This is the final report on Registration at Midwest FurFest 2004, its fifth year of existence and my fourth year running Registration. Although I’m posting an executive summary of this to the staff mailing list, this is the comprehensive version. I’m going to be pretty detailed here, for two reasons: 1.) As a method of notes to myself for future years, and 2.) In the hopes that this might be useful information to other furry, and fannish in general, conventions. Any comments, suggestions, or constructive criticism is welcome!

Pre-Convention

A big part of pre-convention preparation is gathering Registration materials – the stuff that you give to your attendees and sponsors when they register. Aside from the periodic mailing of postcards to acknowledge pre-registrations, this is what takes the most time before the convention for me. Here are the vendors who supplied us our registration materials:

• 4Imprint – Sponsor coolers, Registration bags, and thank-you keychains for staff and panelists. These guys are fantastic. I’ve been using them for four years and they have been very flexible in meeting our delivery dates, and the one time things went wrong, their customer service department bent over backwards to FedEx items overnight to the hotel so they would be there in time. Highly recommended.
• Marco Meetings – Badge ribbons. Fast delivery times, reasonable prices, and nice carryover of custom dies from year to year. They also carry lots of other convention supplies, but the ribbons are all I’ve ever really used them for.
• Lone Star Badge – Name badge holders. Great prices for essentially a commodity item. Over the past few years, MFF and MFM have done a joint order with them, and it’s worked out pretty well.
• Custom Pins – Sponsor pins. They have made all of our cloisonné’ pins over the last four years. A good-quality product, though over the last year they were bought out by someone else. Communication is still a bit wonky, but I’d still use them again next year because the finished product is excellent.
• A to Z Engraving (Wauconda, IL) – Staff badges. Great prices on short-run badges. They’re a small operation, and thus can turn around badges very quickly, if need be. The owner is also a very nice guy. I found them by way of Capricon, for whom A to Z had made badges a few years back, so they are definitely fan-friendly.
• Indestructo Rental – My source for chains and stanchions and cable racetracks. Very friendly folks, and quite willing to work with small outfits like us. If you need convention rental stuff in the Chicago area, I highly recommend Indestructo.

So. That gets that out of the way, now let’s talk about how things went. Obviously, with so many of the vendors not local to the Chicago area, a large amount of shipping is going to be going on. I discovered much to my chagrin that living in a condo in the city is not conducive to receiving packages gracefully. In fact, finally getting everything in hand required a couple of trips to the UPS depot in Franklin Park, a package getting bounced back to a vendor then redelivered to a more reliable address (you’re a life saver, chouette!), and leaving work early to pick up an Express Mail package from the post office five days after it was shipped overnight. Definitely no fun, and next year I’ll be better prepared to deal with problems like this.

I have found that one of the biggest things I can do to save myself a lot of grief at the convention is to line up as much as I possibly can before the convention even starts. This is especially true of staffing. Midwest FurFest has something of an odd command structure: department heads and seconds are definitely staff; from there on down the line between gopher (volunteer) and staff is somewhat blurry, sometimes separated only by who gets which ribbon at the convention. Almost everyone who works Registration is considered staff, though it seems each year I pick up a hard-working gopher who puts in an insane number of hours and who I subsequently draft for next year’s Registration staff. Nice how that works, eh? 🙂 Last year it was Cheesecake, this year Robert Alley, aka Government Drone, who put in five hours on Thursday night to help us kick off the convention.

So, where do I find staff for Registration? Some are friends who I ask for assistance. Daveqat did a fine job recruiting some new faces as well. Some were folks who helped with other departments before the con and were recommended my way as a reliable volunteer. And a simple open call in my LiveJournal brought a surprising number of responses. Unfortunately, I’m ashamed to say some of the those folks I didn’t get back to (sorry freakylynx!). I attempted to set up a schedule before the convention where we had adequate coverage for all four days Registration would be open, and at the same time get everyone the ten hours they needed for a membership rollover. Of course, no schedule survives contact with the convention, and mine was no exception. I overscheduled several times during the convention, but between sending folks away and my staff just dropping by to fill in as needed, things went amazingly well.

I want to thank my second in command DaveQat for his help, and I want to salute my Registration staff for 2004: Osiris, rustitobuck, Synicism, Rollie, Cheesecake, Kitfox, Feren, shy_matsi, Shockwave, Foxen Griffox, little_wolf, Benjie, and Mariner Raccoon. A very special thanks to the folks that I leaned on kind of heavily because I know they’re really good at making Registration work: Rama, Rasslor, and Tsuki. Without your help, guys, Registration would not have run nearly as smoothly as it did, and I would have been a basket case. And Rama, you of course own my soul should I ever come within 100 feet of Mephit Furmeet.

