Sara Sunshine Holloway
Teen Services Librarian
Tacoma Public Library
Kirsten Edwards
Teen Services Librarian
King County Library System
Bonnie Svitavsky
Teen Services Librarian
Puyallup Public Library
Alex Byrne
Youth Services Librarian
Pierce County Library System
Twitter: @HeofHIShirts
for
Washington Library Association Conference
4 November 2017
#wla2017
Planning The Event
So you're interested in starting a mini-con or doing a fandom event? Great! There's a lot that we're going to end up doing before the event gets put on.
It's very easy to get the idea that you want to put on a convention for everyone and do as many things as possible, but the truth of the matter is that such a thing will quickly become a beast that gets away from you and everyone else who you are trying to get to help yourselves out. And trying to be everything to everyone might mean you get less attendance than a more focused meeting. So what you want to start with is finding the right kind of focus for your event. Keep it limited in scope, and you'll be able to keep the work down to a manageable amount.
It's also important, right at the beginning, to get you to understand the timeline that you're working with here. If you want to make a mini-con, a full day or multiple-day event, if it's your first time, expect to spend a year's worth of time recruiting all the people you need, getting the space you want, making sure everyone understands their roles, and to put all of the pieces into place so that you'll have a smooth and successful convention.
Even for smaller events that will take less time, a first-time event will likely still take six months or more to plan out completely. Some of this is the speed of bureaucracy, and some of this is that you have to be looking that far out to be able to get the things and people who will make your con experience excellent.
It's dangerous to go alone. Doing all of this by yourself is the sort of thing that leads to hair-tearing, stress, and not wanting to do it again after the first run, or burning out on it while you're still trying to get it planned and ready. Recruit others from your organization to help you and to take on specific parts of the event. Yes, this does mean you're trusting them not to flake, but events like these get done because of a lot of people working together, not a single genius that manages to hold everything together until the event happens. Especially because you can't be everywhere during the actual event.
Getting Buy-In
So, the first thing to do is convince the people who are in charge that this is a worthwhile endeavour. Common talking points to use include:
- It's great customer service
- We're filling community needs
- It's much more affordable than the bigger, more commercial conventions.
- We're connecting people to resources in the community
- Events for teens mean those future taxpayers will think the library is worthwhile and support our levy / bond votes
Those are philosophical and practical things to talk about. One of the common things that will be discussed is how much you anticipate the cost of the event will be. Most libraries and library systems don't have plenty of money to spare to give to your project so you can purchase everything. Which means we have to talk about how to put on a great event on a shoestring (or less) budget.
No Budget? No Problem.
The most common funders of your work will be outside sources, like community foundations or Friends of the Library groups, and beyond that. Most of the things that you'll get, though, will be in-kind donations or loans from groups in your community. Hobbyists, local shops, or even other departments might have space and personnel with talents and ideas that will be helpful to you.
Test Your Events
Before jumping in fully to making a con, it's a good idea to see if you actually have the audience for a full-on event by doing smaller things. By doing small things, you will likely also experience some of the common issues and/or failures that happen that will also try to plague you during a bigger event. Having practice at putting out the small fires will make it easier to know what to do for the larger ones. (And, although nobody really wants to talk about it, doing small events sometimes also helps you figure out which of the groups you want to work with are reliable and trustworthy and which ones are the ones you want to invite and work with, but not actually plan to be present at the event.)
Doing An Event
Doing a con requires three main components: Time, Space, and People. The time and space you can probably find or use with your organization, although there's something to be said about running a con during open hours, which means having to balance the needs of the people who are using the library and the people who are here for the con experience.
Space Planning
Planning what spaces you're going to use means knowing what space you have available! The easiest way to figure that out is to have a map of your building. Even if it's an emergency exits map, because you'll need to know about those, too.
Because you're likely going to be doing this event during open hours, think about how you can creatively use the space that you're in while not stopping the regular use of the library. Which might involve going outside, or having to drag and tape down an extension cord from one space to another so that events can happen in different spaces. Your building will fight you, because, for the most part, libraries were designed a very long time ago and their power and data fits and retrofits are meant for the last remodel's New Hotness, not what's going on right now. You'll have to be creative to work with your building's limitations.
Time Planning
You'll want a schedule of events and a program for your event. In addition to the schedule, you'll also want to print your space and behavior policies (if you haven't thought about those, you'll want to make them. Stop what you are doing now and create them.) so that everyone knows what's expected and how to report if someone is behaving outside of the guidelines. If it's not on the program, it should be prominently displayed for the event. Big signs that say things like "Cosplay is not Consent" with explanations are a necessary part of making your event safe for the most vulnerable attendees, and treating allegations of bad behavior seriously are necessary to making sure that people come back to your event.
