Dear beloved GeekyCon community,
After GeekyCon 2016, we announced that we were giving GeekyCon a one-year hiatus so that we could figure out how best to produce this event. Our dream for GeekyCon started as (and continues to be) that of a community experience that revolves around the way story impacts and enriches our lives, and we felt sure we could figure out how to achieve that vision.
So, when we said we’d be back in 2018, we meant it. We know GeekyCon to be a home-like environment unlike any other fandom event, but faced with shrinking audiences and increased competition for other multi-fandom conventions, we had been having a hard time communicating what that meant. And if you can’t tell someone what something is, they have no reason to spend their time or effort or money on it.
Unfortunately, it has become clear that there is not an immediate way forward for this event. We must suspend it until further notice.
This means there is no event in 2018, and we know that is incredibly disappointing (and even heartbreaking to its creators). But we have spent seven months having countless conversations inside Mischief, and hearing the feedback of our GeekyCon ambassadors. That feedback has been immeasurably helpful, but also constructive: all of us together have still not been able to figure out how to make GeekyCon a success, as fervently as we dream of its continuation and its growth. There are a lot of factors why. They include:
Despite various marketing attempts, GeekyCon’s audience has shrunk year to year. This means we have also lost money, which isn’t always a deal breaker in event management. However, while all of Mischief Management began through volunteer work, and we still rely on the amazing work of volunteers at each of our events, we now are a fully functional company with employees whose livelihoods depend on our work. We also are not yet the kind of company that carries the sort of profits from other events that can balance out this sort of loss repeatedly.
We heard your requests for bigger-name guests, but to attract such names, we must pay them market rates for conventions of a similar nature, and unfortunately, the market rate in the multi-fandom area far outstrips our ability to produce the kind of event that eschews the normal pay-for-play activities. Just a handful of bigger-name guests would bring up our bottom line by over a hundred thousand dollars.
We are experimenting with a hybrid of a paid autograph model in some of our other conventions. The idea is to blend the ideals of community and content with the reality of paid appearances to create a middle ground. These experiments, however, are still nascent, and are best tested on events with a strong single-fandom affiliation.
If we made GeekyCon like every other autograph-based event, it would still face point-of-view problems that would hurt its marketability. GeekyCon’s success requires it standing out, and without a strong narrative supporting what makes it different than other events, this remains elusive. We know it is different than other events, but explaining how has been a three-year-long challenge that we are sad to say has not produced results.
We have learned so much from GeekyCon. The core of characteristics that made GeekyCon unique — celebrating content and community, inclusion and industry, and passion above it all — is now part of every event we produce.
We aren’t ruling out the possibility that, as we fine-tune a community-based model of convention, we discover how to truly make GeekyCon work, and we write you again with good news in the future. We just can’t responsibly commit to it right now.
The community that has come from GeekyCon is incredibly empowering. We hope it continues, and we thank you for the energy, spirit, passion, creativity, and joy that you bring to it.
We are so sorry for the disappointing news. I, personally, will miss GeekyCon very much: it was a place that helped define the values that make Mischief what it is, and walking around it always felt like home. I will continue to be incredibly proud of what we as a community produced there, and hope that, one day, we can go there again.
With love, Melissa Anelli CEO, Mischief Management
