Project Spotlight: Coast Guard Festival Website

The Grand Haven Coast Guard Festival is one of Michigan’s longest-running community events, held each summer to honor the men and women of the United States Coast Guard. Over the course of 10 days, the Festival draws visitors from across the United States for waterfront concerts, activities, and celebrations rooted in that mission.

During peak ticket-buying season, the Festival’s website attracts 600k+ visitors, supporting the sale of over 32,000 tickets annually across multiple events. As a nonprofit, the Festival found traditional large-scale ticketing platforms too costly. Over time, its website came to depend on a patchwork of third-party tools to handle ticketing, event management, and forms—resulting in a fragmented experience for both staff and attendees.

Many guests continued to purchase tickets in person, leaving the team to juggle sales across disconnected systems and making day-to-day operations more time-consuming than necessary.

Acorn rebuilt the Coast Guard Festival’s website with an emphasis on simplicity and operational efficiency. At the core of the new platform is an integrated ticketing system that pulls event and ticket data directly into the website, supports handheld scanners and QR code tickets at the gate. With ticketing, events, forms, and visitor resources all consolidated in one place, the team spends significantly less time managing multiple systems and more time focused on delivering a great festival experience.

As an added service, Acorn also developed a custom online storefront for the Festival, giving the team an easy way to list merchandise and manage inventory without tracking it by hand. Guests can purchase official Festival gear online and choose to have items shipped directly to them or held for in-person pickup — a seamless experience that didn’t exist before.