As far as promoting your Costume-Con is concerned, perhaps some observations on the audience you're trying to reach are in order.
At the very core, a Costume-Con's success is based largely on the return of the same people who attend Costume-Con every year.
While it is not the absolute rule, a majority of the known costuming community are professionals to some degree, with more expendable income. This allows them to travel beyond their traditional regions to wherever a CC is being held.
This group of people, made up mostly of International Costumers' Guild (ICG) members, feels that it is important to support this venue every year in some manner. Many of them have attended five or more Costume-Cons. The usual outlet for reaching these people are at the Costume-Con immediately prior to you own.
Other outlets for promoting your Costume-Con include:
Fan-written publications (like CostumAPA or Costume & Masquerade)
Emailing lists (the ICG, or Fantasy Costume or Historic Costume lists)
Science Fiction or other media conventions
Historic Re-enacting groups, sewing guilds or other loosely-related groups.
These are good places to announce your intentions of making a bid, and also to get information out to all the friends of the participants. Some of these people have run a CC before, so you can seek advice as well as making announcements.
The tough part about this sort of promotion is that you have to be diligent about reaching out to these groups. Many times, the people who participate in these groups, lists or publications have never been to a Costume-Con (or other concentrated event), and they will not know what the benefits are simply by reading a flyer.
The items below are ways in which you can reach these potential attendees, although the list is far from complete.
Flyers
Always send flyers and notices to the ICG Guild chapters. These flyers may be reproduced by the newsletter editors, and will save you money when it comes to advertising elsewhere.
You can also concentrate your efforts on local and regional costumers who have never been to a CC before. From the time your bid is accepted, until shortly before, you should be sending out flyers to as many local and regional SF conventions with masquerades as you can manage.
Press Releases
Press releases should go to the following sources:
SF-related magazines that have conference listings
Local/regional newspapers
Sewing/costume-related magazines
Chamber of Commerce or State Calendars
Local city tourist magazines
Television and radio stations
To be listed in a magazine calendar, you really need to plan at least a year in advance of your event. Many of these publications have their content set for months before the actual date, so that they can publish on their schedule without dealing with last-minute additions. You should consider sending notices out more than once to these publications, since there is also no guarantee that your information will be published the first time you announce it.
Bruce Mai (CC16) writes:
On a local level, press releases were mailed out months in advance, to sort of give a "head up" to the local media. Recipients were the major newpapers and television stations, some radio stations that had community bulletin board announcements, and smaller suburban newspapers. A follow-up press packet was mailed out closer to the conference date. It contained stories about the art of costuming, the ICG, the SLCG, Costume-Con, a fact sheet, some photos fo SLCG members in costume, and a key to the photos identifying what they were.
While it is pretty likely that you will not receive much media attention, sometimes the attention you do receive will pay off. Unless you have a large crowd appeal or make some impact on the community at large, most news outlets won't deem you very interesting.
Bruce Mai (CC16) writes:
We did manage to have one or two articles about our members published in suburban newspapers that had a passing mention of Costume-Con. We also had a very brief location shot done by one TV station on the con's first day, but this was almost too late to do us any good.
Betsy Delaney (CCXV) writes:
Our conference wasn't listed in as many places as I would have liked, but we
did have one reporter visiting us during the Future Fashion Show on
Sunday. She gave us a nice write-up
for the Baltimore Sun, which may have inspired local costumers to
seek out our sponsor, the Greater Columbia Fantasy Costumers' Guild
for more information after the con.
Web Sites
The web is a major source of information about Costume-Cons. The first CC to have a web site, Costume-Con 14, pioneered this new form of promotion. CCXV followed up with its own version, which eventually became Costume-ConNections.
Web sites are excellent locations to make announcements of the following:
Planning progress
Hotel information (and any changes)
Program items
Membership rates and registration requirements
Competition rules and stage specifications
Much of this information will also be contained in your Progress Reports, but in this medium, you can reach people who have not yet purchased their memberships, and so attract them by providing them with the information they need about what to expect for their membership fees.
As more and more households are connecting into the web, more effort needs to be made to keep your site up to date, with announcements, changes and additions. If possible, you may even want to set up a "notification" list, so that when changes are made to the web site, you can let visitors know to come back and see what's new.
You may even garner free advertising by swapping links with like-minded web sites, which will add more traffic to your site.