Finally in the pre-convention preparations is the Bag Stuffing Party. This is the last-minute ritual in which all of the registration bags are stuffed, the sponsor goodies packed, and ideally any membership packets prepared. The latter didn’t happen, unfortunately – more on that later. Thank you to takaza, linnaeus, datahawk, unclevlad, neowolf2, aureth, Straif, scribble_fox, and Firewing! We had some issues with bag stuffing being delayed for over an hour by a flyer that that was supposed to be there but never showed up. In the future, I also need to specify that all flyers to go in the Registration bag must be approved by the chairman in advance, as the flyer in question sounds like it would not have been acceptable anyway. Also, I need to give better thought to moving the boxes of Registration materials once they have been prepared; we lucked out this year because Feren dropped off the Art Show carts early, but if we hadn’t had those getting all of the boxes of bags would have been a real pain in the butt. Likewise, while the sponsor coolers were nifty, I should have had a large bag or box or something in which to carry them – they were pretty much consigned to an untidy pile and were generally difficult to move around all weekend.

At Convention

The core of making any convention’s Registration run smoothly is the Registration Database. We have been extremely fortunate to have an excellent Registration database over the past four years, and that has made MFF’s Registration as fast as it has ever been. This year the registration system was completely rewritten from scratch using a PHP-based system. Unfortunately, because of various issues this year, the newly rewritten system was not delivered complete until 3 PM Thursday, and we had no technical support on it available on Friday. You’ll understand if this made me extremely upset in the days leading up to the convention, to the point where I was not sleeping well and was quite irritable. This was slightly offset by the fact that the system worked almost exactly the way it should have, except for a few annoying bugs. Also, because it was delivered so late, the staff packets I had hoped to prepare on Wednesday night instead had to be made somewhat frantically on Thursday afternoon.

The Registration database was designed to run on a server running Apache, so any client can attach to the network, fire up a web browser, and you’re off and running. Because I’ve been trying to keep the system low-cost, we have two older HP Deskjet 648C printers, and six laptops of various speeds and configurations, none with a processor faster that P166 or running an operating system more recent than Windows 98. The printers are slow, but reasonably reliable. The laptops…well, let’s face it, the laptops are utter crap. And this year, because DaveQat, Synicism, and Rusty were kind enough to donate the use of their laptops, we had a system that actually was fast. On Thursday night we set up with six laptops, plus someone on the server console. At peak processing, the server handled everything extremely well; it turns out that the choke point was the printers. I’m not sure how to speed those up but rest assured it’s at the top of my list for next year. See my forthcoming traffic analysis for more information on printing and processing times.

So, Thursday night. In a lot of ways it’s annoying that the entire Registration system needs to be designed around an hour or so on Thursday night – that is our peak time for Registrations, and my goal is to make things as fast as possible. I deployed the maximum number of staff on Thursday night, and it turned out to be complete overkill – not that that’s a bad thing. Likewise, I tried to expand beyond the Mayoral Ballroom Prefunction area – that’s the area at the foot of the stairs where we have normally set up. This year we were up in Arlington Heights/Rolling Meadows – two rooms right off the main hall. The downside is that we didn’t get possession of Arlington Heights until 5 PM, and Rolling Meadows (aka the Fursuit Lounge for the rest of the con) was set up for the department heads meeting with the hotel staff at 4 PM. We set up the Registration server on the counter in Rolling Meadows and Rusty printed off all of the staff badges that we needed for the staff packets. DaveQat and Sotiris went to work stuffing the staff packets, while I worked on getting things sorted out in preparation for our taking possession of Arlington Heights. The hotel meeting went off at 4 PM without any problems, and was wrapped up within 20 minutes. I made some useful contacts there that that served me well for the rest of the weekend, particularly Jonathan, the Front Desk Manager.

Once the meeting was over the air wall between Rolling Meadows and Arlington Heights was stowed and we could really get to work. I designed a table layout on the fly, with the assistance of a hotel facilities employee who was friendly if not always quite conversant in English. We had our tables in place by 5 PM, and Rasslor did a splendid job of directing our eager volunteers in setting up the chains and stanchions. Rusty set up the Registration system and I worked on getting all of the signage and forms in place. A line formed outside of the room, although we assured people that we would not be open until 7 PM. We got everything into place by 6:00 PM and ran a few tests, then threw open the doors at 6:15. (Yeah, I letting slip one of my little secrets here: I always set my target open time exactly one hour before the published opening time. That way if you’re late, no one will notice, and if you’re on time, people will think you’re wonderfully efficient 🙂 People rushed in and filled the queue…halfway. Once the initial clump of people were registered, we never really saw more than two or three people in line for the rest of the night. Yet for over preparedness! We really could have pulled down the chains and stanchions by 7:30, but I kept waiting for the rush of people that never came. I’ll talk about traffic patterns and handling times in my post about data analysis, still to come.

