A one-night pageant that needed a site doing five jobs at once: tickets, contestants, sponsors and details, on a Wagtail site the organisers now run themselves, year after year.

The brief

One night to get right, five jobs at once.

The Miss Fil-Am Florida Pageant is an annual celebration of Filipino-American heritage in Florida, and it supports Gawad Kalinga, a non-profit working to end poverty in the Philippines. It came to us through Anthony at WooMeNow: four years of one partnership turning into the next.

The event is one night at the Hilton Downtown Tampa, and the site had to sell tickets, introduce every contestant, give sponsors their own placement rather than a logo strip, and answer every practical question before the night, all at once. A fixed date, a volunteer team, and an event that comes back every year, so anything hard-coded for one edition becomes next year’s problem.

What we developed

A site the organisers run themselves.

A full event site on Wagtail and Django, designed in Figma and developed with Tailwind. Ticketing runs through the site itself with general admission and VIP tiers and a supporting candidate on every order; each contestant has a profile with her title; sponsors are part of the layout; and the event details sit exactly where someone looking for a start time will find them.

Wagtail underneath, so the volunteer team edits contestants, tickets, sponsors and dates themselves from one year to the next without coming back to us.

What shipped

Three editions, one site.

The site carried the 2024 pageant and has run the 2025 and 2026 editions since, now in its tenth-anniversary year, with the organisers updating contestants, tickets and sponsors themselves. That is the argument for doing the work properly rather than quickly.