Bruce Mai (CC16) writes:
A year or two before the con, the Internet explosion was just about to begin. We had our doubts as to how many people it might reach. Nonetheless, we accepted the offer of web page space on the ICG website -- it had been started up about a year or so before Costume-Con16. We could definitely trace some of our memberships and dealers to those who stumbled upon the site and inquired for information. One particularly good anecdote was that some students or staff associates of a teacher in Iowa came across the CC info site just days (maybe even hours) before the conference began. The powers that be apparently gave her the funds to travel to St. Louis, because they recognized CC as an excellent opportunity for learning.
And, don't forget to notify the Costume-ConNections Web Mistress, so that announcements can be posted on the Costume-Con What's New page!
Convention/Conference Tables & Panels
Costume-Cons have a long history and relationship with Science Fiction conventions. Many of the people who regularly attend Costume-Con got their start in costuming at either a Science Fiction or Star Trek/Media con.
You should plan to have someone attend your local conventions, or at the very least, supply flyers for their "freebie" tables. Expect to spend at least a couple of years on the promotional tour.
For more exposure, you can contact the convention planners to acquire space for a "fan" table, to sell memberships and display information about your event, get your staff scheduled on panels so that you can discuss what is planned for the weekend and answer any questions, and sponsor giveaways that help promote your Costume-Con.
Betsy Delaney (CCXV) writes:
We gave away approximately 12 supporting memberships to CCXV as prizes for the Best Novice Costume. These prizes had two benefits, and one drawback. The benefits were exposure (the audience may not have heard of us, but with an announcement during the award ceremony, we could get our name announced as prize sponsor), and additional membership money (when the winners upgraded to Attending from Supporting members). The drawback came when the winning costume contained more than one individual, since we couldn't supply memberships for everyone. Of the 12 or so memberships we gave away, at least six were converted to Attending memberships.
Other sources
Sewing supply stores, craft stores and quilting shops are all excellent places for flyers and displays. Being creative here can sometimes pull in people who never had a clue that such an event existed.
Other possible places include local museums, libraries, primary and secondary schools, universities (especially if they have Theatre or Fashion Design programs), and historic re-enacting events. You may not get many memberships from these sources, but if part of your goal in sponsoring a Costume-Con is to attract local interest to your ICG chapter, or to start a group of your own, reaching out to them may do some good even after your event is over.
Bruce Mai (CC16) writes:
To get people to really see what it was all about, we also arranged a display of costumes at local libraries. Along with the costumes, there were CC publications and information on the upcoming conference.
Some Caveats
All the publicity in the world won't work if you aren't reaching the right audience. It's tough, especially for a smaller committee, to cover all bases and reach out to a large and diverse population. There are some trade-offs to be considered, though, when outreach doesn't get you the membership numbers you would like.
In planning your conference, be prepared to accept lower numbers for the total membership depending on the effectiveness and market for your Costume-Con. Repeat members may not be able to make it to your location, so that while they may have attended every CC up to the previous year, there is no guarantee that they will be able to make it to yours.
Travel expenses, family obligations and changes in personal or financial status can all affect the ability for someone to attend a Costume-Con. Sometimes these changes are gradual, but often, the changes are surprises, and there is a substantial group of people who traditionally wait until the last minute to decide about attendance.
Budgeting for a specific size of membership without taking this into consideration can cost you and your committee a substantial amount of money, or can reduce the services and "gimmees" you might otherwise have included for your members.
Bruce Mai writes:
We really had no success reaching the historical costumers in our area, mainly because of a lack of contacts. The SLCG had no members who participated regularly in recreation events and didn't know where to find those who did.
We should have made a greater effort to follow this up. We suspect, though, that unless there is a complete track or more of costuming devoted just to a given era, success will be very limited, if at all achieveable.
We wish we had publicized the availability of [events access] for the masquerades more. Especially with smaller Costume-Cons, there are almost as many costumers and support staff behind stage as in front of it. We could have probably distributed flyers to schools and local sewing guild chapters.
Speaking of sewing guilds, we probably should have made more contacts with the local chapters, in general. Their goals and interests are almost exactly the same as the ICG.
We didn't get any interest from the schools, on the whole. We suspect this was because of the inherent costs of attending a Costume-Con. While our membership prices were in line, or even cheaper than, some previous Costume-Cons, it was still off-putting to otherwise interested parties. We did not offer a student discount, per se, although we were prepared to do so on a case by case basis.
The same could be said about our local costumers. Unfortunately, a good many of them did not attend, because of the costs. Here in the Midwest, where the cost of living is lower than on the coasts, even the earliest membership rate ($40) was seen as too high. The costumers in the St. Louis region were used to paying $25 for a 3-day membership to our big regional venue, Archon. They didn't seem to understand or take into account that this was a conference strictly for and about costuming. Nor could they see the value of the intense education opportunity that a CC could offer. That was their loss.