As for the rest of the weekend: Credit cards were a slight problem. We didn’t have a credit card terminal on Thursday night because we didn’t want to pay the exorbitant fee the hotel whacks us for a phone line. On Friday we were supposed to have a phone line in the Mayoral Coat Closet, but after 10 AM and three visits from hotel maintenance to try to find which socket had been turned up, I finally said “Screw it” and elected to go with the manual credit card machine (aka the knucklebuster). We stuck with that for the rest for the weekend, and it worked reasonably well, though sometimes people forgot to put the three-digit code from the back of the cards on the credit card slips. The two big issues that we ran into were a shortage of credit card slips (resolved when Jonathan from the front desk graciously supplied us with some of the hotel’s), and the greater issue: because many people were paying with debit cards, when they checked out with those same cards on Sunday, the hotel put a large block on their cards. When we tried to run the slips Sunday afternoon we got about $400 of declined charges. Feren was going to re-run these last week, and hopefully most if not all of them went through. If not, then we get to turn over a couple of folks to Mirko to shake down for the money they owe us. For next year we need to decide whether it’s worth it to have the credit card terminal Thursday and Friday or juggle around the declined charges (or run them on Saturday night? Oh, I’m sure Art Show would love that idea…)

A couple of small, random things: Staff packet pickup in Operations seemed to work very well, and decreased the workload at Registration slightly. We’ll definitely be repeating that next year. Dealers’ badge pickup unfortunately did not go as well as I’d hoped; with the late arrival of the Registration system, I wasn’t able to pre-print the dealers badges since I had limited time and staff badges took priority. I apologize to Brendan Lonehawk and Wyldekyttin for this and I hope that I can get things to work a little more smoothly next year. I trimmed our hours of operation this year, closing at 5 PM on Saturday and 3 PM on Sunday, and that worked surprisingly well. That decreased stress on my staff and kept them for sitting at an empty table doing nothing.

On Friday, we closed at 8 PM, as we did last year. It seems that we probably could have stayed open at least another hour since we sold 17 Temporary Badges that night. (Temporary Badges are badges which are sold for $20 at Operations – they expire at 9 AM the following day, and if you are pre-registered you get your $20 back, or if not it gets applied to your membership) This was my major screwup of the convention. I did not account for the fact that Artists Alley was open late, nor that 2’s show was badging for minors. The instructions that I gave to Operations did not include checking for proof of age, nor even collecting any information at all on the attendee. This was also a problem on Saturday, when I realized the magnitude of the problem. I made a brief announcement in the Artists Alley that all possessors of Temporary Badges were to be considered minors, but I doubt that was particularly effective. This will be remedied next year, and I will have a better system in place. I apologize in advance to the folks in Operations for the extra work, but we’ll work out something.

Sponsors this year received a tremendous bang for their buck, I believe. The coolers, though similar to what FC did earlier this year on the face of it, turned out to be a big hit. People really liked the munchies that we packed into them, and labeled them “convention survival kits” (not what I’d considered calling them, but hey it worked). I didn’t hear much feedback on the pins, probably because they were buried in with all the other stuff in the cooler. I just hope people didn’t throw them away! The feedback on the T-shirt has been generally good, and according to Off-World Designs, 89 sponsors out of 109 sponsors picked up their T-shirts. The sponsor brunch is where we really hit the jackpot, though. It cost us a few more bucks than last year (not sure, but I think it was $42 or so per person, after tax and gratuity), but it was more than worth it. On the strength of this alone I think we’re definitely going to see more sponsors next year.

About the only other thing I wanted to mention is that in the several dozen convention reports I’ve read on LiveJournal since the convention, very few if any of them mention Registration. This makes me very happy 🙂 My goal is to be that quick stop you make before going on to enjoy the rest of the convention, and I think we did an excellent job of that this year.

And then there’s Midwest FurFest 2005. First off, I’m open to any suggestions or advice anyone might have for next year. Here’s some of the thoughts I’ve had:

• I hope to work with Art Show to more closely integrate the Registration database with the Art Show database. I think this will make things easier for everyone involved.
• We need a better system for flagging registrations as they come in, to catch media, known problem children, etc. Maybe set it so that you can’t print a badge with a special password?
• I need to run a nightly printout when we close Registration of badge names, badge numbers, and real names. Copies of this will go to Operations and Security. This will prevent some of the late-night runs I had to make to fire up the Registration server to obtain this information.
• Improve the Temporary Badges system.
• As much as I like helping the convention, this year we put over $4,000 on my credit card. To be fair, Mirko worked to get us reimbursed extremely quickly, something for which I am quite grateful; however, I need to work with some of our vendors to set up accounts that will bill MFF directly and cut me out of the loop.

So that’s my report on Midwest FurFest 2004. Thanks again to all of my outstanding staff – we would not have been able to pull this off without the help of each and every one of you!

I’m going to take a short break and I then go to work on writing the data analysis report. Look for that by the end of the week or so.