POLL: Ideas for improving fest participation (CONCLUSION)
Alright, the poll I posted up earlier this week has been up for a few days, Iāve received quite a few responses on it, so Iāve decided to go ahead and close it. Thank you so much to everyone who took the time to respond! You all ended up really helping me out a lot! I greatly appreciate it. <3
So now that Iāve taken some time to go through all of your responses, Iāve come to a couple conclusions regarding the direction of this fest that I wanted to share with all of you! (Donāt worry, all good things, hahaha.)
Firstly, Iāve decided to forget the Facebook idea for now.Ā The responses I received to those first two questions were pretty much a unanimous no, and I also received a few detailed comments that brought up the same issues I was worried about with going in that direction. So yeah, probably not the best thing for the fest at this point in time. And Iām honestly happy about that, because I wasnāt sure I wanted to go through having to figure out how to use FB for that purpose. xD As a couple of you mentioned, IĀ couldĀ open a general Ron/Draco group on FB and just advertise the fest when it comes up - but Iām going to wait on that for now, just because I need to justify to myself having it open all year when itāll be dedicated to a specific rarepair. Definitely a great idea!! Just gonna hold off till Iām sure.
The second very important thing I decided was I need to make sure Iām advertising better on Dreamwidth!Ā A few of the suggestions I received was to open a Dreamwidth account - of which weāve already had for awhile now. (The longest have been LJ/DW, with Tumblr being new last year.) So that really opened my eyes to the fact that I havenāt been doing a great job of advertising on that platform, haha. Now, Iām not that familiar with Dreamwidth. Iām much more versed in LJ. I mainly just use DW to mirror my personal and fest blogs. So going into Fest 2020, itāll be on my list to research the best ways to advertise there. (If any of you know of any good communities I could do that with, feel free to send them my way!)
Lastly, we have some ideas for the future that Iām going to ponder more.Ā I had a couple people bring up places like Pillowfort and Twitter (although I donāt think Iāll ever go with Twitter because quite frankly I hate it, hahaha), as well as WordPress, and even the idea of a mailing list to send out upcoming fest reminders to those who have participated in the past. I definitely love that last idea, and I may even utilize it as soon as the coming round. As far as the others, they are definitely on my list to research more, so weāll see about those in the future.
So essentially, nothing much is changing as far as the platforms weāre using. Iām just going to make sure weāre broadcasting as far as we can!Ā Weāll still be on LJ/DW/Tumblr with fics hosted on AO3, because I do believe thatās the best thing for us right now. Itās likely a rarepair issue, as I brought up before, which is totally fine! I love our close little rares community weāve got going on here - I just want to make sure anyone whoās interested in participating is aware of the festās existence in general, which has been an issue Iāve run into in the past. I think with me focusing more on when/where Iām advertising, we may be able to combat that better this time around. One of the places I already know Iām going to advertise more is this new HP Rare Pairs Discord I joined a few months back. Weāve got someĀ amazingĀ people on there, and definitely some Dron love! I do believe that members are allowed to invite new people, so if anyoneās interested in joining, please let me know!
Once again, thank you so so much to everyone who took the time to help me sort all this out! Youāre all awesome. Iāll be coming out with the usual little announcement/schedule of events post in October - so until then, I hope youāre all doing great, and I canāt wait to see you for Ron/Draco Fest 2020!
All the love! <3
@ohlookagaydracoā (fangqueen)
