#running conventions

You cannot run a convention on good intentions alone. You need a team, you need a plan, and you need to be able to deal with the unexpected. This is a list of things to help you get your team and plan together. It is not exhaustive! Conrunning has a lot of nitty-gritty details, and this is very much an overview.

The extremely important yet really boring stuff:

Incorporation. You are running a business, so you have to tell the state and federal governments you exist. State and local laws vary, so do your diligence on this. The limited liability company (LLC) is very popular for conventions.

Money. Where is it coming from? Where are you going to put it? You will need a business bank account (which you can only open after you've incorporated). Get an official PayPal account linked to the business bank account. DO NOT USE YOUR PERSONAL ACCOUNTS FOR ANY OF THIS. EVER. DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT. This is how you get your finances screwed up and money mysteriously goes missing. Don't take that chance.

Make a budget. Factor in the rental fees for your hotel space, program book and badge printing, marketing (printing fliers, selling web ads), paying for t-shirt printing, a/v equipment rental... then work backwards to get your badge price.

Any difference between your expenditures and income will have to be paid for: by the people who are owners of the LLC. Keep that in mind.

Timeline. It takes time to get all this stuff sorted out. Don't rush. Yes, we went from idea to con in 8 months, but I don't recommend it. The core staff has 30+ years of conrunning experience between us, so we had that advantage. A more leisurely timeline, like 14-18 months, gives you time to do all the necessary, boring background work and put on a good show.

Policies. Make sure you have rules for your con and post them. Have things like “A badge must be worn at all times” to “Weapons must be peace-bonded.” Take a look at other cons' rules and go from there. You don't need to reinvent the wheel. You may want a harassment policy and other policies to promote inclusivity. There are sources for those as well.

The important and less boring stuff:

Staff. It is very important to have a full staff! Your con is only as good as your team. Positive attitude and willingness to learn will get you far, but experience is also important.

You need the following at a minimum:

Chair: The person in charge. Much more detail below.

Operations director: The person in charge of making sure things happen.

Security chief: The person in charge of assembling a security team.

Treasurer/finance officer: The person in charge of money.

Hotel liaison: The person who negotiates the contract with and is your contact point to the hotel.

Programming director: The person who comes up with programming and makes the schedule.

Registration director: The person who maintains the list of attendees and takes care of badge labels.

Graphic designer/website maintainer: The person who makes the website look good.

Other staff you may find useful:

Artists alley coordinator: The person who contacts artists for artists alley and makes a layout map.

Dealers room coordinator: See above but for dealers.

Accessibility coordinator: The person who makes sure the convention space is accessible for people with disabilities.

Volunteer coordinator: The person who gets volunteers where they're most needed during the con.

Social media coordinator: The person who posts on tumblr/twitter/Facebook.

Marketing coordinator: The person who organizes where to advertise.

Guest liaison: The person who interfaces with the guests/their agents.

You need a reliable group of people. The key is reliable. Where do you find them? Friends and family are where most people start. Your friend who is late for everything or flakes out all the time? Don't ask that person to help you out.

Having a con staff composed entirely of your friends could also be a terribad idea. Friendships can end over disagreements. So look beyond your immediate circle, too.

Space. Where are you holding the convention? Does this hotel host other conventions? How much space do you need? You will also need to negotiate a room block with the hotel, and you need to sell 80% (usually) of the room nights, or you will pay for them yourselves.

READ YOUR HOTEL CONTRACT. Make sure you understand all the fine print.

For a first-year convention, start small. Dream big, but plan small. That way you won't blow your budget. For Shatterdome Atlanta, we went with a one-day event. We had the space from 10 am to 10 pm. For year two, we're going to 2+ days (Friday evening to Sunday afternoon.) (Spoiler: we're coming back.)

Marketing! This is extremely important and kind of a dark art. If you know someone who does marketing for a living, ask them to help you out. Don't just depend on tumblr and Facebook to get the word out. Marketing requires making lots of connections—talent agents, comic shop owners, game studios, university clubs, website owners, corporate sponsors, other conrunners—and many of these connections start with the dreaded cold call.

Guests. Guests are expensive. For a guest of honor, you will pay airfare/travel expenses for them (and sometimes a guest), their hotel, a per diem for food, and, in some cases like actors, a performance fee. You may not be able to afford a guest your first year. That's OK. Maybe you can afford a local fan celebrity (a well-known cosplayer or artist in your fandom, say). You should still pay for their hotel and a per diem.

Practical matters

Running a convention takes a lot of time. As chair of Shatterdome Atlanta, I've put in 8-10 hours a week on con business in the last week or two. In the two weeks before the con this year, it was more like 16-20. But I was also acting as registration director and dealing with everything from indiegogo. (This involved a lot of cross referencing and spreadsheets and data entry. I enjoy cross referencing, and I am good at it. I am also a little weird.)

