And now it’s come to this: After seven years, my final Midwest FurFest Registration Report.

Executive Summary: Proper Prior Planning Prevents P*ss-Poor Performance.

In hindsight, I can see that it is a good thing that this was my last year as Registration Director for Midwest FurFest. A whole lot of the planning that went into this year fell into the category of “let’s do it like we did last year”, which is great for maintaining the status quo but also stifles creativity and innovation. If you don’t change, you don’t improve. So while everything went well this year and there were no complaints, I’m still leaving somewhat dissatisfied, but glad things are being turned over into good hands.

Pre-Convention Planning

As opposed to last year’s huge surge in pre-registrations, this year’s numbers were a bit more typical. The rate at which people pre-register is always subject to a large number of variables (weather, gas prices, etc.); this year the fact that the Hyatt sold out in August had an appreciable impact on our pre-registration rate, leveling out things a bit September through November. I don’t think it affected our final attendance, but it did make things a bit more difficult to predict. By the close of pre-registration, my predictions were for between 1,650 and 1,750. I was right on the money.

This year’s sponsor surprise gift was the product of a lot of hemming and hawing and debate. We finally arrived at the custom sketchbook idea after sorting through a lot of samples and getting a whole lot of sky-high quotes. Surprisingly, the provider of the sketchbooks was Cafepress. They were able to supply a nice spiral-bound sketchbook with a custom cover for a very reasonable price. We supplemented this with a black velvet bag with a nifty silver tiger-skull-and-crossbones design done by Torakhan (Arthur Dreese). In that bag we put silver and gold “booty” (milk and dark chocolate coins) as well as this year’s sponsor cloisonn‚ pin (a lovely piece with artwork by our Guest of Honor, Jill0r). Top that off with a pair of lovely sponsor prints by Jill0r and Chilly, our fabulous sponsor brunch, and a T-shirt with a great design by Chilly, I’m very happy with what we were able to provide our sponsors this year.

The last item, the sponsor T-shirt, apparently did cause some problems, though. Apparently Off-World Designs ran out of some sizes of the convention T-shirt and the demand for replacements was small enough that they didn’t intend to run off anymore. Unfortunately, this meant that a couple sponsors who pr-registered did not get their T-shirts. This is completely unacceptable. Fortunately, Linnaeus had an excellent solution to the problem: upgrade them to embroidered shirts at the convention’s expense and mail it to them after the convention. Next year, though, we’ll need to find a better way to handle things to make sure that pre-registered sponsors get their T-shirts so that no one walks away empty-handed.

As an aside, I had an entertaining e-mail conversation with our sales representative at the vendor who provided the velvet bags. He was intrigued by the convention name and the bag design, and we had a long back-and-forth conversation about “What is furry fandom?” The upshot is that I may have gotten Mephit Furmeet a new attendee next year!

I can’t finish this part of the report without making mention of a new face on Midwest FurFest staff. Dexcat jumped in with both feet and took over not only the design of the Restaurant Guide but also all of the registration printing (attendee badge blanks, at the door registration forms, etc.). He did a fantastic job at a cost well below last year’s. Well done! I look forward to working with him and Mirko in Publications in the coming year.

For the computer system this year we kept everything pretty much the same. Rustitobuck worked hard on Wednesday night before the convention to whip everything into shape, and in fact did a sterling job of providing support throughout the convention. Registration would not have been the success that it was without his efforts. We did unfortunately run into some snags, mainly hardware related. On Thursday night we had printer problems that necessitated rebooting the Registration server five or six times, a process that slowed things down a bit. Many thanks to all of our attendees who were so patient as we worked out the bugs! On Saturday and Sunday we had issues with our minor badge printer, but fortunately traffic was light enough that we were able to swap out badge stock as needed. I’m not sure if the problem was with the programming (which is unlikely – I watched as Rusty checked over everything and it seemed to be working OK) or if it’s a hardware problem, possibly with a bad USB cable. This will need to be addressed next year before the convention, most certainly.

The one new hardware addition this year was a new credit card terminal, a First Data FD100. This is a slick little device that made processing credit cards and closing out at the end of the day exceedingly simple. It also solved the problem of having only one terminal, which means a single point of failure; this way we were able to process credit cards electronically in both the Art Show and at Registration on Sunday. Thanks to Takaza for ordering and programming the new terminal, as well as upgrading our old terminal with an additional PIN pad.