Promotion
Promoting the event sometimes means getting everything in to your Communications or Publicity Department and letting them do their magic for you, which can be great if your department knows what they're doing. If you don't have one, or they don't understand how to promote the event, you may have to do a certain amount of promotion and otherwise yourself.
- Local newspapers will usually print your press releases in various places if you give them with enough time to get them printed
- All of your social media platforms, official and unofficial, can become promotional vehicles to the followers you have
- Making short videos, either by yourself or with the help of volunteers, can make things even better for attracting attention
- Having fliers is also good for in-location promotion. The best thing to do for your events is to have a consistent visual presentation, logo, or mascot that shows up on all of the events that are related to this programming or theme. If you don't have someone with a graphic bone in their body, there might be a volunteer who would love to have the opportunity to design a logo or mascot character for you. Just make sure you get all the right releases and permissions, or that you have some money to commission them to get the character
At The Con: Halp, Wat Do?
Doing the actual con is essentially running all of those smaller events that you tested and perfected all at once / all in sequence over a limited amount of time. Having enough to do for everyone for the entire event is definitely a thing you'll be nervous about, but don't panic, because you already have enough practice at doing this.
It is still dangerous to go alone for the event itself! Make sure that you have all of your friends and fellow planners present to help deal with emergencies as they arise, to keep an eye on their designated sections, and to otherwise help wrangle and answer questions and enforce policies and otherwise be your trusted arms, eyes, and ears so you're not trying to do everything yourself. There needs to be enough people who are staff or trusted volunteers to make everything run smoothly.
Vendors and Artists
Many con experiences involve people who are selling things, whether good or commissions or fanworks for attendees. Being in a library space or being a library program may prohibit you from offering this at your con space, depending on the policies of your organization. Check with your lawyers about what, if any, commerce is allowed in your space.
If you can do commerce, you'll want explicit contracts spelled out about what can be sold, what can't, and how vendors need to behave in the space, when their times are to set up and take down, and so forth. There may also have to be information in the contract about how copyright works with the materials on offer and what can and can't be offered because of that. Check with your legal department, if you have one, about what has to be present.
Cosplay
cosplay (v.) Portmanteau of "costume play," generally refers to the act of dressing yourself up as a (favorite) character. It often involves makeup, fabrication of costume parts, and putting an outfit together intended to either faithfully replicate an original or transform it to work for a desired look or idea.
Cosplay is an involved art, and one of the things that cosplayers like to do is show off their work to an appreciative audience. In addition to the regular con showing-off, you can put on a runway show for all the interested cosplayers to show off their work. It can become a contest with judging, audience voting, and/or prizes as well, if desired, but that may discourage some people from entering if they feel their work isn't good enough compared to others. The fashion show idea is more inclusive and lower-pressure, so understand your audience and what kind of competitive nature they have.
Guest(s) of Honor
Like any other program, sometimes you can pull in some local or some big-name talent to appear at your event and have them talk and answer questions from the audience. So long as you're willing to work with their publicists, agents, and schedule, you can probably engage in talk with all sorts of people. Understand that a lot of them will charge money to come speak, and will have other requirements for their wrangling and lodging, so that will have to be put into your budget's accounting.
Panels and Workshops
A hyper-local and much cheaper alternative might be to have some of your knowledgeable teens and community members deliver panel programming about their fannish interests. There are a lot of topics that can be covered, some of which you may want to pre-screen for specific things or have the presentation delivered to you beforehand to make sure that it's appropriate for the right audiences.
Games
There's a lot of interest in gaming, so having some game programs at your con is a good way of getting people in the door. A way to make sure your program gets seen and read is to provide a game on the program itself, something like collecting stamps or visiting specific locations and programs, so that someone who doesn't quite know what to do has some suggestions and people who are sure they know what they want might try something outside of their comfort zones.
Board Game Lending
A low-cost way of getting games going at your con is to have some board games available for attendees to borrow and play with their friends. The library can be overseen by a few people even if there's a lot of games that are available. If you don't have a game collection already in place to use, you can potentially partner with local game stores to borrow their demonstration libraries (and possibly demonstration staff) in exchange for some promotion in your program or for a small fee. If you happen to know them (or can sign up to be part of them), people who are demonstrators for game companies can be brought out to show off things at your event as well. Board games are an easy way of having all-ages programming at an event.
