You already know what an event chatbot is and you understand why more and more promoters are using one. Now comes the practical part: how to set one up for your next festival without it taking weeks or requiring a technical team.
This guide is for promoters who have a festival on their hands and need to automate part of their attendee support without sacrificing quality. No theory. Concrete steps, with real examples and a checklist you can apply starting today.
The 7 steps at a glance:
Estimated time: an afternoon if you have the information organised. 2-3 weeks if you’re starting from scratch.
The most common objection we hear from promoters is: “Sounds good, but I don’t have time to set up another tool.” That’s understandable. You’re managing artists, production, sponsors, ticket sales — and someone is suggesting you also build a chatbot.
The reality is that setting up a chatbot today looks nothing like it did three years ago. You don’t need to code, you don’t need to design complex conversation flows, and you don’t need a technical team. With modern platforms, you can have a working chatbot in an afternoon if your event information is already organised. If it isn’t, this process will help you get it in order — which is worth doing on its own.
How is that possible? Because modern AI chatbots learn directly from documents. You upload a PDF with your festival’s information (schedules, rules, map, FAQs, artists, services) and the chatbot already knows how to answer. No decision trees. No programming rules. Upload the document, test, and launch.
That said, doing it well requires some preparation. Not much, but the right kind. That’s what we’ll go through step by step.
One more thing to be clear on: a chatbot doesn’t replace your team. What it does is filter out the noise so your team can spend their time on what actually matters. If your team currently answers “what time do doors open?” or “can I bring a camping chair?” twenty times a day, those queries can be handled by a chatbot. Complex queries will still reach your team — but fewer of them, and better filtered.
Open your Instagram inbox, your email, the WhatsApp messages from last year. If you use a CRM for events, check your conversation history. If you don’t have any of that, ask whoever on your team manages social media or support.
What do people ask again and again?
Make a list. Literally: open a Google Doc and start writing things down. At most festivals, the 20 most frequent queries account for between 60% and 80% of everything you get asked.
You have your list of 20 queries. Now it’s time to prepare the answers.
You don’t need to write in any technical format or use complicated language. Write the way you’d respond to someone on WhatsApp. Clear, direct, with exactly the information they need.
Create a document (Google Doc, Word, PDF) with all your festival information, structured by section:
General information:
Tickets:
Festival services:
Accessibility:
Lineup schedules:
FAQs from previous editions:
This document will be your chatbot’s “memory.” The more complete it is, the better it answers.
If your festival is family-friendly, use a warm and reassuring tone. If it’s an electronic music festival, you can be more casual. If your audience is international, prepare the content in English too (or in whatever languages you get the most queries in).
Not all channels work equally well for every festival. It depends on where your audience is and when they tend to ask questions.
Your website is where people look for information before buying a ticket. If someone searches “festival X schedule”, they land on your site. If they have a question and find a chatbot that answers instantly, the likelihood of them buying goes up.
An AI chatbot on your website covers everyone who arrives via organic search, ads or social media. It’s the foundation.
For English-speaking audiences, WhatsApp is increasingly common, especially among under-35s. You can add a button on your website that opens WhatsApp with the chatbot, or share the number across your social channels.
Advantage: conversations are saved. If someone asked a question a week ago, they can reopen the chat and find the answer.
If your festival is in the urban, electronic or indie space, and your audience is between 18 and 30, Instagram is where you’ll receive the majority of queries. Integrate the chatbot directly into your DMs.
If your festival has its own app (because it’s large, multi-day, with a dynamic lineup), integrate the chatbot there. But if you don’t have an app, don’t build one just for the chatbot. It’s not worth it.
Once you’ve got it running smoothly, expand to other channels if it makes sense.
This is where things get technical. Less than it sounds, though.
There are two types of chatbots: those based on flows (decision trees: “if someone asks A, respond B”) and those based on AI (they understand natural language and respond from a knowledge base).
For a festival, what works best is an AI chatbot that can interpret questions in natural language. Because nobody writes “door opening schedule.” People write “what time do you open tomorrow” or “when does it kick off.”
Modern platforms like Nevent let you upload the document you prepared in Step 2 (the PDF or Word file with all your festival information) and the chatbot learns from it. You don’t need to programme anything.
