So You Wanna Make a Fan Week @soyouwannamakeafanweek - Tumblr Blog

Fan Weeks Step By Step

So you wanna make a fan week event, huh? Maybe you have a favorite pairing or character that you don't think gets enough love, or enough attention from a specific angle—and you know that if you want something done right, it's best to do it yourself! Even saying that, though, organizing events is hard, especially when you don't know what you need or where to start.

That's where this guide comes in!

Here's what you need to have a successful fan week event:

A theme for the event

External interest in the theme

A hosting platform

A list of prompts

Guidelines for participation

Time to manage the event

And here are some things that, believe it or not, you DON'T need:

A popular theme

A big audience

Fancy graphics

Permission from other fans

Got it? Excellent! Now, let's get into the most basic breakdown of the steps to organizing a fan week event. Details on the things you need, some things you don't, and things you might not have thought of but won't want to forget.

Look for existing events + optional: talk to the event organizer

Choose the theme + optional: do an interest check

Choose the date

Create event accounts

Compose event prompts + optional: get feedback on prompts

Compose participation guidelines

Create a FAQ

Create event graphics + optional: get a friend to proofread

Do final organization + optional: make an organizational document

Post and schedule event prompts

GO TIME: RUN THE EVENT!

Conclude the event + optional: prep to do it again next year

Who knew that running a fan week event was a 12 step program? Weird.

Anyway, now that you know the basics, let's get into the details! Click below the cut for way more information than you ever wanted but hopefully as much as you need to organize and run your event with confidence!

(Alternately, check out the guide on the SYWMAFW site for easier navigation.)

▌ 1. Look for existing events.

Chances are you've already done this, but if not you'll want to dig around before you do literally anything else. If there is already an active fan week event for the character, pairing, or whatever else you've been brainstorming, then you're in luck! Someone else already did all the heavy lifting, and you can just participate in the next round of the existing event. This is what we call "living the dream."

▌ 1a. Talk to the existing event organizer. (OPTIONAL)

If the event that exists isn't to your tastes and you want to create your own event anyway, it's in the best interests of everyone that you try to make contact with the event organizer and let them know what you're doing. You don't want to look like a competitor, or imply that you find the other organizer's efforts to be lacking! Although some fans become possessive, most will just be excited that more people want to spread the love. Remember, nobody can stop you from doing your event, but a good fandom experience is built on being courteous, so it's best to try not to inadvertently create bad blood.

▌ 2. Choose the theme.

Fan week events are usually themed around a specific character or pairing, but there are no rules here! Your event can be centered on anything you want. An organization within the source material, a specific holiday or season, a color—the most important thing is that you hammer down exactly what the theme means to you, so that you can explain it clearly to possible participants.

▌ 2a. Do an interest check. (OPTIONAL)

While it's not required, it can be helpful to know how many people are interested in the concept of your event. This can be done on your own social media, in a Discord server, or even just in a conversation with friends. The most quantifiable way of doing this would be to run a poll, although that can be a double-edged sword. If the poll doesn't go very far or get much exposure, the small sample size can imply disinterest and be quite disheartening.

If you choose to run a poll, make sure that you do your best to boost it as far and wide as possible; ask your friends to reblog the post, share it around in your other fandom spaces, really put it out there so that you have the best possible chance of getting a genuine indication of interest.

▌ 3. Choose the date.

This guide is based around the organization of a one-week event, but your event can be any term you think is appropriate: single day, a weekend, a month, just make sure you have a set term and can put it on a calendar. This is also one point where you'll want to do a little fandom specific research to make sure that your chosen dates don't overlap with similar events or important dates in the fandom or the source material so as to avoid stepping on anyone else's toes. (Example: Say your fandom has two big pairings, A/B and B/C. You probably shouldn't schedule A/B Ship Week to run over C's birthday. This is how ship wars start, and good event organizers don't start ship wars!)

You also want to make sure that the date chosen is far enough out for you to both organize and properly boost the event! Six weeks is the minimum recommended term from interest check to event, but eight weeks is much better. This will also depend on what time of year you intend to run the event—if it's overlapping with a holiday or takes place during a busy time of year, you'll want to start spreading the word even earlier and keep boosting it regularly, or else interested parties may forget, or even miss out on the discovery that happening in the first place.

▌ 4. Create event accounts.

It may seem counterproductive to spend time making accounts when you don't have anything else for the event yet, but doing this first is a great way to help encourage yourself to keep at it! Organizing fandom events is a lot more work than people think, and having somewhere to put the fruits of your labor (and interact with people who are eager to participate in the event you're creating) makes a huge difference in maintaining the motivation needed to get through it.

For the moment, tumblr is the best platform for fandom week events as far as ease of organization goes, while Twitter is the best for exposure; the recommended course of action is to make an account for the event on both platforms, with tumblr linked as the event hub and twitter used as a secondary platform. This will be further explained in Organization Hacks when it's completed, but you'd want to finish reading this guide before jumping to that one anyway!

