Your work counts.
Lanyard is an operating platform for festivals and a reputation network for the people who run them. I designed it, built it, and then ran a real festival on it.
getlanyard.app
The problem
50% noshow rate
Deposits are a tax on
missing infrastructure.
Festival volunteering runs on distrust
Festivals staff their gates, bars and welfare tents with volunteers. To stop them flaking, festivals charge deposits — £130 held against your promise to show up.
It doesn't work, and it isn't fair.
- Deposits punish poverty, not behaviour. £130 filters out people who can't float it, not people who won't turn up.
- Good volunteers start from zero every year. The person who stayed through the storm has nothing to show for it next season.
- Reputation exists — it just can't travel. Crew chiefs remember who was brilliant. That knowledge dies when the festival ends.
The insight
Reputation beats deposits
A volunteer with three festivals and a 95% completion rate doesn't need to hand over £130 to prove they'll show up. Their history proves it.
So the design brief wrote itself: capture the history, make it portable, make it worth something. A volunteer's deposit at their first festival: £130. After one good festival: £80. After three: nothing. Trust, priced in.
| Tier | Track record | Deposit |
|---|---|---|
| New | No history | £130 |
| Returning | 1 festival, 80%+ completion | £80 |
| Proven | 2 festivals, 90%+ completion | £50 |
Your work counts. Wear it on your chest.
It's not just a scheduler. It's a way of noticing and showing other events what this person did for us.
For events it's a clever bit of SaaS. For workers it makes them feel seen.
The design challenge
Five audiences. One data network. Zero tolerance for confusion.
Lanyard isn't one app. It's one platform wearing six faces:
Organisers
An admin CMS that runs the whole event — crew, shifts, lineup, passes, maps, deposits
Artists & Performers
A verified network profile, gig history, passes, festival-branded share cards
Volunteers & crew
Shifts, wayfinding, check-in, an entry ticket, and a reputation that follows them
Vendors & stalls
Self-service profiles, entry passes, a map listing
Punters
A festival-branded web app on the festival's own domain — timetable, picks, site map
The Brand
I wanted a brand that makes someone feel seen.
The name covers events: a lanyard is your pass behind the scenes. Proof you're supposed to be here.
The language is shaped for the workers, not the buyers. The colours come straight off a hi-vis. The type is marker pen — because that's how events actually run: scribbles, tape, a rota on the crew mess wall. It needed to belong in that environment, not turn up looking like a shiny SaaS product.
Why hexagons?
It's a hive. Worker bees, all doing their bit for something bigger — the event. Each cell is a shift that actually happened. There's no score and no leaderboard because I didn't want one. It's not a game, it's a record.
Woven. Worn all weekend.
Deep dive The worker app
Designed for a field, not a desk
Volunteers use this on a cracked phone, in the rain, half-way through a ten-hour build day. Every interaction is shaped by that.
Building your lanyard
It fills as you work. Every completed shift adds a cell. Hours, roles, endorsements, recorded by the event as it happens. Nothing on it is self-reported.
The Journey
Signup
You arrive through a festival: a signup link from an event that runs on Lanyard.
Pick your shifts
Matched to you, capped at three a day. Some roles are earned before they're offered.
Build your lanyard
It fills as you work — shifts, hours, endorsements. A CV you earn, not write.
Live event mode
On the day, the app knows where you are in the weekend: one job, one CTA, one next thing. Safety always on screen.
Post event
Endorsed, recorded, kept. Your work doesn't end with the weekend — it's on your lanyard when the next festival asks.
Find work
Use your record to apply for other festivals and events. Grow your career.
Real data captured
Crew signups
Shifts completed
Completion rate
Deep diveAdmin CMS
This is where lanyard began
Lanyard started as the tool I needed. I ran a music festival without it for a year, so every feature in the admin exists because a real weekend demanded it. And what I needed turned out to be what every organiser needs — so I made it multi-tenant.
Designed and built for real needs
Shifts build themselves. Tell it “gate cover, 8am–8pm, four-hour shifts” and it generates the lot. No spreadsheet.
The Rota is dynamic, shifts can be added, swapped, created or removed on the fly, from a computer or mobile phone.
A life cycle state machine — Applications open → Pre-assignment → Shifts live → Event live → Event ended — so the whole team always knows what phase the event is in, and reputation finalises automatically when it ends.
Recognition tools — endorse crew against five named qualities, tag photos, verify beyond-shift contributions. The admin gives recognition; the worker decides what to display.
Deep dive132 artists, one link
The best admin interface is the one you never open
A Self serve artist platform
I wanted an interactive timetable, nothing unique there, however I didn’t want to message 100+ artists for their photos, bios, social links. This is where things got clever.
Artists got sent 1 link, they fill in their own information, not written by the organiser, or AI but themselves. Including a photo, logo, and social links to be displayed on the punter facing experience app.
And every artist with a photo got a festival-branded share card, generated from a CMS template, to post their own set time.
Real data captured
Artist signups
Artist favourites
Opted punters in to emails
What I said no to
The product is also the features it doesn't have
- No points, badges, streaks or leaderboards. Recognition, not gamification.
The hive and named milestones are the ceiling - No numeric ratings of workers. Ever.
Endorsements are qualitative and consent-gated. Negative data stays local; positive data travels. - No in-app chat.
Crews already live in WhatsApp. Lanyard links out instead of competing. - No social feed, no likes, no comments.
This is a work credential, not a network to perform on. - No festival re-theming of worker surfaces
even though I built full theming for punter surfaces. Different audiences, different rules. - No punter ticketing.
Lanyard does accreditation — who's allowed in, and why — not ticket sales. Festivals already have ticketing partners; the crew side was the unserved half. I drew that line early and held it.
The pilot & the result
Three days in a field, for real
Slipshod Gathering, Scholey Park, Lincolnshire — 10–12 July 2026. Every number below was recorded by the product itself. Final figures, pulled from the live system August 2026.
Crew
Timetable & audience
2025 no-show
2026 no-show
50%
14.3%
What I learned
The journey I designed ended with the festival. The workers didn't.
I didn't put enough thought into post-event. Endorsing crew was mostly manual, and the UX for how a worker submits their work was never clear. Deposits were tracked in Lanyard but not processed — sending them back was a manual job, and once sent, there was no way to mark them returned.
Lanyard's whole promise is that the work counts afterwards. Afterwards is exactly where I under-built. If I did it again, I'd design the ending first — the moment the worker gets what they earned — and work backwards into the weekend.
What's next
The hive is where it goes next
I built a product to help me run a festival. That's not where the journey ends.