Convention Website 101

~ Cheryl

While I am having to cut back on most of my convention travel, I will make an exception for any event that both Kevin and I can get to. As a result I have just signed up for the 2012 World Fantasy (Toronto) and 2013 World Fantasy (Brighton). Both of them have membership-buying experiences that are best described as woefully embarrassing. Here are a few tips for prospective convention runners.

  • Buying memberships should be a one-stage process. Submitting your membership application and your payment separately is a recipe for disaster.
  • Consider that people may want to buy more than one membership at once.
  • If your only means of accepting money is PayPal, stump up for a business account so that you can accept credit cards.
  • If you put instructions on your website for prospective members, make sure that the payment process allows them to fulfill those instructions
  • If you use a system other than PayPal, make sure it sends receipts to the customer.

We got all of these things right in for San José in 2009. How come years later the quality of WFC websites appears to have gone down the tubes?

15 thoughts on “Convention Website 101”

  1. I’d add, make sure you set the name on your Paypal account correctly. I was a bit confused when I got my “Receipt for Your Payment to World Horror Convention 2010” as confirmation for my payment for WFC 2013.

    1. It is fairly common for the name on the PayPal account, and indeed credit card receipts, to not match the convention. Ours all say “SFSFC”, which confuses some people. But we make a point of warning people about that in the payment process.

      1. Note that SFSFC learned this the hard way, when selling memberships to the 1993 Worldcon in San Francisco. People got credit card charges from “S F S F C INC SUNNYVALE CA” (Sunnyvale being the SF Bay Area suburb where our mailing address is) and thought they were being fraudulently charged. You can’t fit “SAN FRANCISCO SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTIONS INC” (the full corporate name) into the credit card fields, and SFSFC is the parent non-profit corporation of a bunch of different conventions (1993 and 2002 Worldcons, 1998 and 2009 WFCs, 2000 and 2011 Westercons, etc.). After having to deal with some chargebacks and challenges, we started putting the notice on all of our sales publications and web sites that your charge will be from SFSFC. We’ve not had any problems since then.

  3. Devil’s Advocate here: is there any written document to pass 2009’s experience along to future WFCs?

    (For the record, not involved with any of these organizations, but had no problem registering two memberships with WFC2012)

  4. Petréa & René:

    I haven’t had time to write anything, but it is not as if people don’t know where to find us. Both of these conventions are being run by people close to the World Fantasy Board, people who attended the 2009 event. They have seen membership forms be done better, and should know where to go for advice. Of course that would involve them swallowing their pride and admitting that perhaps not everything we did in 2009 was totally incompetent and an utter disgrace.

    1. Wait, what, 2009 an “utter disgrace”? From my perspective as a total outsider who just attends these things, I thought the 2009 WFC was superbly run. Other than the water problem in the dealer’s room, of course, but that wasn’t the con’s fault. I’m still in awe of the organizational coup of getting USPS to show up on a Sunday to ship books home.

      1. By all means. And also add Andy’s point about the company name on the receipts.

        I may have some time to help out in May, but not before then.

  5. ” .. and 2013 World Fantasy (Brighton). ” An interesting convention that is due to take place in a town that is both interesting and accessible to the spinally challenged who live up North of the U.K ? !!

    There just has to be some sort of catch .. that is to say a catch that goes beyond the bureaucratic inefficiencies to which fanndom is heir.

    As for ‘ swallowing their pride ‘ oh come now Cheryl, I know that you are deeply steeped in the Literature of Fantasy but, well, six impossible things before breakfast is easy imagine when compared to the concept of con organizers swallowing their pride…even you can’t manage to imagine that.

  6. Hi Cheryl

    I was linked to your blog post and came to look.

    I have just moved into the role of Publicity for WFC 2012 (Toronto) and I just want to thank you for your observations on the process of purchasing online memberships for our convention.

    I took these comments into consideration and have already contacted the Chair and Vice-Chair of our convention and started looking into turning the page from its current format to the much more user friendly “shopping cart” model.

    Again, thank you for the feedback,

    Kim C

    1. Thanks Kim, that’s good to know.

      My experience doing the web site for 2009 suggests that the typical World Fantasy attendee is not very technically savvy. For example, quite a few preferred to follow our news blog via email updates (which Feedburner will do for you) then to read the blog or use an RSS reader. The more hand-holding and reassurance you can give them the better.

      1. Again, thank you!

        We’d been kicking around the email list idea, but for sure it’s on my to-do list.

        I will keep all that in mind when making my suggestions for keeping in contact with current and prospective attendees for WFC 2012. 🙂

    2. It’d also be handy if the site said what happens after paying. I’ve not been to a convention before, so I’ve no idea what’s average. Will I get a confirmation email? A letter? At what point do I email to see if it’s gone wrong? It might seem like a small thing, but it’s handy to know what should happen, so I’ll know if it doesn’t.

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