Ganpati Festival 2026: A QR Code Toolkit for Everyone Running It

Ganesh Chaturthi 2026 runs from Monday, September 14 through Anant Chaturdashi (visarjan) on Friday, September 25 — a 10-day festival. Over those 10 days, a lot changes: aarti timings, prasad counters, cultural programme schedules, stock at a festive stall, the visarjan-day route. What usually doesn't change is the printed material — a pandal's entrance banner, a shop's counter standee, a society noticeboard — because nobody reprints a banner for day 4 versus day 8. A SMLLR dynamic QR code is scanned the same way on day 1 and day 10, but what it points to can change, because the code itself doesn't encode a fixed web address — it redirects through SMLLR's servers to whatever destination is set at that moment. This guide is a plain, factual rundown of which SMLLR features are actually useful for the festival, for four groups running it: pandal and mandal committees, festive-season shopkeepers and retail brands, event organizers running corporate or society Ganpati functions, and agencies handling several clients' festival campaigns from one seat. Nothing here is a discount offer — it's a feature rundown, gated honestly by plan.

Most printed material for a 10-day festival goes up once, at the start, and stays exactly as printed through visarjan. A static QR code, or a printed URL or phone number, locks in whatever it pointed to on day 1 for the rest of the festival. A dynamic QR code solves this specific problem: the physical code — printed on the banner, standee, pass, or sticker — never changes, but its destination can be updated any number of times from the dashboard. Better still, Scheduled Redirects (Pro plan and above, ₹4,999/month) let you queue up different destinations for different date ranges in advance, before the festival even starts — set September 14 through 24 to point at the daily programme page, and set September 25 to automatically switch to the visarjan-route page, without anyone needing to touch the dashboard on the day itself.

This is the hub for four more specific guides, each written for a different group actually running some part of the festival:

Every feature below is a real, shipped SMLLR feature, listed with the plan it actually requires so nothing here reads as more available than it is:

SMLLR doesn't process payments or collect donations. If a pandal or stall is collecting donations or UPI payments, that stays on your existing bank, PhonePe Business, or BHIM UPI QR code — a SMLLR QR code can sit alongside it for the marketing and information side, the same pairing our UPI QR guide describes for retail. There's also no WhatsApp marketing automation today — the only WhatsApp capability that exists is a click-to-chat CTA button that opens a pre-filled wa.me chat; broadcast or automated WhatsApp messaging isn't a shipped feature. And there's no fully rebranded, white-label dashboard on any plan, which matters mainly for the agency section below.

Given the timeline, the order of operations that gets the most value fastest is: first, a dynamic QR code pointed at a Landing Page with the daily programme (Pro and above) or a simple info link if you're on a lower plan; second, Scheduled Redirects queued now for the September 25 visarjan-day switch, so it's already done before the festival starts; third, a Lead Capture Gate if you want a contact list for follow-up, with Email Marketing or Meta Sync layered on only once there's a consented list to use them on. Play & Win and scan-limit redirects are worth adding once the basics are live, not before.

The feature list above is the same across all four groups — what differs is which combination actually matters for a pandal committee versus a shop counter versus a society event versus an agency running several of these at once. Pandals and mandal committees, shopkeepers and festive brands, corporate and society organizers, and agencies each get the specific combination worked through in detail.