If one were to consider wanting to run a similar character speedrun event at some point in the future upcoming season, what tips would you share?
Tips in my experience of running this event but also the @bakuraryouspeedrunexchange last year I can definitely provide! This accidentally got a bit wordy, but I like to be thorough, so hopefully this helps you out.
I would say for sure consider things like where the audience for your event primarily is in terms of websites.
Like, if you expect your main audience of participants to primarily be on Ao3, you might be able to consider looking into the Prompt Challenge version of an Ao3 Collection to help speed up some of the prompt or other information collection process.
If your audience is primarily tumblr, though, and you want to allow for multimedia participation, it might limit your options to go with an Ao3 based collection model for collecting prompts.
Otherwise, definitely consider the amount of time you’re willing to invest in managing the event itself too, and whether you think you’d be able to bounce back if thing suddenly go awry for you irl (I had two things suddenly pop up during the Creation Period week, but due to the more off-hands setup of this style of event, it allowed me more flexibility in being away while people made their things because they were still able to make their things without me needing to check in too much.). If you’re able to find someone you think would make a good co-mod, that might be good to arrange as a backup for cases like these, but in my experience, this isn’t 100% mandatory.
Signing up for an event also doesn’t appear to be necessary for an event to gain traction or participants; I ran signups for the speedrun exchange last year and did no signups for this event, so that’s something to keep in mind, this experience that having no signups frees up some of the stress of running an event styled like the bakubang speedrun.
Other than that, google forms is great for information collection in my experience, and ellipsus seems to have worked for this event since people were able to reliably access and read through it to select prompts for the Creation Period of the event.
It’s handy I think too to have a countdown timer and to consider time zones when setting up the schedule. Don’t be afraid to keep the schedule convenient to your time zone and use the timer as a way to give people a sense of how long they have to do their things!
Probably too important to note would be that I’ve noted, thanks to some of my friends who participated in my events, that frequent or semi-frequent check-ins with participants does wonders for keeping people motivated to stay in the event and see the event through to the end.
It doesn’t have to be invasive or direct, but even a post every other day or so inviting conversation seems to stoke the flames of excitement, and I think maybe that’s because people just like to be heard or thought of!
And, lastly: strive to be as clear as possible when laying the groundwork for how your event functions. Things that seem clear might end up being vague enough in actuality for unexpected questions or occurrences to occur in the middle of the event itself!
Hope that helps! I’m happy to share my experience like this.