Game Tournaments
With enough interest in your community, the popular collectible card game or hot competitive video game could have a tournament or other more formal event as part of the convention. You'll have to find people who are properly certified to judge, whether by the official sanctioning bodies or who have significant amounts of experience with that game and would know how to set up a tournament properly.
The things that are most important to consider for these kinds of events are time and money. Tournaments will take time and people to run properly, to the point where someone might have to be only in charge of running tournaments.
Furthermore, many of the most popular things are the kinds of games where more time or more money being invested will result in a better ability to play the game. Which can sometimes result in the tournament being full of hyper-competitive people who are looking to win and scare away anyone who might want to try the game or play it at a less intense level. Choosing a game where everyone has the same basic chance of winning and someone has to adapt their strategy to the players around them might be a better option than hosting tournaments for games that might be seen as more pay to win.
Open Gaming
Alternately, you can decide not to have any competitive events at all, or host alongside the competitive events open gaming, where the point is to have fun, and possibly teach some games to people who haven't learned them, or for people to chill and play something neat with their friends. For smaller events, open gaming is probably the way to go for most things, as you won't draw enough people for the competitive types to feel like they're getting challenged at the games they love. Or which might be frustrating to have all of these good, but casual, players end up not having a chance against the highly competitive tournament one.
Video Programming
Especially for anime-themed cons, having shows to watch communally and bond over and sing along to or otherwise make commentary on is sometimes a big draw for people. You'll have to have someone there to monitor the room and make sure that people don't get too far out of the boundaries of the event with their commentary, but for the most part, the people coming to see the shows are doing so because they're already fans, or because they're interested in picking up new shows to become fans of.
If you plan on putting on video programming, make sure that your location has a Public Performance License that covers the things that you want to show. Nothing kills the mod more than having letters come for you alleging infringement of copyright for your friendly anime showings. If you don't have one that specifically covers what you want to show, some distributors like Crunchyroll or Funimation will grant public performance rights if you register a club with them and have an official presence.
Crafty things
Button Maker
A button maker is an instant hit for just about any kind of programming. It's pretty simple to use, once you get the hang of it, and the supplies for the button maker can be found in the thousands of pieces on various websites, ensuring that you'll have enough material on hand for your mini-con's attendees to put together whatever buttons they would like to keep with them after the con is done. You can help people who don't want to design their own button fronts by providing old withdrawn comic issues or templates of various (appropriate) memes and fandom sigils and badges so that people who want to proclaim their love for a particular faction or fandom will have material on hand to quickly stamp out their allegiance and attach it to their lanyards. Having a person on hand to help with difficulties and instruct the attendees on how to use the button maker is helpful, but it can be the same person assigned to the room for the other creative endeavours in the same room.
Brick-Building
Giving attendees a big bucket of bricks and asking them to come up with whatever they would like is really good for some people who want to build with bricks (or who are curious to see if their Minecraft build ideas will translate well into the real world). For people who are less sure of their building creativity, having some materials on hand that offer step-by-step brick-building instructions will make the space good for everyone. Just be sure that things that fall off the table get picked up quickly and everything gets put back in the bucket, because bricks are often sturdier than flesh beings, and stepping on one is one of the definitions of pain.
Perler Beads
If you have someone who is willing to stick close by to the hot irons that will be needed to fuse them, and who is willing to take the time that's needed to do the fusion correctly, Perler beads are excellent for people who want to create 8-bit-looking art and fuse it together into a complete item to take with them. It takes time and practice and being able to see the pixels to be able to help with Perler beads, as well as knowing how to operate an iron and make sure that it only melts the beads enough to get them to stick to each other, rather than to completely melt the project. Building with grids is also helpful for keeping the beads in place and at the right distances from each other to make the project work. Unlike brick-building, which ultimately gets taken apart at the end, Perler bead fusion produces something for an attendee to take home with them.
Makeup or Facepaint
Doing makeup or facepaint is sometimes a hit, if you've got someone who can paint things they've never seen before or has a wide variety of possible paintings they can do, so this is a little more limited to people who you already know or can hire to do these things. If you get a person, though, with the right audience, this will be one of the most popular and long-lasting things that people remember about the con.
Other Possibilities
Photo and/or Video Booths
A photo or selfie booth is a neat thing for people to have to create mementos of their con experience. Make sure that you stuff the booth with a few different background ideas, frame ideas, or props for everyone to hold while they take the picture. With digital photography and cameras, people can take as many attempts as they want before getting it just perfectly, so we recommend people who have complex ideas or who are going to be perfectionists choose a time when the photo booth isn't in heavy usage to stage and take the pictures they're interested. You can also instant-print those pictures that you've taken through the use of entities like the Selphy printer, made by Canon, so there's an immediate memento available and printed.
