[Steppes] Akon vs. Scottish festival

[Faelan Caimbeul]

WARNING, PRETTY LONG

I agree with everyone about the demos we're doing in the past. I reserved
jugdement about the Irish Festival until I attended it, and my fears were
confirmed. It's a fun time, for us, but not real productive. To my knowledge
we've had 2 or 3 people contact us for more info, but no one's actually
started coming to anything. This is historically the way it's been with this
event, from everything I've heard from people I've talked to. I'm in favor
of dropping it, personally. In contrast, we've had several contacts from
that convention, and are finding old Scadians coming out of the woodwork.
Sure, they're not newbies, but they're more than welcome.

Likewise with the Scottish Festival. I am not familiar with it, but everyone
should ask themselves, how many people have we really gotten from that
event? If it's one or two every 5 or six years or more, we need to find
other venues.

I'll admit, I'm trying to do every fantasy, sci-fi and game convention in
town over the course of the next year. Why? because they're "our kind of
geeks", as Morgan so eloquently put it. Mahdi brought this up at populace
months ago, "Where did we learn of the SCA?". For me, it was a game
convention. For many it's sci-fi cons and ren-fairs. These are the kind of
people that would be interested in the SCA, not a bunch of beer drinking
Highland wantabees (not that  the SCA doesn't have their share of those as
well), but my point is that the vast majority of people at that kind of
event are there for beer and cabers and then going back to their mundane
lives.

To really drive this point home, let's look at who's running these
conventions.

All-con seemed to be run by mundanes. Then, at Elfsea Springfaire, I saw the
director/owner of the con coming out just to have fun. Turns out, he's
already a Scadian (and was quite excited and generous with his con).

A-Kon, the stage director is our Queen. The director of the con is at least
familiar with the SCA, by his association with Her Majesty, if nothing else.

Lazy Dragon; one is a long time Scadian/merchant (which explains their
enthusiasm and generosity) and his partner was turned off by a bad
experience at his first event, then brought back when he hooked up with his
current partner years later and was convinced that not everyone is an
authenticity Nazi.

Every Renfaire in the country is run by Scadians and/or gamer geeks. They're
also attended by the same.

I'm not sure about the rest of the local cons, but I'd suspect we're going
to find more of the same. How many of you have/do play role-playing games?
Fought with swords as kids, and attended some conventions like the one's I'm
targeting? As Gunthar said, geeks are the lifeblood of the SCA. This is our
target audience, mundanes wishing to be free, at least for a little while.
Search your feelings, you know it to be true.

All that being said, the other biggest problem is exposure time. I'm afraid
this may happen at Akon. Currently, we have only one fight time, and are not
likely to get another. It's Saturday afternoon. The rest of the time we get
one table on the way to the dealer's room. It's not a lot of time to catch
someone's attention. I'm wanting to create a "standard" booth decoration for
things like this, and all demos, that will catch people's attention. At the
moment, it consists of a stand alone tapestry with either a Knowne Worlde
Mappe, or images of SCA events painted in period style. I'll need artists to
help with this little project, but along with it I want to make a table
cloth with the Kingdom, both Baronies and all our Cantons arms on the
skirting. This is a color explosion that will attract attention from far
away, especially since there's a lot of yellow involved. The top will also
be yellow. It will be fitted to one of the standard plastic tables the
barony owns and many of us also have. It'll work fine for practically any
event, and gives us "presence". Since we have such a small time and area, we
need to think like merchants here. Advertising.

On the flip side, Lazy Dragon is shaping up to be an event in and of itself.
Actually, that's what I'm shooting for. What better way to introduce someone
to the SCA, than at an event? The con is being held at the Holiday Inn in
McKinney. The hotel has been MOST gracious to them, and we have the run of
the courtyard, with the exception of the women's jello wrestling. This means
we can do whatever we  want, when we want to do it. I'm planning Blood of
Heroes (light and heavy), a monkey tournament (like we had last weekend, it
was just too much fun to pass up) where the winner gets a sword donated by
the owners of the con (who are blade merchants themselves). Melees, bridge
battles, "Save the boobies" (check out the con website and you'll see what I
mean http://www.lazydragon.com/con/) tournament, etc. We have the
opportunity for a LOT of exposure to locals that are "our kind of geeks"
(TM). Saturday night we'll host a hafla. We want to show everyone how much
FUN the SCA is. I'm also open to suggestions, and volunteers to coordinate
and run, non-fighting stuff, like Baudy Bardic (to be run with the hafla),
dancing, games, etc. Sorry, no archery or hurling of anything sharp and
pointy through the air. Waterbearers will be a MUST. It's in August. More
details forthcomming.

I think the fun factor gets lost at demos all too frequently. So, that being
said, I encourage EVERYONE, from both Baronies, to come and support this
event, and just have a great time.

Just my 4.5 cents.