For events open to fanfiction, it is not recommended to make an AO3 collection at this time unless there's a specific concern about losing the event name to a URL squatter (which isn't really a thing that happens on the Archive, but anything is possible).

Other alternative platforms include PillowFort, which is recommended for hosting visual art that is disallowed by tumblr's community guidelines (artists may not be comfortable hosting this work on Twitter based on their policy of treating all uploads as free to be scraped for machine generation engines), and DreamWidth, which may be more familiar to fans who miss the days of LiveJournal events and communities.

▌ 5. Compose event prompts.

You're finally here: the fun part! The first fun part, anyway. You probably started this with at least some concept of prompts in mind, but don't be afraid to take all the time you need to get them just right! These will make or break fan participation in your event, so really put some thought into it.

Most events offer prompts that are a single word, with many offering a main prompt and an alternate prompt for each given day. However, it's important to remember that a lot of creators aren't particularly inspired by a single word; order to garner the greatest possible level of interest, you may want to to have a single word main prompt, and a short theme-appropriate quote or phrase as the alternate prompt.

▌ 5a. Get feedback on prompts. (OPTIONAL)

This doesn't mean post all of them in advance and let the general public decide what is and isn't good, mind you. Allowing entirely uncurated feedback on a themed event's main aspect will generally result in a prompt list that tried to please everyone and instead pleases no one. Ask people whose opinions you trust, and try not to set up public calls for feedback in a way that people can "check the results" on the chance that you decide you don't like the general consensus after all. You're the one organizing this event, put some trust in your own judgment!

▌ 6. Compose participation guidelines.

This is one of the harder parts of organization, because at least some of those guidelines need to be specific to your event and your fandom specifically, so you can't just copy/paste all your guidelines from somewhere else. You can, however copy/paste most of your guidelines from somewhere else—specifically, the Recommended General Guidelines Document provided for anyone reading this guide!

Please make sure you read through and modify the content of the above document to suit your event! If you don't care as much about ratings or care more about the type of content allowed in your event, the guidelines need to reflect that. For more information on creating your own guidelines, check out Guidance On Guidelines when it's available—and once you've finished reading through all the steps in this guide.

When you're done composing and formatting your event guidelines, save the post as a draft. It will go live later.

▌ 7. Create a FAQ.

Another hard part! How can you have frequently asked questions if your event is brand new and no one has ever asked you about it? The trick here is that there are questions that are asked frequently of any event, and you can get a basic list of these from the Recommended Basic FAQ Document provided for anyone reading this guide.

As with the event guidelines, save this post as a draft to set live later.

▌ 8. Create event graphics.

This is the part where a lot of people balk, and it's understandable. Graphics are hard, and not everyone has the skill or even the interest to create them! However, contrary to popular belief, these don't need to be super fancy professional grade design. Your fan week graphics do not need to be worthy of the Louvre.The "required" graphics for any fan week event are as follows:

A header image

An icon (also called a "profile pic" or PFP)

The event prompt list in image form

That's it. Literally. You don't need a fancy header for every single prompt—although you can absolutely do that if you want to—or a custom-built blog theme for the event account. You don't need custom artwork to count down the days leading up to the event. You need a header, an icon, and a prompt list.The header and icon should be used on every platform where the event is active, including AO3 if applicable, and a general rule of thumb is that either the header or the icon should have the URL of the event written on it, but even that isn't entirely necessary.The prompt list should be constructed similarly to the following:

(Check alt text for a description.)

Recommended Design

Content: event name, date(s), list of prompts, and social media handles.

Colors: accent, aside, body, and background. (Not too many!)

Styles: title, subtitle, body, and footer. (Must be readable.)

A more comprehensive breakdown of the basic graphic design standards featured in this example will be available in Getting Into Graphics when completed.

The two most important elements of your event graphics are readability and cohesion. Even just maintaining the same color scheme for all event graphics will create a sense of cohesion that will help the event look like you've put as much work into it as you actually have. Even if you choose not to use a custom theme on tumblr, setting the accent and background colors of the event account blog to match the color scheme of your graphics makes a world of difference in the presentation of the event!

For folks who like to do the graphical side of things, here are a few others you can make to look even more fancy, without working too hard:

Mini headers for event pages (directory, FAQ, guidelines, etc.)

Mini headers for each day of the event listing each prompt (make sure to also include the prompts as text in the body of the post)

A thank you to be posted at the close of the event (this can literally be something as simple as the prompt graphic with the words "thank you for participating!" scrawled over it in a different color)

When posting the prompt list, make sure you also have a written version of the prompts in the post, preferably tucked beneath a cut/readmore. This assures that even if the image doesn't load (tumblr is a Functional Webbed Site, after all) people can still see the list! Likewise, the nicest graphics in the world won't matter to a screenreader, so this also falls under the need for the prompt list to be readable.

For full-bore professional grade graphic design, you can create a fully custom theme. However, this isn't generally recommended, as the ever-changing nature of web design standards and tumblr's opaque documentation on accepted versus deprecated modifiers and styles in their themes can cause organizers to get lost in the weeds for weeks when they could be working on other tasks that are actually necessary for the event. (Learn from my mistakes.)