Registration staffing this year was just plain amazing. I had help coming out of the woodwork. Once again Registration rivaled Security for the largest staff of the convention, but because of this we were able to put ten people in front of laptops on Thursday night and burn through an astonishing 625 registrations in five hours. I was delighted also that when people couldn’t make their scheduled shifts, they handled it amongst themselves to make sure that we had adequate coverage. This is why MFF’s Registration staff rocks, and I’m really going to miss working closely with these folks. Many, many, many thanks to every single one of you: Bullet, Chanur, Cheesecake, Cobalt Fox, DaveQat, Drew, Ford Shepherd, Kellic J. Tiger, Little Wolf, Moira, Osiris, Rama, Rollie, Rusty, Shy Matsi, Street, Tozier, and Woody. These folks are the heart of Midwest FurFest Registration, and make sure you say thanks the next time you see them!

Finally, I should make a note about the Wednesday night bag stuffing. Every year, the Wednesday before the convention we have a “Bag Stuffing Party” where we lay out all of the Registration materials and folks fill the Registration bags and put them into boxes. Maybe it’s a consequence of folks arriving earlier for the convention, maybe it’s getting the word out more, maybe it’s because we had a bigger space to work in, but while we started out slow with just a few people soon we had dozens of folks in there toiling away! What has in the past taken several hours I think we wrapped up in a little over 45 minutes. Thanks to everyone for their help!

At the Convention

We decided to try something a little different at the Thursday Night Mixer this year. While we’ve done ice cream and cotton candy in the past, we decided to go a different route: a mashed potato bar! The hotel provided a selection of white and sweet mashed potatoes as well as a variety of toppings – caramelized onions, bacon, cheese, and other goodies – served in martini glasses, and accompanied by The Most Expensive Fruit Punch in the World. The reception was…mixed. Of the people I talked to, half of them thought it was a cool idea, the other half were confused by the concept. Still, I think we will continue to try new and nifty things for the Thursday Night Mixer, assuming it’s not insanely expensive.

As mentioned above, Thursday night Registration went very well (and combining it with the mixer for the second year in a row worked well too – we’ll be keeping this idea, I think). I think we fixed last year’s issues with making terminal available to only sponsors, or only pre-registered attendees, but we still have lingering problems with sponsors not getting their materials when they register. Maybe have someone whose sole responsibility is to give sponsors their materials? (And Mwalimu, who stepped in at the last moment, did a sterling job with helping in this regard!)

As for the other typical items of concern, I’m pleased to say things appeared to have run smoothly. Temporary badges were handled well by Operations and setup and teardown went very smoothly each day, with the final teardown being handled extremely efficiently thanks to the dedicated Registration staff.

Normally this is where I would make a nice bulleted list of things that could be improved next year, but since I won’t be running registration next year, I don’t think it’s really my place to do that.

Traffic Analysis

Good news! We got the traffic data fixed this year, so you get more geeky graphs from me. I am extremely happy with the traffic flow that we had at Registration this year, with the exception of the aforementioned rebooting issues on Thursday night. You can see that we did pretty darned well, hitting a maximum of 5.5 registrations per minute on Thursday night and 5.2 registrations per minute on Friday morning. Oh yes, we did indeed rock.

As expected, we’re seeing an increasing number of attendees showing up on Thursday night. We need to be a little better prepared for the descending hordes and look into maybe giving folks more to do (but we are NOT going to become a four day con!).

Taking a historical look at our attendance, you can see that we’re still maintaining a healthy growth rate, with our attendance up over 18% from last year, though nowhere near the staggering 34% increase that we saw in 2006.

