Universal FanCon Creator Blames the Fan Community for Con Debacle
Universal FanCon in Baltimore was intended to be an inclusive fan convention that celebrated diversity. The convention was the brainchild of Robert Butler (The Black Geeks) and Jamie Broadnax (Black Girl Nerds). They started a Kickstarter campaign that raised $56,498, with an initial goal of $25,000. However, despite the fan backing and all of the support it got from the fan community, especially marginalized groups, a week before the con was supposed to take place, it was canceled due to a lack of funds.
Fans, sponsors, and guests were rightfully outraged that the people behind the convention waited so long to inform anyone of the financial deficit they were in. People who had already invested money also booked hotels and airplane tickets, and were left with little information. Thankfully, people are resourceful, and WICOMICON popped up in Baltimore to give those who were left with little options a place to have fun and enjoy themselves.
Besides the loss of funds, which was bad enough, Black Girl Nerds also removed the bylines of some contributors who spoke up about their problems with the BGN community, including a lack of credit and lack of pay. BGN said it was an accident/glitch, but the timing left many in doubt.
Now, it’s possible to both have sympathy for Broadnax and call her and Butler out for their major error in financial judgment. However, the decisions made in light of that financial judgment and their response to criticism are the problem.
In an article published by Vulture, Butler makes the following statement:
“It was hubris,” said Butler, in his only interview discussing the implosion. Hubris — and, as he went on to suggest, a surprising lack of enthusiasm for diversity among fans. If more fans had bought tickets, he said, the whole debacle could have been avoided. “Unfortunately, they just didn’t,” he said. “I should have known better. But I let my belief in this nonexistent community blind me.”
Um … excuse me? It is because of that “nonexistent community” that Universal FanCon was even able to form a true concept in the first place. Not only did they double the goal set by the Kickstarter, but they invested what they had into attending. The problem is that the people behind FanCon had no real financial expertise and spent more time securing huge celebrity guests (Billy Dee Williams, Roxane Gay, Orlando Jones, Mehcad Brooks etc.) and renting a huge convention space rather than running it through a hotel.
Nevermind the fact that as people who are running a convention for marginalized nerds/geeks should have a better understanding of the financial difficulties affecting poorer people. And when starting a con for the first time, it’s basic business sense to start small and then expand: ie FlameCon, which has upgraded its location pretty much every year since it began.
Butler and Broadnax have every right to be frustrated and to defend themselves against the onslaught of criticism; however, they can’t just get a pass because they are part of the black nerd community. They were supposed to be doing this for people who don’t often feel they have a safe place within nerd culture. Instead they are making it seem like those people let them down.
No, you let us down and you have to own that shit. Butler comes close to that when he admits that they “believe their own hype” when it came to seeing the social media response: “We were in the bubble of social media. Our critical mistake on size and scope was that we believed that our combined tens of thousands of Twitter followers would actually come out and support us.”
Again, this language makes it seem as though it’s the tens of thousands of Twitter followers who are at fault. Except anyone who works in events will tell you that you trust ticket sales, not social media hype. If everyone who followed/retweeted Tinashe bought her album, she’d be platinum.
Nearly half a year after they’d made the deposit, Universal FanCon had only sold a hundred or so tickets. “There was no marketing,” Melanie Dione, the former director of entertainment for FanCon, told Vulture. “If you didn’t know someone directly involved, you wouldn’t have known about FanCon at all.” Which led to them to hire consultants who promised them they’d see results. Meanwhile, they’d given 5 figure offers to their celebrity guests.
At the start of 2018, four months before the convention, Butler said they had only sold 169 tickets. The article then goes on to describe events from March onward to the day they canceled, which was just a flurry of bad news (Orlando Jones dropped out, they were $289,000 in the red). Broadnax secured a $10,000 sponsorship from SyFy Wire, but at that point, it was pretty much useless.
Butler, Broadnax, and the rest of their team f-ed up hard and while they may not be villains, trying to place the blame on other people and waiting so long to actually let people know “hey this is where we are at” speaks to the level on incompetence on their part. Since a lot of cons run a deficit the first year it’s par for the course in many ways, so the way they want to deflect responsibility is the real villainy.
Do not use the fact that you are trying to help an underappreciated section of the fan community against said fans. They did their part by helping to fund the event from the beginning. It is the people behind the project that misfired. 169 tickets may not have been a lot, but I’m sure that if FanCon was being run out of a hotel with one or two guests and had lot of fun panels, it would have perfect to those 169 people.
(via Vulture, image: Universal Fan Con)
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