So, Midwest Furfest. Right.

I’ll skip the chronological play-by-play because it would be too long and quite frankly a lot of it is a jumble in my mind. The overview is that this year I was reminded that conventions are a whole lot like sausage-making and the passing of legislation: If you want to enjoy the final product, don’t look too closely at the process required to make it happen. If you had asked me at the end of the weekend if folks had a good time at the convention (in the absence of any outside input), I honestly would not have been able to tell you. All I knew was that everyone involved worked their asses off and after that all you can do is hope for the best. After the fact, all I have heard was rave reviews, so I suppose we must be doing something right. First, the highlights from Registration (since that was my job):

We introduced a whole lot of new stuff at Registration this year: bags for the con book and stuff, restaurant guides, spiffy new sponsor goodies. Somehow it all worked, but it wasn’t easy. As an example: We needed to print 800 or so copies of the restaurant guide. As we’re driving up through Indiana, somewhere south of Indianapolis, at around noon on Wednesday before the con, Takaza called around to check and found out that our source for printing them (through no fault of his own) was only able to print 360 of them. Panic time, considering the guides had to go in the registration bags, and we were going to have a bag-stuffing party at 8 PM that night. Takaza used some amazing cell-phone-fu to get quotes from three different printers, explain the design we were looking for to the printer, have datahawk tell Donaldson to e-mail the file to the printer, and assure the printer that we would be there to pick up the guides before they closed at 5 PM. And somehow, everything came off without a hitch.

The sponsor goodies were well-received which really made me feel good. The badge holders seemed to be more highly prized than the pins, which rather surprised me. I thought that the printing was too small on the holders and I wasn’t too fond of the design. but hey – if folks liked it, I’m happy (and I’ve still got some extras, too, due to a bizarre mix-up with the vendor that I won’t go into here except to say that if you are looking for customized printed stuff like this, 4imprint is definitely the way to go! If there’s any problem with the order, they will bend over backwards to make it right!). I’ll probably be posting some polls here in the next few weeks to see what folks think might be good sponsor tschokes people might like for next year.

Registration worked well in the space I had selected. It was a bit cramped at times, but once we got everyone in place and worked out a system for distributing badges, bags, and sponsor packets as people needed them, we rocked. The registration software that rustitobuck wrote was perfect – we turned it on Thursday night and turned it off Sunday night and didn’t see any glitches in between. Most importantly, we didn’t keep anyone waiting – Thursday night we had a full queue, maybe 30-40 people in line, with more coming in every minute. We cleared the queue within an hour, and from the informal polling I did it didn’t sound like anyone had to wait more than 10 or 15 minutes. This made me very happy. Special thanks to Rusty for sitting in for Thursday night rush hour, providing us with four Registration stations.

We had enough of almost everything, without to many leftovers. I had ordered 125 of everything for sponsors, and we came in with 108 sponsors total. We had 720 or so Registration bags prepared and 685 attendees. The only thing we ran out of was badge blanks – I had printed 720 of them, but I had not allowed for printing errors, waste, reprints, etc. The last five or six badges we printed had to be on yellow minor badges, marked very clearly “ADULT”. I’m not too upset about that.

Then, there’s the numbers. Looking back at an e-mail I sent to the staff mailing list a week before the con, I wrote, “Right now I’m leaning to estimates of 575-600 people total, and roughly 100 sponsors. Let’s see how much crow I have to eat a week from now.” Well, if I have to be wrong, what a way to go. We wildly exceeded our expectations this year, seeing a 33.5% increase in attendance over last year (as Aureth pointed out last night, we are now third in attendance for furry conventions, behind Anthrocon and Further Confusion. Eek!). Such a growth in attendance doesn’t seem sustainable, but if it is this means we’ll be looking at over 900 attendees next year. I’d rather not think about that too much just now, thanks. Anyway, I’ll be doing a demographic breakdown of the attendance within the next few days and we’ll see what that has to tell us.

Highlights from the rest of the convention:

Great con suite, as everyone has said. Always seemed to be busy whenever I stopped by.

Security stew. Wow. Made with meat, meat, meat, meat, meat, a carrot, an onion, and some more meat. It really hit the spot and carried me through some times when I was dying for food and didn’t have time to get it.

That late-night security duty. Yeah, I bitched about it (and I’ll continue to bitch about it), and three hours of sleep is NOT enough for me, ever, but it made me feel good to know that I was able to help out when needed.

Having breakfast Thursday morning with Harry Bear in the hotel restaurant. Sort of the “calm before the storm” feeling. Harry is always good company, and knowing he was there meant that the con was about to start 🙂

Our amazing con staff. Every single one of y’all were fantastic – we had a big influx of attendees and we rose to meet the challenge. The only drawback is that now we’ve raised the bar from what folks expect from Midwest Furfest, and we’re going to have to meet or exceed those expectations next year. I know we can do it, though.

Getting to see and talk to so many of my friends (I’m not even going to try to capture them all here, but they know who they are). I just wish I could have had more time to spend with you all, but you know how it goes. Special thanks go out to ramalion – first, for stopping by Registration and chatting – I enjoyed that – but more importantly for keeping his head and dealing with a difficult situation in a calm, levelheaded manner. Way to go!

And then, Monday. The con was over, everyone was dispersing in the lobby. Lunch at the Olive Garden with steviemaxwell, Patcat, Linnaeus, Datahawk, Rustitobuck, and mirkowuff was delightful, as was relaxing watching the new Harry Potter movie afterwards. It was the perfect way to wind down from the weekend, and exactly what I needed.

I’ll post more of a recap from the past week in a bit. I need to get some coffee…