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 Posted: Sat Oct 24, 2009 9:49 pm
Some of my friends and myself, in the town that we live in, are trying to host an anime convention here and I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions that might help us get going!! Any help or ideas are welcome!! Thank you for your support!! 3nodding
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Posted: Mon Oct 26, 2009 1:18 am
If you want to host an anime convention you'll need money and a HUGE space to host it in. Ideally, you'll get the money back from the profits that come from hosting the con, but you need cash to start with.
Cons are planned several months in advance, so advertise EARLY online, in anime mags, and put posters up at game/anime shops and schools.
You'll need to purchase prizes, like anime dvds and video games, to give out as prizes for contests. You can have cosplay and art contests in a variety of categories. Best bishonen, best chibi, best comic, etcetera...
To earn back the money you spent on the con, charge for admission and for participation in the contests.
You'll also need to buy/make food for the con, so you can charge for meals, too.
I'll come back to this thread if I think of anything else. Good luck! biggrin
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Minerva the Bookwyrm Captain
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Posted: Wed Oct 28, 2009 10:55 pm
As someone who has been committee secretary for a convention for the first three formative years of a convention, and who just got done staffing it this past weekend, I have the following advice.
1. Advertise the living daylights out of your convention.
2. Check your dates and make sure there isn't another large one already going on within about a month or so of your desired dates. If there is, consider other dates.
3. "Months of planning" is a joke. A convention is really a year-round undertaking. Make sure you have enough time to do that and make sure that the people who are going to be staffing it are aware of the commitment.
4. Spend at least one year raising revenue before you actually begin planning the convention.
5. Don't shoot for the Moon the first year. You can't really expect more than a few hundred attendees your first year. There have been exceptions to this, but they are rare. Crunch your numbers with that in mind. That way, anything above and beyond that is gravy to use as seed money for the following year. Which brings me to...
6. Crunch your numbers before you make any commitments! Make sure you're not reaching beyond what you can.
7. Incorporate as a business. If you don't, you run the risk of being personally responsible for any debt that may occur if you don't reach your target attendee number (ie, don't get enough people), which has happened to a couple of conventions recently (most famously Fed Con).
8. Don't try and serve your attendees food yourself. Let them get their own food however they may. Trying to serve food is NOT worth it, at all, ever. There's too much work and liability involved and it makes a GIGANTIC mess by the end of the weekend. Trust me, the headache is NOT worth the trouble. More and more conventions are doing away with their con suite munchies because it just isn't worth the problems it causes.
9. Make sure you know, precisely, what sort of convention you wish to be. Do you want to focus on a certain genre? Do you want to focus on manga? Do you want to focus on the industry? Nail this down and you'll more easily attract a niche market. Once you have that decided, though, be sure you stick to it.
That's just a small taste of what my experience has taught me. There's a lot more to tell, but at some point it starts making assumptions about the type of convention you will be.
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