2000 Archive: Survey Results

"Thanks! You guys did great!"

"Keep up the great work!"

"This was the best con I have attended in many years, thank you."

"This was very poorly organized.  I had fun despite the con, not because of it."

"Thanks very much for a great con." — Survey Comments

We went into CONvergence 2000 thinking it was likely that we could take a dip in attendance from CONvergence 1999's registration total of 1,500. We were forced to be located in a different hotel this year, and change is always disruptive. And we were moving FROM the Radisson Hotel South (a fan favorite convention hotel) to a hotel in downtown St. Paul. There was lots of grumbling about not knowing where to find the hotel and having to pay for parking, so despite the positive word-of-mouth generated by our 1999 convention, we were prepared to see our numbers go down.

Well, we were wrong. Despite all those factors, our registration total ROSE by 101, and our actual warm body count rose by more yet. See the graphs at right for details.

The total registration count was 1500 [registered] in 1999. The total registration count for Convergence 2000 was 1601. The increase in registered members was 6.7%

Convention Survey Analysis

16.6% of the convention population took part in the survey (256 surveys/1533 attending). Statistically this can be considered a relevant sampling of the convention population.

Demographics:
Gender
Male	49.4%
Female	50.6%
Age
2%	0-12 years
6%	13-17 years
7%	18-20 years
33%	21-30 years
26%	31-40 years
19%	41-50 years
5%	51+ years

Did you attend last year?

67% of those who answered said yes, 33% indicated they did not attend CONvergence 1999.

This is perhaps the most interesting statistic recovered this year. If 33% of this year's attending members did not attend last year, and the convention grew by a WBC count of 10%, this implies that 23% of the attending CVG 1999 membership did not attend CONvergence 2000. This would seem to reflect the losses we expected due to our one-year move to the downtown St. Paul location, but appears to have been more than offset by an influx of new members. Next year's numbers should prove interesting indeed.

List your 3 main reasons for attending.

The most popular answers were:
"Friends Do" (About 20%)
"Masquerade/Events" (About 10%)
"Parties" (About 10%)
"Dealers" (About 10%)
"Programming" (About 10%)
"Local SF/F Con" (About 10%)

How many Science Fiction / Fantasy conventions have you attended?

Many of you responded with comments like "many," "I lost count," or "lots". Obviously any response other than a numeric value couldn't be figured into an average. The average that we WERE able to calculate was 9.7.

For those of you out there who love these statistics, the median value of conventions attended was about 5.5; (i.e. 50% of the population has attended fewer than 6 cons).

20% of respondents indicated that they had attended only 1 convention before.