This is the Registration Report for Midwest FurFest 2005. This marked the sixth Midwest FurFest and my fifth year running registration. You’d think I’d have things down pat by now, but I am always working on improving and making things run smoother. This is the third year that I’ve tried to put together a comprehensive Registration report (see reports for 2003 and 2004), and while it helps me sum up the year and make notes for next year, I also welcome any questions or comments anyone reading this might have as well.

The first big change from last year was that I brought in a new Assistant Registration Director, Neowolf. DaveQat did a fine job over the past three years and I consider him to be a fine friend. Neowolf has expressed an interest in eventually taking over Registration, something for which Dave had zero interest; that was the big qualifier for Neowolf. Neo has provided much valuable feedback in his first year and has brought a valuable fresh perspective to a system that had settled into a rut. Look for a lot of improvements next year based on his perspective and assistance.

Pre-Convention Planning
Midwest FurFest has earned a reputation as one of the best-organized conventions in furry fandom. The biggest way that we keep this reputation is through planning, planning, and more planning. Anyone who followed my LiveJournal from September onwards knows that MFF has had a high priority for me and I am happy to report that the many hours spent preparing really paid off this year.

We had the usual round of purchasing from our vendors. I used the same vendors this year as I did last year, with the sponsor carabiner/flashlight, registration bags, and staff thank-you badge holders coming from 4Imprint, the badge ribbons coming from Marco Meetings, the badge holders from Lone Star Badge, the sponsor cloisonné pins coming from Custom Pins, the engraved staff badges coming from A to Z Engraving, and the chains and stanchions coming from Indestructo Rental.

There were two items of note here: first off, several people mentioned problems with the quality of the badge ribbons, typically with peeling off the nonstick tape to expose the adhesive to stick it to their badge, only to find the adhesive peeled away with the nonstick tape. This is an unacceptable quality issue and I’m going to have to look into possible alternate suppliers for badge ribbons for next year, though Marco seems to be pretty much the least expensive supplier that I have found.

The second item was that on Wednesday before the convention, I was laying out the engraved badges and I realized I was short three badges. Even worse, they were the badges for the Guests of Honor. The fault for this was completely mine, as I had accidentally omitted them from the list of names. I called A to Z Engraving at 5:30 PM and spoke with the owner, Gary Nelson. After a bit of checking for possible badge stock, he said to e-mail him the information and the badges would be ready for pickup at their shop in Wauconda by 1 PM the next day. They did a fabulous job, and though they charged almost triple for the rush job, it was worth it ($27 instead of about $10 for three badges). Gary and his people at A to Z do fantastic work and I can’t recommend them highly enough.

Last year I had some problems with shipping of packages and having to go to the post office or FedEx depot. We avoided those problems entirely this year thanks to Neowolf agreeing to receive the packages at his home out in the Northwestern Suburbs. That was a major stress-reliever for me and I thank him and his wife for their assistance with that.

So, now that I had most of the items in hand needed to run registration, it was time to turn my attention to staffing. Usually, what I do is send out an e-mail to those who have worked Registration in the past asking if they were interested in helping out again. Once I know how many folks I have to work with, I determine if I need to recruit further and start contacting friends and friends of friends. Well, that’s how it normally works. What actually happened this year is that after I asked my Registration staff (twelve or so people) who was returning, I got an astonishing answer – all of them! Additionally, I was contacted by several people out of the blue saying they were interested in working Registration as well. I was faced with the bizarre problem of having too many people wanting to work Registration. I worked through who I had on my list and what their requirements were (when they could work, how many hours they could work) and that helped me winnow things down a bit. I apologize to those of you who I couldn’t fit in!

From the bottom of my heart, I want to thank all of the good folks who put in the time to make Registration the success that it was: Benjie, Cheesecake, Cobalt Fox, DaveQat, Foxen, Jackie (Takaza’s mom), Little Wolf, Osiris, Rama, Rasslor, Rollie, Rustitobuck, Shy Matsi, Synicism, Tsuki, and Woody. You guys are all awesome! As always, Tsuki, Rama, and Rasslor were my go-to guys for setup and teardown. Neowolf also jumped in and got a good handle on the system as well; between the four of them I wound up as a bystander to the whirlwind of activity every morning and evening.

The bag stuffing party that we have every Wednesday night before the convention went reasonably well this year. We had a decent turnout and we were able to start on time. Gene Breshears, one of our Guests of Honor, and his partner Michael joined us in the latter stages of the bag stuffing and we cheerfully put them to work (they know the routine all to well from their many years working for Conifur!). We were able to get most everything stuffed in about an hour and a half or so. We were very fortunate to have the two carts that I purchased for Registration this year; these made moving the many boxes of bags much more pleasant. Also, we had the good fortune of taking possession of the Mayoral Coat Check (in the lower foyer, where Registration was set up all weekend) on Wednesday night so we were able to take the boxes directly down there once they were full. This was a tremendous time-saver over the course of the weekend and I highly recommend we continue getting Mayoral Coat Check at the same time next year.

