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Welcome to ConRunner, a Why and How-To reference for Convention organizers.
ConRunner was started in July 2005, and we are currently working on 337 articles. You are invited to join us, and to help make them better.
Featured Article - Badge NumberA badge number is a unique number, often serial, assigned to and printed on each badge. It's very useful to make each badge uniquely identifiable. If it's turned in to Lost and Found, you need some way to figure out who it belongs to, and if you observe somebody wearing it behaving badly, it's useful to know whose badge they stole at least. If the names are pre-printed on the badges, this can be done by simply indexing all the names (though you have to do something about duplicates). However, at-the-door badges are rarely pre-printed, and getting the names on those badges into the list prepared in advance in a timely manner during the convention is also dificult. So it's very common to put numbers on the badges, and use those as the unique identifier. It doesn't particularly matter if you assign the numbers in order as registrations are recorded, alphabetically at the end of pre-registration, or even at random. However, changing a well-established practice at your particular convention is likely to attract attention and comment. It's very common to reserve some low numbers for special people, particularly the Guests of Honor. It's very common to make sure the author guest gets badge #1. Alternatively, the ConChair may have badge #1. It might be socially prudent to also give the conchair's spouse a fairly low-numbered badge in that case. Other individuals may request particular badge numbers that are special to them. Whether or not such requests are satisfied is entirely up to the registration dept. People often assume the badge numbers serve as a rough guide to the number of people registered for the convention. |
DepartmentsThere is no One True Way to organize your committee into departments. Often times a convention will run for a few years one way, and then combine departments that share a lot of the same resources or purpose into a single department. Or a department may split, as the needs of the convention grow. Do what works for you, and recruit reliable department heads. Create, publish, and maintain a clear set of objectives and methods to document continuity of what works, what doesn't, and why. Check on the senior staff regularly to make sure they're getting whatever support they need from you and the rest of the committee, pre-con and at-con. Department heads then recruit what staff and at-con volunteers they need to accomplish the goals of the department. Have your department heads document the procedures of running their department, and train people under them so that you have a pool of people ready to be future department heads, and you are capturing knowledge from one year to the next. A common way to split a science fiction convention into departments is like so:
You can easily see how Volunteers might also go under Operations, Masquerade and Dance under Programming, etc. A small enough convention may not have a person dedicated to publicity separate from their publications head, or an information desk, or whatever. And of course, some conventions don't have Art Shows, or Charity Auctions, or whatever. Try to pick a structure that best supports what you do and how you want to do it. |
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