TET FESTIVAL

BACKGROUND

For over 30 years, UVSA SoCal has hosted a Lunar New Year festival, known as the “Tet Festival.” The event has attracted over 100,000 attendees from across the nation and donated over $1.5 million back to the community.

For this event, I served as the festival marketing director as well as oversaw the event website.

In addition to working on the website, my team and I also worked on developing the branding identity, conducting market research, and campaigns for traditional press (interviews, TV, radio, newspapers, billboards, storefronts) and digital (social media, email marketing, online ads).

CHALLENGE

For this case study, I will be focusing on the development of the event website over the course of my time on the marketing team.

Our website for Tet Festival had to accomplish the following:

1. Provide information in English and Vietnamese languages for prospective vendors and sponsors to complete the application process, 5 months prior to the event

2. Provide information for contestants and performers to apply for various festival programs, such as the pageant, children’s contests, talent competitions, community performances, concerts, etc

3. Provide visitor information 1 month prior to the event, such as ticket sales, program schedule, vendors list and map, parking and directions, special promotions, etc

Information ARCHITECTURE

One of the hardest things about building the festival website was figuring out how to present information to 2 different sets of users over 2 phases of festival planning.

In Phase 1 (September to December), the website would typically contain content catered towards users who participated in the festival for up to 1 month before the event.

In Phase 2 (January to February), the website would get updated to reflect information catered towards users who were the general public/festival attendees.

USER TESTING

Tet Festival planning is a fast-moving, chaotic operation. With roughly 4 months dedicated to recruiting vendors, sponsors, performers, and 1-2 months after the holidays to sell tickets and promote the event, the marketing team was nearly always testing on live users and iterating as we went.

Sometimes, we would not receive the program schedule or finalized map and vendors list until a few days leading up to the festival, due to changes on the logistics end. This left us little time to test use cases on pages that accrued the highest amount of visitor traffic (e.g. visitor information, program schedule, map, vendors), and if there were changes we couldn’t fix in time, it would be a lesson learned for the following year’s festival.

Our most critical areas for improvement

As a team, some of our greatest challenges were:

1. Visibility of system status

Being able to communicate to our audience when our website was reflecting outdated information or lacking new information.

Issue

Not all teams were ready by Phase 2. For example, the Entertainment team may have not yet finalized the performance schedule or performers line-up, or the Vendors and Operations teams haven’t finalized the vendors and map layout of the festival.

Without sufficient or updated information for our visitors, oftentimes the website suffered in being able to provide the most up-to-date information to visitors on time.

This unfortunately led to the website typically being updated last, meanwhile the most up-to-date information would be on social media first (it was faster for our team to post small updates and graphics to social media than to build it out on the website, test user flows, etc).

This was a high point of frustration, because the website was supposed to be our official, most reliable source of information… a matter that would cause more confusion for our audiences who did not use or follow our social media, or tuned into the radio & TV stations we were on, or read newspapers and articles we were featured in, etc.

Recommendations

• Populate the lacking areas with general information learned from previous years or, if possible, indicate to users when the pages will be updated

• Plan and prepare pages waiting for critical information (e.g. schedule) earlier so that the team does not have to spend crucial time at the end building out pages

• Re-direct users to our social media channels where our posts tended to reflect updates instantly

• Send emails to subscribers to notify when the website has been updated with pertinent information

• Communicate with our users through customer support (hotline and emails), and get controlled information out faster when on-air with radio, TV, and press

2. Consistency and standards

Not being able to organize and distinguish between information catered to festival participants vs. visitors, which often fell under the same labels (e.g. Contests, Vendors).

Issue

If teams fell behind on schedule, and the marketing team could not update the website in time, there would be a mix of Phase 1 and Phase 2 information on the website at the same time. Hiding pages was not an option because the information was still relevant for existing Phase 1 users.

In Phase 1, if a user visited the website and clicked on “Contests” or “Vendors,” the user would only see information about contest rules, booth prices, how to apply, etc. By January, users are now visitors and will expect to learn more about attractions, etc, but instead see either only Phase 1 information or an uninformative parent page full of general information (while the Phase 1 information gets moved to a sub-page).

Recommendations

• Enforce earlier deadlines for other teams

• If teams inevitably cannot meet deadlines, the marketing team should prepare general information pages earlier, and based them on previous years to populate for Phase 2

• If critical information such as program schedule and vendors are falling extremely behind schedule, be honest with users and announce that the information will be available (e.g. by the morning of the event, etc) even though we did not meet our goal of preparing our visitors with information well-beforehand

3. How to present the most pertinent information to both English and Vietnamese readers without compromising on design

In the first few years, we experimented with:

• 2013: Providing both languages on the same page, but visually, it negatively impacted readability due to the sheer size of information

• 2014: Integrating a plugin that automatically translated a webpage from English to Vietnamese, but during live testing, our users reported that the translations were oftentimes incorrectly worded… this affected our credibility

• 2015: Creating two websites (one in English, one in Vietnamese), but we did not have enough manpower to design, translate content with quality assurance, and consistently update both sites

After 2015, efforts to provide bilingual services on our website ceased as the marketing team could not fully meet the necessary measures required.

Recommendations

As a compromise, we provided the most important pieces of information to our festival logistics in multiple languages, such as vendor applications that were available for download, or we focused on traditional marketing methods such as newspapers, radio, and TV to reach our Vietnamese-language audiences.

The team’s future goals would be to recruit more team members that could translate, design, and implement customer experiences that catered to bilingual audiences.