Where does a festival audience actually come from?
From two directions: what you collect at the event, and what you bring in from wherever it already exists. All of it passes through the same recognition step, so one person stays one profile. On site you collect five things:
- The sign-up pages. Every activation has its own public page: name and email required, phone, city and postcode optional, plus the consent box for your own communications. On sponsor activations a second box appears, separate and never merged with the first.
- The QR code. The activation QR code carries the address of the sign-up page: on the gate, on the bar or under the stage, it sends everyone to the same form.
- The event app. Points, check-ins and in-app scans stay tied to an anonymous device token. The profile appears when someone creates an account and joins your festival from the app. Consent to be contacted is a separate switch they can withdraw, and it decides only whether you may write to them. A withdrawal counts on the account at once and reaches the profile at the next connection.
- Redeemed offers. Every redemption stays attached to its venue, with how many offers it brought in and for what value. The fan there is an opaque token: no personal data goes into that table.
- Partner venues. You choose them, each gets its own scanner, and each validates the offer at the counter.
DICE, Eventbrite and Shopify have a direct connector. The poller runs every quarter of an hour, but it picks a connection up again only once the last sync is over six hours old, and that is the real cadence. New connections come round sooner, so do the half-done ones and the ones in error, retried after an hour. If you need it now, there is ‘Sync now’. Then the files: tickets, merchandise and scans as CSV, your own contact book, an audience imported from Mailchimp. The public survey creates and enriches profiles but makes nobody contactable: answering is not consent.
What is the difference between an email list and an identified audience?
A list is a file, and every row stays a row. An identified audience recognises the same person each time they come back, and keeps their history attached: how many events, how much spent, when you last saw them.
Recognition runs in a fixed order. First the ticketing platform's external identifier, then the email, then the phone, then the name as a last resort. Phone numbers are normalised on their last ten digits, so an international prefix and a national one land on the same profile. Name matching is deliberately narrow: it attaches only to profiles with no email, no phone and no external identifier, a conflicting city blocks it, and it can be switched off.
Two limits. Identity is per organisation, so a person another festival also knows stays a separate profile. And duplicates are never merged automatically: deduplication happens on the way in, and whatever fails to attach there stays apart.
Which segments are actually useful to a festival?
Solco has five: whale, engaged, dormant, discovery, unknown. They are recalculated when activity data arrives (an import, a ticketing sync, a scan) and when you ask for it, on one profile or on the whole audience.
The thresholds are fixed and apply to everyone. Whale: at least three events, 150 of spend in the currency of your takings, and at least three scans. Engaged: at least two events, or at least two scans, or at least 50 of merchandise. Dormant: has a history, and at least thirty days since the last activity. Discovery: has a history and is recent. Unknown: has not yet done anything that counts, or has a history with no usable date, as with a file imported without dates. Anyone arriving from a form, a contact book or a Mailchimp import lands there too, until a recalculation moves them.
One thing is counterintuitive. Dormant is tested first and wins over the rest, so a whale quiet for thirty-one days ends up dormant, and the lapsed whale flag is there to find your best people inside that group. The flag looks only at events and spend, though, never at scans, so it also marks people who were never formally whales.
A person's value is the sum of tickets and merchandise, with no forecast of future value. And when whale or dormant show zero, the screen says why: the spend source is missing, or the history is.
What does consent mean in practice when you collect contacts at an event?
It means one specific thing: consent is recorded per source. Every channel has its own slot, and the permission that counts is the union of the slots switched on.
The consequence is the one that matters. If an opt-out arrives from DICE, the DICE slot goes off and the consent that person gave your own sign-up form stays on. Two relationships, two decisions. There is a deliberate asymmetry, though: when the fan withdraws, from Mailchimp or from the public unsubscribe link, the withdrawal covers everything and switches off every slot. The same as a suppression you record yourself. How to treat an opt-out that arrives from a single channel is still a call to make with your privacy adviser.
The standard of proof changes from channel to channel. On the sign-up form the wording the person read is saved too, the first 200 characters as a snapshot of the version shown, with date, source and IP address. On app accounts an append-only record keeps every yes and every no with the version of the copy shown. On a contact book import, consent is your own statement, not the fan's: it only fills in unknowns and never overturns an opt-out already in the file.
