A couple of weekends ago I attended Rainfurrest, the furry convention in Seattle that pretty much filled the void that Conifur left. For the most part, it was a reasonable con, but a few isolated incidents created a black mark that might be very hard to recover from.
The first was something that was strewn all over social media: a guy in the hotel convention space lobby area wearing what looked like a pup hood and nothing but a diaper below his waist. RF has long had a reputation of “catering” to the “cub crowd”, and it’s no secret that a number of their staff is part of it (based on the “crinkle” ribbons seen around this year). But actively catering to it? I don’t really think so. While RF has not officially commented on this picture (because they rarely officially comment on anything, thanks to continually poor PR skills), I would like to believe that this person was told by security to go out some pants on at least. In the scheme of things, this is a relatively minor issue anyway.
Then there were the rumours about diapers being left various places; in stairways, on cars, and so on. I spoke with someone who had one left on their car, and they said it was “unused”. Now seriously, do you think that the “cub” group – who know that they’re getting some pretty bad PR themselves right now – are that clueless to go around and deliberately make themselves targets? They’re targets enough already, and likely they were being targeted here to try and smear that group and try and make them look more responsible for the ills of RF.
The bigger issues is the damage that was caused to the hotel – something that RF did officially comment on.
Usually at conventions there is always some form of minor hotel damage. I include things like elevators falling out of operation here, of which one of the ones going up to the main convention center broke on Thursday early evening. I actually saw that happen, and it was not malicious at all – just an example of how bad those elevators are in general. I was coming up the short flight of stairs to the lower elevator lobby and someone had just pressed the button to go up. They saw me and attempted to hold the doors…but not using the door open button; actually putting their hand against the door edge to try and stop it to close. Any decent elevator should detect and obstruction and stop trying to close, but not these ones. As such, the elevator broke. Wasn’t malicious and just an accident by someone trying to hold the elevator for someone.
Other issues included the hot tub (always a problem for any con) getting broken, because something (believed to be towels) got into the pipes and blocked them. Once again, the con’s failure to deal with PR let rumors run rampant on social media about defecation causing the shutdown of the hot tub. I’ve heard such rumours before at other conventions (one of which may have been RF last year) and they’ve never been true once. The only thing that ever came close was a hot tub at a completely different con getting shut down because a couple of people decided that having sex in it was a good idea. Anyway, regarding this rumour at RF; I decided to find someone on RF staff that was either on the hotel liaison side or very close to them and get the story – which is where I found out about the blockage and it likely being towels. Once I had that, I put out the news on places like Twitter & Telegram to debunk the rumour with something that was close to fact.
The remainder of the issues, which can be found on RF’s “open letter to attendees” at https://www.rainfurrest.org/2016/index.php/2015/10/05/a-letter-to-our-attendees/ included a flooded bathroom causing damage to a hotel office below it, multiple petty vandalisms, and thefts. There were also multiple emergency services callouts (ambulance and police), which doesn’t really put a hotel to ease as to how an event is going.
And now, as of last night, RF posted on the “Location” page of their website (so, not in any really visible place) that they won’t be back at the SeaTac Hilton for next year. Whether this was the hotel deciding “enough is enough” and actually breaking the contract, or the convention and hotel mutually deciding to part ways, is not known. Of course, RF PR being what it is (i.e., “bad”) this news about the con needing to find a new location was not announced by the con, but found by other people and tweeted about – which just sets the rumour mill running again.
Where could RF realistically go?
Nearby in SeaTac there’s the Doubletree hotel, just down the street. But the Doubletree is owned by Hilton, and hotels talk to each other. While moving there is possible, the relationship that the con has with Hilton no longer helps it and possibly hinders now.
Downtown Seattle? That brings a whole new level of expense, as well as trying to find a hotel that has enough rooms and function space. Certainly the con is not big enough to get into the Convention Centre yet.
Bellevue? Located on the east side of Lake Washington, there’s quite likely a hotel over there that might have enough space that isn’t owned by Hilton. It won’t be as convenient for the airport, but I think that it’s likely a contender.
Does the convention already have something in mind? I think probably. The convention had grown enough over the past few years that it was busting the seams of the SeaTac Hilton, and a move was very likely for 2017. No doubt that potential venues had already been looked at, and now the timetable is accelerated a bit.
Before I end this ramble of consciousness, I’ll mention again how poor RF’s PR skills are. They’ve been consistently bad in announcing various deadlines over the past years, and the failure to react to rumours during the con itself. Now, I know that during a convention people are busy. I’ve staffed conventions from 1998 onwards, held various director level positions within conventions, as well as been a vice-chair and chair of Further Confusion. But one thing that I also did was run FC’s social media from 2008 until 2012 (I think?) I had posted all the announcements on various mailing lists and forums from before then, but the Twitter account started in November 2008, after I saw what Midwest FurFest was doing with scheduled tweets. One thing that I found during my year as chair (FC in January 2009) was that Twitter was a great way to find out about problems before con ops even knew about them, and I saw the value in that. My vision from then onwards was to have a Twitter client running at con ops searching on mentions to the con’s Twitter account or the convention hashtag to find out what people were saying about the con, so we could get a heads up on things quickly. I got so much resistance to this, because people were too busy and no-one could be spared. Sometimes we did get a client there running, but I don’t think much attention was paid to it.
Yet the events of this past RF show that there is a need for an increased social media presence during the convention as well as before it. You can see when rumours start, and then get an official notice out to squash them quickly. If you start having problems with petty vandalism, you can put out a notice to inform people to watch out for people doing such and report them to security. There is just so much you can do to make people aware of things, and when people are aware of things – even you don’t give them the whole story, but enough – then your attendees can help the convention stop (or at least, significantly reduce) the amount of bad things that happen. Yes, certainly some things need to be kept quiet, but not everything. A convention is run for the attendees, and the attendees are on your side. They want the con they’re at to keep running, so given a chance, will be able to help by keeping an eye out for things.