The process:
This can be ready in a day. Literally.
There are queries the chatbot shouldn’t handle alone. Set up triggers so that when it detects certain words or topics, it passes the conversation to your team:
On platforms integrated with a CRM, these escalations automatically generate a ticket with the conversation context. Your team receives the query with the full history — they don’t start from zero.
The chatbot speaks on behalf of your festival. Define whether the tone is formal, friendly or relaxed. Most festivals work well with a tone that’s warm but professional:
❌ “We wish to inform you that the door opening time is 18:00 hours.” ✅ “Doors open at 6pm. See you there!”
Some chatbots let you configure this in the settings. If not, adjust it in the base document you upload.
One week before the event, the chatbot should be up and running. But don’t launch it to the public yet.
Get your team together (or at least 3–4 people who know the festival well) and have them talk to the chatbot as if they were attendees. Ask everything:
Note down everything that fails or sounds off.
Go through the testing conversations. What didn’t work?
Test again.
If you have time, activate the chatbot on your website one week before the event. Don’t announce it on social media — only people who visit your site will see it.
Monitor the conversations. What are they asking? Is the chatbot answering well? Make adjustments as you go.
The day has arrived. Activate the chatbot across all the channels you chose (website, WhatsApp, Instagram).
Post on social media that you have a chatbot available 24/7 for queries. Put the link in your Instagram bio, in Stories, in pinned posts.
Example copy for social media: “Questions about schedules, access or services at the festival? Our chatbot answers instantly, 24/7. Ask it anything you need 👇 [Link to chat]“
The first day of the festival is when you’ll receive the most queries. Monitor the chatbot every few hours:
If you spot something, fix it quickly. The advantage of AI chatbots is that you can update the knowledge base on the fly and changes take effect in minutes.
Even though the chatbot handles 70% of queries, your team needs to be available for what gets escalated. Especially on day one.
The festival is over. Now it’s time to review what worked and what didn’t.
The document you used to train the chatbot, with all the adjustments you made during the event — save it with the date. That’s the foundation for the next edition.
Next year you’ll only need to update dates, schedules and the lineup. 80% of the content is already there.
Mistake 1: Trying to automate everything from day one Start with the 10 most frequent queries. Add more progressively based on what you see in real conversations.
Mistake 2: Not updating the content during the event If a set time changes but the chatbot is still giving the old answer, you lose trust. Use platforms that let you update the knowledge base in real time.
Mistake 3: Not reviewing the real conversations The chatbot improves when you analyse what attendees actually ask. Spend 15 minutes a day during the event reviewing conversations and adjusting responses.
Step 1: Identify frequent queries
Step 2: Prepare content
Step 3: Choose channels
Step 4: Configure chatbot
Step 5: Test before the event
Step 6: Launch and monitor
Step 7: Analyse and optimise
The hard part of implementing a chatbot isn’t technical. It’s having your festival information clearly laid out and knowing which queries come up again and again.
If you have that, configuring a chatbot is a matter of days. If you don’t, you’ll use this process to pull all your event information into one place. That’s worth doing even if you never use a chatbot.
Tools like Nevent make the setup easier because you don’t need to know how to code or design complex flows. You upload a document, train the model and test. But the key isn’t the tool. It’s knowing your audience and understanding what they need to know before, during and after your festival.
Is that information already clear in your head? Then you’re ready to build your chatbot.
A basic implementation can be ready in 2-3 weeks. The first week is dedicated to identifying frequent queries and preparing content. The second to configuring and testing the chatbot. One week before the event you should have everything running to test with your team.
It depends on where your audience is. For urban and electronic music festivals, Instagram works very well. For family festivals or broader audiences, WhatsApp. The website is essential in all cases because it covers those searching for information on Google. Ideally, start with web + the channel where you already have an active community.
No, and it shouldn't. A well-implemented chatbot answers 60-80% of repetitive queries (schedules, access, prohibitions). Your team handles complex queries, special situations, and cases requiring human judgment. The goal is not to eliminate people, but to free up their time to better attend to what really matters.
No. Modern platforms like Nevent allow you to train the chatbot by uploading documents (PDF, Word) with your event information. You don't need to write code or configure complicated flows. If you can prepare a document with FAQs and your festival info, you can set up a chatbot.
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