Case Study: Pumpkin Daze
How a volunteer-run fall festival welcomed 21,000 attendees in one weekend — and kept its small-town soul.
Overcome Queues and Outdated Systems
Children’s Fairyland has been serving their community in Oakland, CA, since 1950 as an amusement park designed especially for children. Featuring fairytale sets, farm animals, and live entertainment, the original attraction took the “kiddieland” concept further with landscaped gardens and costumed guides who led guests through the fairytale setting.
The storybook theme park was so successful that Walt Disney visited and incorporated ideas from the park into his “magic kingdom,” which opened in Anaheim in 1955. Fairyland continues to entertain children with the longest-running puppet theater in the United States, where Frank Oz developed his puppeteering craft long before joining the cast of Star Wars.
Before 2019, Children’s Fairyland had no digital ticketing platform of any kind. Their software infrastructure was dated up until then, and they had no ability to sell tickets online. Their solution had been to send physical tickets through the mail, a cumbersome process that took multiple weeks.
Tickets were primarily sold in person from their box office, a tiny building at the end of a single-file line. One ticket seller was all the box office could fit, and so the line would get uncomfortably long during the park’s peak hours. The slow, inefficient system resulted in bottlenecks and kept the park from operating at its best.
How a volunteer-run fall festival welcomed 21,000 attendees in one weekend — and kept its small-town soul.
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