Also, for the love of fandom, do not create anything for your event using generative AI. Just don't do it. Not only is this the equivalent of shooting the event in the foot before it's even stood up on its own due to the very legitimately negative opinion toward machine generation within most creative spaces (99.99% of fandom creatives will refuse to participate in an event run by someone who is pro-genAI), but also runs the risk of real legal issues due to the inherently unethical method by which all machine generation engines function. Just don't do it. I don't care if you can't draw. Don't do it.

▌ 8a. Get a friend to proofread (OPTIONAL)

This is listed as optional but it is highly recommended. It's harder to see errors in things that you created, particularly when you've been working on those things for a long period time—and by this point, you'll probably have been chipping away at this project for days if not weeks. Get a second pair of eyes on it if you can.

▌ 9. Do final organization.

This is the boring part. It's not time to post the prompts yet, but it is time to post your event's guidelines, FAQ, and any other nitty-gritty event information you've been working on; it's recommended to backdate these entries to keep them from showing up on the dashboard, and turn off reblogs to avoid old versions of these posts circulating about the site.

You may also want to create a guide on how to add work to the AO3 collection—authors should be able to add work to the collection themselves the moment you open it rather than relying on you to add each work manually. Check out this guide created for @sephesisweek on tumblr as an example.

▌ 9a. Make an organizational document. (OPTIONAL)

Again, while this is optional, it is highly recommended. In a plain text document, copy/paste or manually write out the block of tags that you intend to use when posting event prompts, as well as a list of all the organizational, rating, content and other tags to be used on reblogged prompt fills. Any tag that you intend to reuse regularly should be placed in this document to keep the organization straight.

It's also recommended to paste in the URLs of the event's most important pages to assure you don't have to go digging if you need to direct someone to something specific.

More comprehensive information on creating an organizational document will be available in Organization Hacks upon completion.

Save this document natively on your computer or whatever device(s) you're using to organize, access and manage the event. You'll thank yourself later.

▌ 10. Post and schedule event prompts.

Create the post where you intend to reveal the prompt list! It should have the image, some basic information, a link to the directory, FAQ and guidelines, and then the prompts in text under a cut/readmore. Create multiple versions of this post to go up roughly once a week leading up to the event; these posts should use the same block of tags as the original, but have slightly different body text in order to avoid being flagged by often-buggy automated spam filters. Counting down the weeks (and eventually the days) leading up to the event is the best way to differentiate one post from the next.

If your fandom has a popular event calendar account, make sure to contact them to get your event added to the calendar, and tag the account if applicable in order to get your post(s) reblogged leading up to the event and increase your reach.

You should also schedule individual prompt posts at this time, set to go live each day of the event and tagged appropriately for each prompt. This allows you to fully commit to the event's tag structure, while also making sure that the individual prompt posts will go live around the same time every day of the event—even if you're indisposed.

▌ 11. GO TIME: RUN THE EVENT!

While there will probably be some work in the interim (answering questions and modifying the FAQ and tags are the most common), you're really just going to be in a holding pattern until the event starts.

If you've done all the organizational work, running the event itself shouldn't be particularly difficult, although it may be time consuming depending on the level of participation. Prompt fills should generally be queued rather than reblogged on sight, as this will not only assure that you don't flood the dashboard of anyone following the event account, but also allow you to double-check your tags before the post goes live on the main page. The last thing you want is for something intense to go up with no content warning!

Track the event tag and run regular searches to make sure that nobody has been missed. Double check that everyone is adding work to the AO3 collection on their own. Work on your own prompt fills in the interim, if you're participating as well as organizing.

Most importantly, this is the time to bask in the joy of a fandom community coming together around something you all love—that's the real reason that events like this exist, and presumably the whole reason you wanted to organize one in the first place. Try to enjoy yourself!

▌ 12. Conclude the event.

At the end of the event week term, make a post thanking everyone for their participation. It's recommended to continue to reblog posts and keep the AO3 collection open for submissions for one full week following the event in order for people who may have been waylaid by life to catch up if they so choose.

At the end of this straggler week, post a final thank you message, close the AO3 collection to new submissions, and take a nap! You deserve it!

▌ 12a. Prep to do it again next year! (OPTIONAL)

Depending on how things look when the dust settles, you may be one of the many people who decide that organizing a fan week event just isn't for them after all. This is fine! It's a lot of work, and it really isn't for everybody—but, well, you already did all the heavy lifting, didn't you?

If you followed this guide, you'll never have to fully organize this specific fan week again. You've got the guidelines, the FAQ, the tag structure. You know how to create, maintain, and close an AO3 collection. You know which sorts of prompts people liked and which ones they didn't, and you have a solid visual style that you're (hopefully) happy with.

In fact, all you really need to do to prep for next year is come up with a new set of prompts and update some tags...that doesn't sound so hard, does it?

Maybe that's the devil talking. You'll have to find out next year.

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