Other staff members have less of a time commitment in advance of the con, like ops, but they are busy during the con. Marketing and website stuff take a lot of time as well, but it's variable. Right now, marketing is busy, but it will taper off a bit then get busier.

If any staff member is having trouble getting their work done, it is important to have an environment where they are comfortable saying, “I don't have time to get this done.”

So you want to be the chair...

Just say no. I'm mostly joking. You have to be a particular kind of organized to be a good chair.

As chair, you have to be able to handle information on a full FIREHOSE setting, filter and sort it, and get it to the appropriate people. You have to be extremely organized. You have to like spreadsheets. You have to be able to make high-level organizational decisions.

Your job is to organize all the things. You need to know what needs to be done, set a timeline, assign people to do what needs to be done. Get regular (monthly or bimonthly) reports from the departments so you know what's going on and can make sure things are getting done.

You have to be able to delegate. You can't do everything, and that's OK! You have reliable staff (see above). Trust them to do their jobs.

For example, I know nothing about a/v equipment setup. But the operations director has 17 years of experience doing tech ops at Dragon Con. We made a list of things that needed a/v, and she took care of getting everything that we needed and setting it up. There was a problem with one of the audio connections, and she solved it then told me about it.

I am also not a graphic designer by any means, but our creative director is, and he's amazing.

You CANNOT be a micromanager. You will overwork yourself if you try, AND, as an added bonus, you will piss off everyone you're micromanaging. Don't be a control freak. Trust your staff, but make sure they're getting things done.

You will be the solutions person. The staff should be able to solve problems on their own then tell you when they're resolved, but sometimes they won't be able to resolve it. You have to figure out how to fix it. If a staffer gets busy because of life (job, school, illness), you need to find someone to cover for them (this person may be you until you recruit someone).

Google Docs (they're calling it Drive now, whatever) is your friend. Know it, love it, learn to use the sharing feature.

So you want to run programming...

This is a good place to start getting conrunning experience (she says without any hint of bias). If you've never done it before, here are some things to consider.

Your job is to come up with programming that will be of interest to your attendees and put panelists on them. There are a variety of ways to do this, ranging from putting out a survey and asking attendees for suggestions (and whether they want to be on said panel) to brainstorming everything yourself. The former works well for narrow-focus cons without invited (ie people you pay to be there) guests.

Larger cons may have multiple tracks of programming, such as literature, comics, and costuming. A smaller con will probably not need to have tracks.

Security

This is very important. You need a security team to make sure everyone in convention space is wearing a badge, to make sure nothing walks away from the artists alley, and to take care of any Situations that occur. (A situation may be a drunk attendee, an altercation, or harassment.) Make sure you have people who are good at this who are not also prone to ego tripping.

Operations

I admit, this is a bit of a black box to me, where I say “we need this” and J makes magic happen. If the chair is the brain of the convention, operations is the heart. They will make the room setup plans, from seating to airwall pulling to doing the a/v check. They are vital, and do not underestimate the need for experienced ops staff.

Everything else

The rest of the staff positions are pretty self explanatory, and this is already a monster post, so I won't go into detail on those.

Fake Q&A!

I think I want to run a con, but now I want to get some experience first. How do I do that?

Great! Find a convention in your area that you'd be interested in attending and look for their contact information. Sometimes there'll be a volunteers address, sometimes just general info. Tell them you'd like to help out, whether in a particular area or wherever they need someone. Most cons are always looking for staff.

I still want to run a con, but I don't want to wait. What should I do?

Find conventions in your area and ask if anyone with experience is willing to help you out. Have a plan already in mind when you approach them. Unless they're jerks, they'll probably say yes. They might not come on as staff, but they should be able to give advice.

Conrunner.net has a wiki of con planning. It's got a lot of information, though I don't know when it was last updated.

My ask box is open, and I'm willing to give what advice I can.

So do I get to hang out with celebrities at a con?

No, not really. You'll be too busy running the con. (I went to one panel at Shatterdome ATL. One. And the costume contest, but I was a judge.) You might be able to get your book/poster signed if you approach the guest in off hours (depending on the guest, and ALWAYS be tactful in doing this).

Why does anyone want to run a con, then?

If you get a good group of people, it is a hell of a lot of fun. It's hard work, but it's rewarding. You put on a show for some people who like the same thing you do, and they have fun. Reading people's tumblr posts and watching video reviews of Shatterdome ATL and seeing how much fun everyone had was just … it made 8 months of work worth every minute, every frustration.

You don't run a con for you. You run a con for the attendees.