If you don't have a booth to set up, you could get some official event photographers to document and take great shots of your event. Photography students, student journalists, and other amateurs looking for experience are great to recruit for this role. Make sure they understand what you want in shots and that everyone they're taking pictures of has given their permission to be photographed. (It is not too difficult to, say, have different colored attendee lanyards that indicate how willing someone is to be in photographs, even if you have a blanket permission to take pictures for the event.)
An alternate take, or in the same space as the photo booth, you can videotape your attendees and have them record a short video segment to be put together into a compilation at the end of the con. Have some prompt questions ready for your attendees to answer, with several general ones that make it possible for the attendees to take in whatever direction they would like for their answer. But make sure that they keep it short, so have questions that can theoretically be answered in less than a minute of recording. (The people who have to splice it all together at the end will thank you for keeping it short, especially if there are a lot of people who are participating in the video booth.
A thing to keep in mind about both of these ideas is that if you're going to be using the photos and videos for marketing purposes or releasing them to a greater audience than the attendees, you want to make sure that you've obtained permission from the participants to use their materials and likenesses for your purposes. This will probably involve parental permissions for minors, so have those forms on hand or make it exceedingly clear to the grownups who can give that permission that registering for your con means that this permission is granted for use. Since you may need a permission slip from a grownup to participate in the event all the same, stick the photography and videography language in that form so that the grownups know what's happening and have given written permission for it. Again, offer your attendees a way of indicating their personal preference of being photographed, even if you have that blanket permission obtained from their grownups. Uncomfortable attendees don't come back.
Chill Space
Any con of sufficient size needs a space where people can get away from it all. Chill spaces are essential to a good con experience, and should be placed as far away from the biggest noisemakers as possible, with rules specifically about how chill spaces are meant to be quiet, so conversations and other things should happen away from the space. Having a spot to decompress or otherwise just spend some time looking at a phone or other quiet activity, like coloring sheets or coloring murals, can be the difference between an awesome con experience and sensory overload for many of the attendees. Have a chill room.
Food
Food is an awesome thing to have at your con, but make sure you have enough and that you space it out in such a way that you're not running on unwanted hard candies at the very end of the event. There will need to be someone who is monitoring the food and enforcing the food rules (almost certainly "Food does not leave the food room," for example.) Food can cause additional expense, but local business partnerships might mitigate some of that cost or provide the food at a discount to make it work within your budget, or they might be willing to take their food trucks / mobile kitchens to your event and have food available to the attendees (maybe, just maybe, at discount.) Especially with teenagers, we highly recommend food be present, but we know that sometimes it's not possible.
Lessons for Next Time
Congratulations on putting on your own mini-con! It's been the culmination of a lot of work for you and all the staff that have helped you out. Pat yourselves on the back, take a breath, and then it's time for the debriefing.
Talk to the people who helped you out with the mini-con about their impressions of the event. Here are some of the questions you might ask:
- How many people did you get to attend?
- Were there any things that went really well?
- Were there things that went really poorly?
- Where might there be possibilities for improvement?
- Where might there be places where volunteers might help you run a better con?
Once you have an idea of how the con went and how specific events might have gone, make sure to package up the good stuff and use it to promote what an excellent job you did. Some of those choice elements might get turned into marketing material for the next time that you put on a mini-con event. (Makes sure you got all the correct permissions.)
If you're planning on having volunteers help out next year, the pool of attendees for this year is a great group to recruit from. They've already seen how awesome an event you have put on, and many of them will be eager to help make it even better than it was. This can help with those teens that are hungry or required to handle service hour commitments.
Those attendees might also help you out in planning other, smaller events that happen all throughout the programming year, or what might be secretly test events for things that might make it into the con program, if there's a big enough interest in them outside of the con.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, congratulations on running your con. Who's going to run it after you? A few years of doing this programming may be all that you want to be able to do, or all that you're able to do, and then someone else will have to take over as the primary runner and you get put into emeritus status. Or you might change jobs or classifications. So, if you haven't already found a capable assistant showrunner who can take over in case something happens to you, get one for next time. The secret to events that go on for years and years is having a chain of succession where the next person to take over is being trained while the current runner is putting on the events. Do this thing, and thank yourself for doing it early on when you end up in a situation where you can't run the event yourself.
[Additional note: This presentation was given well before the COVID-19 outbreak, on the assumption that large gathering events would be a normal part of library programming for years to come. The way things are now may be very different than the way things were when this presentation was put on.]