British fan conventions have a long and slightly eccentric tradition behind them. The national science fiction convention has run over the Easter weekend since the late 1940s, Novacon has been going in the Midlands since 1971, and the World Science Fiction Convention has come to this country repeatedly, to London and to Glasgow. Almost all of them are run by volunteers who have day jobs. That tradition is worth knowing about, because it means the model is proven and the mistakes are well documented.
What follows assumes you are aiming at something between one hundred and five hundred people over a weekend, which is where most first conventions land, and that nobody involved is being paid.
First, decide which of these you are building
- A one-day gathering with a programme. One venue, one room, a schedule, a hundred people. Genuinely achievable in six months and the right place to start.
- A residential weekend. A hotel or a campus, people staying overnight, two or three programme streams, a bar that becomes the real event. Twelve to eighteen months, and the point at which contracts start to matter.
- A commercial show. Traders, paid guests, signing queues, a ticketing operation. A different business entirely, usually run by companies, and not what this guide covers.
- A festival with a fan heart. Multiple venues in a town, partner organisations, public funding applications. Rewarding, slow, and heavy on paperwork.
The residential weekend is the classic British fan convention, and the rest of this page leans towards it.
The eighteen month sequence
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Eighteen months out: the committee, not the theme
Five to seven people, each owning one area: chair, treasurer, venue, programme, membership, crew, accessibility. Agree in writing how decisions get made and how somebody leaves without taking a password with them.
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Sixteen months: choose a legal structure
An unincorporated association is the default and leaves the committee personally liable. A company limited by guarantee or a community interest company puts a wall between the event’s debts and your house. If you are signing a five figure venue contract, take the wall.
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Fifteen months: bank account and money rules
A dedicated account in the organisation’s name, two signatories, and a written rule about who may commit money and up to what. Never run a convention through a personal current account, however convenient it feels in month one.
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Twelve months: sign the venue
Read the contract properly, including the cancellation terms, the minimum spend, the attrition clause on bedrooms and what happens if their building work overruns. Negotiate. Hotels expect it and fan committees rarely do it.
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Ten months: insurance and the paperwork
Public liability cover in the organisation’s name, a written risk assessment, a fire plan agreed with the venue, and a decision on whether you need a temporary event notice or are covered by the venue’s own licence.
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Nine months: open memberships
Publish the price, what it includes, the refund and transfer policy, and the code of conduct, all before the first payment is taken. Early rates reward the people who take the risk on you.
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Six months: programme and guests
Build the schedule around the rooms you actually have. Confirm any guests in writing, including who pays for travel and accommodation, and never announce a name before that letter exists.
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Three months: crew, conduct and access
Recruit and brief volunteers, publish the accessibility guide with real measurements, and name the people who will handle a conduct report on site along with how to reach them at two in the morning.
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One month, then the weekend
Print everything. Walk the building with the venue duty manager. Brief the desk. Then get out of the way and let the people you trained do the jobs you trained them for.
The money, and the trap inside it
The trap is cash flow, not profit. You pay a venue deposit twelve months out, a balance perhaps a month before, and public liability cover somewhere in between. Membership income arrives slowly at first and then in a rush in the final six weeks. That means there is a long period where you have spent real money and hold very few bookings, and it is the stage where nervous committees make bad decisions.
Three defences. Price early memberships to bring money in at the start rather than the end. Keep a contingency of at least a tenth of the budget and refuse to spend it on anything that improves the event rather than rescuing it. And write down, before you start, the number of members at which you would cancel, so that the decision is arithmetic rather than an argument in March.
Ticketing platforms are not all the same
- Does the platform charge a percentage of the ticket price, or a flat amount per ticket? At convention prices the difference is substantial.
- Who pays the fee, you or the attendee, and is that shown clearly before checkout?
- When do you receive the money: as it comes in, or after the event has taken place?
- Can you issue a partial refund, transfer a membership to another person, and export the full attendee list?
- Does it handle concessionary rates, supporting memberships and day tickets without a separate listing for each?
- What does it do about data protection, and where is the attendee data actually held?
That last question is not pedantry. You are becoming the custodian of several hundred people’s names, email addresses and in some cases access requirements, which is health information. Decide who can see it, keep it out of personal inboxes, and delete it when the event is closed.
Code of conduct, and meaning it
Every serious UK convention now publishes one, and the published document is the easy part. What separates a real policy from a decorative one is three things: named people who will receive a report, a written procedure they have actually rehearsed, and the authority to remove somebody without convening a committee meeting first.
Put the reporting route on the back of every badge. Brief the desk and the crew on what to do when somebody approaches them, which is mostly to listen, write it down and fetch the named person rather than to investigate. Decide in advance what you will do if the person reported is a guest, a committee member or a large trader, because that is the case that breaks unprepared organisers.
Accessibility, with numbers in it
Publish measurements rather than adjectives. The distance from the accessible parking to the registration desk. The width of the narrowest doorway on the route between rooms. Whether the hearing loop covers the main hall or only the reception desk. Whether there is a quiet room, where it is, and whether it is genuinely quiet or simply unbooked.
Offer seating in queues, reserve space at the front and the back of programme rooms rather than only the front, and let people register access needs at the point of booking rather than by emailing a stranger. Under the Equality Act you owe reasonable adjustments; more usefully, doing this well is what makes people come back a second year.
What usually goes wrong
- The committee is five friends and no treasurer. The finance role is the one that must go to somebody willing to be unpopular in meetings.
- The venue contract is signed unread. Attrition clauses on unsold hotel rooms have bankrupted fan events. Ask specifically what happens if you fill the function space but not the bedrooms.
- Guests are announced before they are confirmed. A verbal yes at a bar in October is not a booking. Get the letter, then post the news.
- Volunteers are recruited but not briefed. An unbriefed volunteer on the desk will invent a policy, and it will be the wrong one.
- Nobody plans the ending. Close the books, publish the accounts to your members, hand over the passwords and write the handover document while you still care. The convention that cannot pass to a new committee dies with the old one.
If all of that sounds like a great deal of administration for a hobby, it is. The compensation is that a weekend event creates the kind of friendships a monthly evening takes five years to build. Start with the evening, though. Our guide to starting a gathering and the planning checklist cover the smaller version, and almost every good British convention committee is made of people who ran small rooms first.