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Howloween: Artist Alley & Furry Festival!
261
Note: Attendance: UCSD undergrad students + student artists (who didn’t get signed with form, explained later). The difference in the discrepancy of the expected attendance and the actual attendance comes down to the fact that this event is a fair, which means that it's outside. Coincidentally as well, Family Weekend was happening at the same time as our event which means that the campus was a lot more active than the usual Saturday. This is also our first time, holding an event of this scale so we really didn’t know what to expect. The expected # of attendees was mostly a gamble that the org was willing to take, since its attendance mostly relied on it being outside.
2730.64
Triton Community Fund, E-market (Org funded for the remaining cost)
The goal of this event was to create something very ambitious, within the context of university furry clubs, and to increase the recognition of the org outside of the furry fandom. This was achieved by making the event take place outside, having a vendor fair that appeals to both furries and everyone else, and having other activities that appeal to the general student population.
This event was a huge success, better than what most of the board expected by a mile. Main considerations for a successful event were the sentiment post-event, lack of problems, and the attendance. A lot of our attendees were here for most of the duration of this event. Sentiment was mostly positive from what we can gather, when we asked some attendees their opinions days after the event. Our attendees loved this type of event and are already asking if there will be a Howloween event next year. We ran into some problems during the event, which was related to lack of training for volunteers (This will be talked about later as well). Besides all of that, we ran into minimal problems during and after the event. Attendance was way more than we expected. It is now the largest furry event held by a student organization in the nation that we can find.
The most valuable resources that we had was A.S staff, who helped with making some last-minute changes to the funding and also were very easy to communicate with. UCEN staff, especially both my event manager and tech manager, were very helpful with the logistics for the event and also gathered a lot of resources from them for free such as fire extinguishers, A-frame signs, and lots of tech stuff.
The event had some problems due to the lack of staff training, since it was done on the day of the event. This caused a lot of problems with registration, since some volunteers accidentally gave out volunteer wristbands to students, which meant they could get food early when that’s reserved for staff and vendors and some volunteers were not checking for wristbands in the front entrance when they were supposed to, which led to more people who didn’t signed in. Since the back of the fair wasn’t blocked off for fire code reasons, a lot of students still attended the event while not going to the registration tables. Some people had a hard time finding parking near the event (this particularly sucks more for vendors) because of Family Weekend. There was also lack of planning for activities within the Multi-purpose, we made a lot of activities on the spot and thankfully all of them worked, but we wouldn’t gamble on that for next time.
The main change that we’re making for big events like these is more planning pre-submission of TAP and to check on all aspects of the event, 1 month before the event starts. This could mainly be accomplished by having a bigger events team at the beginning of the planning process to make sure that no one is a bus factor, which happened a lot during Howloween since only 2 of our officers did most of the planning behind the scenes. We will advertise for more events staff to make sure it doesn’t happen again, as we do wanna do more events like this but it requires more man-power for that to successfully happen.
Next time, we would like to try if boosting our posts through ADs can work, especially within social media services that like to gather a lot of data. We are also planning to do more shorts content in general as that seems to be doing well.
I would like it if we had a grandfather clause for A.S policies. I submitted my funding request with the A.S policies from 2023-2024 in mind since it had to be submitted back in June 2024. This meant that attendance from non-ucsd affiliates was still possible when most of the planning for this event happened, which was why there were so many vendors for this event. Having to abide by recent A.S attendance policy meant that vendors got less sales than they had expected, since cutting off a portion of potential attendance meant that there were going to be less people in attendance in general. This also looks bad on our org on the vendor's side because of this reason, which will make us less likely to pick up vendors for next time. Also please add the event on the attendance form one hour before the event starts, since all of our student vendors didn’t get to sign-up.