Faelan


On 4/13/07, Sir Morgan Buchanan <morganbuchanan at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> > From: rudin at ev1.net> To: steppes at lists.ansteorra.org> Date: Fri, 13 Apr
> 2007 18:58:02 -0500> Subject: Re: [Steppes] Akon vs. Scottish festival> >
> Sir Morgan wrote:> > I happen to think AKon isn't the greatest venue either,
> but at least we're> > trying something different. My biggest issue with AKon
> isn't actually the> > target market of Anime fans, but the fact that it's
> really an uber-big > > event> > that doesn't give us much chance to actually
> build any rapport with> > people we know to be local.> > While we're playing
> Devil's Advocate, how could the size of the event reduce > the chance to
> build rapport, when that's always done in groups of two or > three anyway?>
> > Robin of Gilwell / Jay Rudin
>
> My opinion is two-fold in this regard.  The first part is factual, and the
> second is anecdotal.
>
> First, I didn't say we can't build rapport, but that we had less chance to
> build rapport with people we know to be local.  The size of an event like
> AKon (I've heard about 12,000) necessitates that many of those who are drawn
> to it are not from Dallas/Fort Worth.  Many are not even from the
> region.  People come from all over the world.  So at an event like this, the
> odds that a given individual is from DFW or even Ansteorra are lower than a
> small local event that is far less likely to draw people from farther
> away.  This isn't a HORRIBLE thing, of course...if we recruit someone to the
> SCA who lives in Atlantia or An Tir or Northshield or the West or where ever
> they may be from, that's cool.  But it doesn't address our local recruitment
> issues as we'd like quite as much.
>
> However, my own experience with various conventions from 500 person small
> local conventions to huge international affairs like Gen Con suggest to me
> that although you're certainly seen by a huge number of people, those people
> give you less of their time.  I believe that part of the reason our demos
> are largely ineffective is that we have such a small window to really engage
> a perspective individual in meaningful discourse.  We're reduced to
> essentially shilling the organization in 5 minute sales-pitches and hoping
> to get thier contact information or convince them to contact us at our
> contact points on a flyer we hand out.  I believe that if we do a more
> comprehensive convention experience where our populace who are interested in
> the convention attend with the secondary goal of relationship building,
> we're more likely to attract "our kind of geeks."  :)
>
> For the sake of conversation, below I include a brief outline of a
> convention concept I've talked about with Faelin, Katheryn, Her Majesty
> Deanna, and many others.  I'm very open to suggestions, comments, critisizm,
> input...
>
> Morgan
>
> ******************************
>
> Here is my idea for a fully encompassing demo.
>
> First of all is a general concept:  If we have trouble finding SCA people
> to do a demo, is that perhaps an indication that the venue isn't necessarily
> the best place to do a demo?  Why are we doing demos at places "we" don't
> want to go in the first place?
> With this in mind and knowing how many SCAdians like going to Science
> Fiction, Fantasy, Comic and Gaming conventions, we've done demos at these
> conventions in the past with varrying degrees of success.
>
> What seems to normally be done is we take a 1 hour slot time slot, wander
> around yelling to get people to come watch, fight, and talk to people during
> the fighting demo.  Then we leave.  A few SCAdians stay for the con.
>
> This creates an atmosphere of desperation, in my opinion.  We are
> handcuffing ourselves by limiting our exposure and limiting the time we have
> to build relationships with our target market.
> Demos like the various heritage festivals allow us to sit around all day
> long and in a more laid back atmosphere we can do our fighting and talk to
> people, but because the demographic is farther away from our target market,
> we're again less successful.  We're also in a situation where a person may
> never walk past us again because of the size of some of these festivals.
>
> So the concept I have is to combine the two thusly.
>
> First, we find as many of our populace as possible who want to actually
> attend the convention in question.  We can fill certain ranks with people
> who will be simply stopping by to help with some of the activities that
> we'll talk about later potentially, but without this group of actual
> con-goers, this concept won't work.
>
> We acquire a table in an appropriate room.  At most conventions this will
> be a dealer's room, but we'll discuss it with the Con-Com and figure out
> what will be best.  We man this table with no more than 2 of our members on
> a regular basis.  Everyone who goes agrees to take some time on the
> rotation.  At this table we can have a display of A&S and armour as well as
> perhaps a laptop that has a slideshow or even potentially wireless access
> and we can show the http://scademo.com/ website.  We would also have an
> information gathering clipboard or whatever here to get contact info for
> interested parties as well as handout fliers.  I've found the "Why is this
> man smiling?" flyer to be terrific.
>
> We work with the Con-Com in advance and insinuate ourselves into their
> programming track.  I'd suggest we do 2-5 fighting demos sprinkled across
> the convention at various times.  We talk up these demos at our table.  We
> have a sign that says, "Next fighting Demo at 2:00 p.m. in the Green room"
> or whatever.  We have our best and brightest and give them a heck of a show
> at these demonstrations.
>
> Finally, when possible, we run a party room at the convention on Friday
> and Saturday nights.  Most conventions have a mechanism for running an
> "official" party room.  We can use various medieval themes such as the
> Medieval Tavern or Hafla tent.  We serve refreshments and food.  Perhaps we
> do some bardic.  We tell war stories and talk about fighting and just how
> much FUN we have.
>
> The key to all of this is that we're not locked into 5 minute
> opportunities to "convince" someone they're interested. We're building
> relationships.  We look less like we're shilling for members, even though
> we're actually working HARDER for members.
>
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