	2000	2001	2002	2003	2004	2005	2006	2007
Total attendees (staff excluded)	446	482	639	748	885	1008	1339	1607
Staff	27	29	46	52	74	58	83	83
Total attendees (staff included)	473	511	685	800	959	1066	1422	1690
Percent increase in attendance	—	8.10%	32.50%	16.80%	19.90%	11.20%	33.40%	18.85%
Pre-registered attendees (sponsors included)	n/a	212	344	386	446	559	769	887
Pre-registered sponsors	n/a	51	69	64	66	56	96	97
At-the-Door sponsors	n/a	34	26	19	24	43	42	54
Staff sponsors	n/a	11	13	6	19	8	12	6
Total sponsors	37	85	108	83	109	107	150	151
% Sponsors	7.80%	16.60%	15.80%	10.40%	11.40%	10.00%	10.50%	8.93%
% Pre-registered	n/a	41.50%	50.20%	48.30%	46.50%	52.40%	54.10%	52.49%

The slight drop in pre-registration rate might be due to the Hyatt selling out so early, but it’s a small enough change that that is probably only one of many possible factors. The relatively static number of sponsors is a little concerning though. Perhaps in the coming year we can do a better job of showing on our website exactly what we give our sponsors, and (as we have done in prior years but did not do this year) have a better display of all of the sponsor gifts that we offer.

As usual the final attendance figures here are slightly different from those announced at closing ceremonies. This is because I have had time to go through and weed our duplicate records, dummy records, etc.

On a final note, if you take the data from the last three years and do a linear best fit to the curve, you’ll find that it is a very reasonable expectation that Midwest FurFest will cross the 2,000-attendee mark next year. A number is just a number, though – we will still be the same convention that everyone knows and (hopefully) loves…just a wee bit bigger.

Demographic Analysis

The geographic distribution of attendees breaks down like this:

	2000	2001	2002	2003	2004	2005	2006	2007
Midwest	66%	70%	66%	66%	63%	66%	59%	55%	(IL, WI, IN, MI, MN, OH, MO, IA, NE)
Northeast	6%	8%	5%	6%	5%	4%	6%	4%	(NH, VT, MA, NY, CT, RI)
Mid-Atlantic	5%	5%	5%	4%	5%	5%	6%	6%	(PA, MD, VA, WV)
South	n/a	12%	12%	11%	9%	12%	13%	12%	(NC, SC, GA, FL, AL, TN, KY, MS, LA, AR, TX)
Canada	n/a	3%	4%	4%	6%	4%	4%	5%	(All Provinces)
West Coast	7%	3%	4%	5%	7%	5%	7%	7%	(CA, OR, WA)
East Coast	15%	16%	14%	14%	14%	13%	17%	15%	(ME, NH, VT, MA, RI, CT, NY, PA, DE, MD, VA, NC, SC, GA, FL)
International	–	–	–	–	–	0.60%	1.00%	1.70%	(Non-US or Canada)

With the continuing fall in percentage of Midwestern attendees I think that it’s clear the Midwest FurFest is now a national convention. We continue to draw more attendees from Canada, with 54% more Canadians attending that last year (I guess monetary parity is good for something!). Finally, we saw more new faces from overseas than ever before, with attendees from Australia, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Mexico, Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.

This concludes my Registration Reports for Midwest FurFest for the foreseeable future. Will I write something similar as chairman next year? Tune in and find out!

I want to close by thanking everyone who made my tour at Registration such an enjoyable and fulfilling experience:
Kodian – who stepped in the first year and got us off to a great start
Rustitobuck – who created not one but two completely new Registration systems that have made us the model of efficiency that we are today, and also for suffering through my panicked requests for technical support with dignity and grace
Rama – for providing a bulletproof online registration system
Puma – for making online registration possible and putting up with my quirky requests
DaveQat and Neowolf – both have served as my second in command over the years and both were helpful, reliable, and personable (well, mostly personable, in Dave’s case 🙂
Everyone who has served on Registration staff over the last seven years – Every single one of you is amazing and fabulous. Want to help out next year? 😉
Robert King, Aureth, Takaza, and Linnaeus – all the past chairmen of Midwest FurFest. Each of them provided support and guidance when I needed it. I can only hope that I can live up to the fine legacy that you gentlemen have created.
And finally I (again) owe my thanks to my loving husband Takaza, who has gone above and beyond to support, advise, remonstrate, and put up with me. I love you, Dan!

With this report I turn the reins of Midwest FurFest Registration over to Neowolf. I do so knowing that the department will be in good hands.

I will see all of you next year as Chairman of Midwest FurFest at the Westin Chicago North Shore!