Con-less on the East Coast

As the days tick down to the grand-daddy con of them all, Gen-Con, I again lament the fact the East Coast of Canada is devoid of any real gaming conventions.  To my knowledge we have one convention here that is primarily an anime convention with a sprinkling of gaming going on but nothing really devoted to rpg (or comic) goodness.  It is times like this that I let my mind wander and think about what it would take to get a convention on the go here on the East Coast.

Where to start?  New conventions need to figure out everything from the ground up but you can probably steal ideas from other successful conventions and apply them to your situation.   A convention is a business after all, in that it has to be sustainable and not cost the organizers their life savings to run.  The business has to market to customers, provide product and/or service to the customer and look after all the backend arrangements that make the convention run.

So, what do you need?  Again, with no con running experience myself I am thinking that you need to find a location to have a convention.  Starting small you might want to use a Student Union building if you go to university or college.  Setting up a recognized club at the school beforehand will also mean you get a good rate on rooms or perhaps even get some for free depending on when you run your event.  Otherwise, you can partner with a hotel to encourage those travelling to the con to stay at the facility hosting the event in exchange for a reduced rate on the larger rooms you will need to run the event.  Other options are community centres and schools.

Timing of your event is important as well.  When will you hold this event?  If you are appealing to those in school, try to plan around the crunch times at university so that your target market is more likely to take the time out of their schedule to attend.  Travel can be an issue on the East Coast so weather might be a factor in your area that you want to consider.  If your target market is covering a wide area, nothing will kill your attendance like a blizzard so try to plan for a less volatile month.

Okay, we have a time and place.  Now we need to figure out how long the convention will be.  For a start-up convention, running a Friday night, all day Saturday event probably is as large as you want to go.  In fact, only running on Saturday might cut your costs significantly.  If you have a successful event, you will gain some recognition and then can perhaps expand.  Better to start small and build up than crash and burn because you were too ambitious.

While you are looking at the above particulars, one important aspects of the convention must not be overlooked: the games!  You will need to find people to run events at the convention for people to do once they get there.  This is where your extensive list of friends will come in.  Get everyone you know to run something at some point.  Advertising will be key here to gather others to run events once you have pestered and exhausted your own list of friends.  Also, are you going to have any panels or guests are your convention?  These events will all have to be scheduled and costs of any guests will have to factored into the costs of the con so that you don’t go broke putting on the event.

Now that you have all your events in place and your schedule drawn up you will need to advertise your event.  Traditional print advertising works but can be expensive.  You will have to do some of that but target gaming and comic shops with posters.  Set up a web page, Facebook groups and e-mail newsletters that you can keep people updated with.  You can run polls and get feedback from potential attendees of what they would like to see at your con.  After the event is over you can get feedback on how things went so you can start planning next year’s event. 

Again, as I said, I have never run or organized a convention but these are the things that I think I would do if I were going to do it.  Anybody have any other suggestions, pointers? Is there anyone out here on the East Coast that is planning an event?