At The Convention
We used the same software this year that we had last year. It’s a fine, sturdy system, a homebrewed Pentium system running Fedora Core, Apache, Mambo (a PHP-based Content Management System), and a Registration database front end written by Rustitobuck. It has the advantages of being free (yay!), expandable to as many clients or printers as we can throw at it, and rock-solid and crash-resistant. Roho provided invaluable assistance in uploading the pre-convention database into the production server, and also wrote a last-minute modification to act as a flag for questionable individuals we know we want to talk to before we issue them a badge. We didn’t use thatr feature once we started issuing badges, but it’s nice to know the functionality is there if we need it.

We had a lot of hemming and hawing about where we would locate Registration on Thursday night. Last year we were in the Arlington Heights/Rolling Meadows rooms, but those were unavailable due to prior scheduling by the hotel. Regency E/F was available, but with Art Show and A/V setting up that would have left the rest of Regency Ballroom unavailable for any social function or mingling, and pretty much left Registration stuck out in the middle of nowhere with nothing going on around it. We had the Mayoral Ballroom available to us after 7:30 PM, so we bit the bullet and put Registration in Mayoral Foyer and had gaming and socializing in the Mayoral Ballroom (with mixed success – this needs improvement next year). As it turned out, this worked well. Things were a little tight when things got busy, but for the most part it was a good location and had the benefit that we could move all of the Registration supplies to one location when we loaded in and we didn’t have to move them around the rest of the weekend.

Setup went much more quickly than I had expected, and if we had had cash available for change earlier we could have opened about 45 minutes sooner than we did (no fault should be placed on our Treasurer, though – I had specified that we needed the change by 6:30 or so, and he was early for that). We opened at 6:13 PM and…not much. The first 20 minutes we were open, we registered five people. After that, word got around that we were open and the rush was on! We matched last year’s peak registration rate at around 6:45 PM, registering one person every 19.4 seconds, but that quickly dwindled as we made short work of any queue that formed (see the forthcoming traffic analysis for more). In the future, I would like to return to the green OPEN/red CLOSED sign at the top of the stairs to better communicate Registration’s status to our attendees.

Credit cards were much easier to deal with this year since we had the credit card terminal at Registration starting on Saturday. I know our attendees felt the same way, since we processed many more credit card transactions this year than last year.

The rest of the weekend went quite well. As typically happens, the schedule that I work so hard on before the convention became more of a loose guideline. To every Registration staffer’s credit, everyone was either on time or at least called in to let me know they were running late. The biggest problem (if it could be considered a problem) is that folks were inclined to stick around after their shifts, so I wound up with more help than I needed. We worked it out, though, and it gave people the opportunity to take the occasional break. For my part, I was gratified that Neowolf was inclined to spend more time around Registration than the 26 hours (!) I’d scheduled him for; this gave me the ability to rotate off more often and see a bit more of the convention than in the past.

I made a slight change in hours this year, staying open later on Friday evening (9 PM vs. last year’s 8 PM). We registered 14 people in the 8 PM hour, so that was definitely a good choice, as it led to fewer Temporary Badges being given out.

We had a slight problem with Temporary Badges this year, including a case on Friday night where a badge was “lost” and replaced, only the “lost” badge later turned up attached to an attendee. Security caught the ruse, though in the end it appears that the problem was miscommunication, not malice. Nevertheless, we implemented two new rules on Saturday night: each attendee’s real name goes (in ink) on the back of each Temporary Badge, and if you lose your Temporary Badge it costs another $20 for a replacement. As always, the Temporary Badges could be turned in when Registration opened the following day and the $20 deposit could be redeemed towards a membership. We need to revisit our Temporary Badge policy one more time this year and look into any other improvements that can be made.

After an impromptu brainstorming session on Sunday, Neowolf and I came up with a list of improvements to be considered for next year:

• New printers are needed. The existing printers are not feeding properly and at one point during the Friday morning rush we were down to one printer because the other was unusable. Additionally, each printer requires new cartridges every year (a cost of $60 per printer).
• We need a small UPS for the server so that it can survive brief power interruptions, as we had on Saturday afternoon when someone kicked the power cord. Fortunately, the database and file system survived the sudden power-down.
• We need a sign that delineates the schedule of membership rates and what the dividing lines are for minors and children.
• We need to revisit our lost badge policy. Should we charge for replacing a badge? This will require some discussion.
• We need to improve the online registration and on-site registration software. Ideally, the information entered online could go directly into the production database.
• We need a sign or some other attention-getting method of communicating to attendees important information such as not to hang things on the hotel room doors and other last-minute information.
• Consider getting lanyards for people’s badges next year.
• Add a checkbox to the on-site Registration front end for Friday/Saturday/Sunday Only that will automatically enter the price into the proper field and add the XXXDAY ONLY label to the person’s badge
• Do we need a policy for what to do when the address on the person’s ID doesn’t match the one in the database? (Perhaps enter the ID number [i.e. DL #] into the comments field?)
• Include in the Temporary Badges instructions explicitly that the Temporary Badge deposit will be applied to the person’s membership the following day.
• Consider getting a couple of USB mice or trackballs for those who find navigating a laptop’s trackpad slows them down too much.

So that’s my Registration report for Midwest FurFest 2005. Thanks again to all of our outstanding staff – we would not have been able to pull this off without the help of each and every one of you!

Look for my Traffic and Demographic Analysis Report in the next few days.