Above all that sits suppression, the do-not-contact list. It takes precedence over consent in every export and sync, even when a box is ticked. And a public portal, with no login, lets a person download their own data or ask for it to be deleted.
How do you get your audience into the marketing tools you already use?
Two ways, and it matters which you are on: an API sync into the destination system, or a CSV you upload by hand. Mailchimp is a real sync: emails go across in the clear because it requires them, and a second push does not resurrect anyone who had unsubscribed. Meta, Google Ads and TikTok receive custom audiences carrying only SHA-256 hashes of email and phone, and no per-person data comes back.
Every ad channel sets its own floor, below which the upload is refused before it starts: one thousand users for Meta and TikTok, one hundred for Google Ads. Mailchimp sets none. For Klaviyo, Brevo or anything else, a segment comes out as a CSV with five fixed columns: name, email, phone, city, segment. Files already mapped for Mailchimp, Klaviyo and Brevo do exist, but only on the export of a single activation's sign-ups.
A saved audience is a live query rather than a snapshot: every export resolves it again, so whoever has just qualified walks in on their own. The most concrete limit sits there: a definition accepts three filters, segment, city and event. The profiles page has more, and they never become an audience you can export.
You do not have to change ticketing platform or email tool. Solco sits in between: it collects contacts with consent, unifies them per person, segments them and hands them over, to Mailchimp as a sync and to everything else as a CSV.
How do you bring back the people who came last year and not this year?
The dormant segment and the lapsed whale flag tell you who has gone quiet in general. The comparison between events tells you who was at a previous event of yours and not at this one, on ticketing data. ‘Previous’ here means any event of your organisation that started earlier, never the last edition of the same festival: a distinction the system cannot make.
Those are two definitions of quiet that do not line up. Dormant looks at thirty days of inactivity; the comparison between events looks at absence from one specific event. The count of reachable people changes too: the comparison treats anyone with email or marketing consent as contactable; an export requires marketing consent.
Then the step everyone takes for granted: no marketing email goes out from Solco. The reactivation screen gives you the count, says how many are reachable, and opens a draft activation with the lapsed fans in it. That list stays where it is, though: no export of its own, no sync of its own. Actually sending means building a saved audience, then syncing it to Mailchimp or downloading it as a CSV.
What can you do without paying, and what sits behind a plan?
Consent, unsubscribes, exports and data subject requests are included on every plan.
On the free plan you collect with forms and QR codes, import your own CSV files, unify profiles, segment them, save audiences, export to CSV, and handle suppression and deletion requests.
Behind a plan sit the outside connections and the measurement side. Inbound connectors (DICE, Eventbrite, Shopify) and outbound syncs (Mailchimp, Meta, Google, TikTok) start at Starter. The impact report starts at Pro. The event app (in preview), the event map, sponsors, partner venues and audience engagement start at Business; the territorial report is an add-on, and a dedicated app under your own name is Enterprise.
Two practical constraints: seats on the team depend on the tier and the free plan has one; access is by invitation, so creating an organisation needs a valid code.
Frequently asked questions
Can I get the email addresses of the people who bought a ticket on DICE or Eventbrite?
It depends on consent, which is never inferred from the fact that you connected the ticketing platform. From DICE a contact arrives contactable only if the buyer agreed to share their details with the organiser, and DICE sometimes restricts what you receive to the name alone. From Eventbrite, imported attendees land with marketing consent set to false: the profile is there, and you build contactability with the sign-up form.
Does the audience I collect at one edition stay with me for the next one?
Yes. The profiles stay inside your organisation, and every new edition adds contacts and enriches the ones already there, filling in empty fields without overwriting anything. But identity is per organisation: the same person, if another festival knows them too, stays a separate profile in a separate database.
Can I send the reactivation emails straight from Solco?
No. Solco prepares the audience and hands it over: you sync the segment to Mailchimp and send from there, or you download it as a CSV with name, email, phone, city and segment for Klaviyo, Brevo or anything else. Inside the product the ‘Write and send from Solco’ panel carries a ‘Coming soon’ label, is disabled, and sends nothing.
If someone unsubscribes in Mailchimp, does Solco notice?
Yes. The unsubscribe comes back through a webhook and becomes a suppression row plus marketing consent set to false, so that person also drops out of every later export. Suppression always takes precedence over consent, and it never depends on the plan you are on.