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Case study

Big Fish Little Fish

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Tell us about your event. How did it get started? Who is it aimed at? Big Fish Little Fish are the first in a new breed of family friendly rave events. They take

place up and down the UK and are currently expanding internationally.

Hannah, the founder, held the first event 4 years ago in July 2013. She had recently given

up her successful career, wanted to be her own boss and found inspiration in her family life.

Festivals had always played a big role in her family life: they went to All Tomorrow’s

Parties with their daughter when she was 8 weeks old; Glastonbury when she was 4

months old - as well as Latitude with both children when very small.

But out of festival season, there was nothing festival-like where both she and her children

could both enjoy themselves. Sure - there were events like children’s discos but as a

lifelong clubber and raver she found the musical choices wanting and everything was

100% child focussed.

And so her decades of clubbing experience inspired her idea for a family rave.

The first Big Fish Little Fish took place in a large pub at the end of the road, and was for

families with 0-8 year old children. Over 300 people showed up - from the start it was

always going to be a big event.

Each weekend afternoon event is individually crafted: they host genre specials - recent

events include drum’n’bass and techno; as well as ever-changing guest DJs including the

Orb, Slipmatt, Aphrodite, Tom Middleton and coming soon fabric resident Terry Francis.

The multi-sensory rave is at the heart of the rave but there is also a high quality multi-

activity craft area and baby chill out and play areas - and a licensed bar!

Hannah loves feedback from customers, ‘You’re all old clubbers and it shows, because

the events come across as authentic.’’Surreal madness’ - BFLF first timers.

Best day of my life.- Child celebrating 6th birthday.

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How much has it grown since inception? After the first event in south London, Hannah held events in a range of venues across

London - then began playing outside such as Coventry, Margate, Whitstable and Surrey

as well as festivals such as Camp Bestival; then built up a base of fans further afield.

The event has now expanded to cover the UK - from the highlands of Scotland to Exeter

and Wales to Newcastle and all the Midlands there are now over 25 towns and cities

across the UK that host regular BFLFs.

Hannah works with 7 regional managers - each with multiple cities to look after on their

patch. Most of the managers started as fans and attendees at the events - the only

qualities required as that they love dance music and club culture and understand family

dynamics - all managers have children.

The BFLF crew see themselves as a family or tribe - all pulling together with their own

strengths and weaknesses but sharing the same ethos and vision for BFLF is about.

Supportive and micket-taking at the same time - like all the most close knit families.

In just under 4 years BFLf has played to over 100,000 people and now run about 10

events per month to 6,000 attendees. Sometimes it can be as many as 20 a month and

occasionally just a couple - such as when we move into festival season.

In 2015 and 2016 Big Fish Little Fish won the Best Family Event at the National Family

Arts Festival. In 2017 they aced the awards - winning the award selected By public vote;

Best Welcome, Best Family Event, Best Venue; and the Judges panel award for Best

Family Event. Out of 4,000 events.

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Why did you choose to move your ticketing over to Eventbrite? As we’ve scaled up, we really needed a more robust platform - something completely

reliable that we can trust and that our customers feel comfortable with too. No fear that

it will drop out and leave people wondering if they have managed to buy tickets or not.

Some of our most popular events have been known to sell out within 20mins of going on

sale and we needed somewhere that could cope with very acute demands.

As we’re now starting international expansion, we also needed a partner with

international reach.

We’re very customer focused - families are often very time-poor and we like to

have a close connection to them - and so we needed to work with a company with

a great reputation for customer service, with the tools that allow for fast and easy

communication with our fans.

For example we love how easy the in-built email functionality is, which makes it simple to

stay connect with our attendees for each event; and also to promote future events to our

database, which helps drive a growth in sales.

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It also helps that the user interface is very clear, simple and clean which makes it

intuitive for anyone to use (on desktop or when they’re out and about on their mobile),

which actually reduces the amount of customer support we need to provide, because it’s

just so easy to use from a ticket buyers perspective.

While still on the topic of customer services, we also needed to have plenty of support

and strong customer service for each of our regional managers, as they all work

independently, which has been provided by the Eventbrite team.

Of course we’re a business, so we had to be sure the solution was good value, and

Eventbrite’s fees were competitive compared to other agents, particularly when

considering the breadth of additional features and support available.

What challenges has moving to Eventbrite helped you solve? We’ve seen 4 major areas of improvement since moving over to Eventbrite.

Email delivery. We like to send out info via email about an upcoming event to help

ticket holders enjoy a better experience. However previously, we’d use a different email

provider, and it was getting caught as spam so people wouldn’t receive our messages.

With Eventbrite’s email system, all customers receive emails and so they’re better

prepared to make the most of our raves.

Promotion. The different promotional tools provided by Eventbrite are working well -

such as providing mailing list recipients with access codes in advance.

Ease of use. Put simply, Eventbrite easy to use for managing ticket sales, updating event

pages, and keeping an eye on how all our different events are performing.

International support. Running events internationally, it’s been amazing to have a local

partner and account manager in each international territory to support the event.

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What sort of results have you seen since switching to Eventbrite?

We’ve seen a 5-10% uplift in new attendees through EB discovery, which is a fantastic

benefit of being on such a popular platform for experiences.

The ease of managing events across the country has also enabled us to support an ever

growing number of events, to a current rate of ~120 a year, which just wouldn’t be possible

for such a small team without a platform as intuitive and simple to use as Eventbrite.

What are your future plans, and how will Eventbrite help you achieve them? There’s a lot more connectivity and tracking with social media we are yet to explore and

that will give us a better understanding of how best to promote and communicate with

our customers.

BFLF will continue to expand across the UK into new areas and having a clear universal

ticketing platform partner will be very helpful to help ensure quality across all events. It

is also expanding internationally. The first LA event was in February, with Melbourne +

Sydney events going live shortly.

With Eventbrite’s continued support as we scale, we’re very optimistic about how far we

can go with Big Fish Little Fish, bringing family raves to people all over the world. See you

on the dancefloor!

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Eventbrite enables people all over the world to plan, promote, and sell

out any event. Since its inception in 2006, Eventbrite has processed

over 200 million tickets and helped organisers sell over £1.8 billion

worth of tickets to events in 187 countries.

The online ticketing platform makes it easy for anyone to discover

events, and to share the events they are attending with the people

they know. Eventbrite provides a professional, simple way to manage

and promote events to help you reach your business goals.

Learn more at www.eventbrite.co.uk/how-it-works/

or call 0800 652 4993.