth for its programme, a platform that could power both the website and the mobile app from the same data instead of relying on two separate systems to stay synchronized.
What Inventis built
Inventis developed Architect Festival, an extension of our open-source Architect CMS, specifically designed around the way festivals operate.
Artist management built for festival programmers
The editorial team at Best Kept Secret can create and manage artist profiles, including promotional content such as biographies and social media links.
Each artist can be linked to one or more genres, allowing the website to recommend related artists to visitors automatically.
Artists can also be connected to one or more performances, each with its own day, stage, start time, and end time.
Lineup and timetable
The team has complete control over which information becomes visible and when.
Visitors can browse the lineup alphabetically by day or switch to a timetable view with a printable schedule for those who prefer carrying a paper timetable while moving between stages.
Favourite artists and a personal lineup
Visitors can mark artists as favourites and build a personalized festival schedule directly on the website.
That personal lineup can then be shared via WhatsApp or social media, making it easy to coordinate plans with friends before and during the festival.
Newsletter integration with Brevo
Visitors who subscribe to the newsletter through the website are automatically added to the mailing list in Brevo via an API integration.
One data source for both the website and the festival app
A robust API integration with Appmiral automatically synchronizes artists, stages, and festival data with the festival app's content management system in real time.
--> Duplicate data entry has been completely eliminated.
The result
Best Kept Secret manages around one hundred artists every year.
Before Architect Festival, every artist had to be entered separately for both the website and the festival app, creating a recurring administrative burden. For one staff member, preparing all artist information for the app could take up to a full week every festival edition.
Thanks to the Appmiral API integration, that information now flows automatically and in real time from the website to the festival app. The manual checking and duplicate data entry have disappeared, while the risk of conflicting information between the website and the app has been dramatically reduced.
Today, Best Kept Secret manages its entire programme from one centralized platform.
What used to require duplicate work across two systems has become a single workflow that keeps every channel synchronized automatically. The team can focus on curating the festival programme instead of repeatedly entering the same information.
Inventis has proven to be the ideal partner for developing the new Best Kept Secret website. You immediately notice that their dedicated CMS, built on years of experience with other festivals, is a pleasure to work with and already includes a wealth of useful functionality. On top of that, our visual identity has been perfectly translated into a mobile-first experience, while the integration with our festival app works flawlessly behind the scenes. In short, Inventis comes highly recommended for any festival or event organization.
What could a festival CMS like Architect Festival do for your event?
A festival CMS such as Architect Festival brings lineup management, festival app synchronization, and publishing workflows together in a single platform.
If your organization currently maintains separate systems for your website and mobile app, this type of integration can eliminate duplicate data entry entirely.