With No Brand Con 2026 in the rearview, I think it’s time to talk about the business of running a small, nonprofit convention. This year was genuinely really good for us, and kind of a miracle. Events like ours usually don’t come back from the dead, and I want to talk about how that death happened, and how we used the lessons from that collapse to bring it back.
When we failed in 2023, it wasn’t out of nowhere. Events like ours don’t just just spontaneously combust. There are a number of reasons cons can fail, and ours wasn’t special. Now there were some cirumstances that accelerated that death, like the COVID-19 pandemic suspending any income for a few years for an organization that has to get most of its revenue from memberships, but that train had left the station long before that.
Something we don’t talk about a lot is how No Brand Con’s attendance had been steadily declining for years.
The last time No Brand Con publicly reported its numbers was 2015 (1504 for the record). 2015 was No Brand Con’s last year at The Plaza (which has since been demolished) in Eau Claire, with 2016 being the first year the event was held at the Chula Vista in the Wisconsin Dells. Now an attendance drop was always anticipated with the move, but the con saw a steady decline year over year afterwards.
Now I wasn’t heavily involved with the con for a few years, so I don’t have access to figures for 2016 and 2017 without digging through an old SQL database, but both years as far as I was told hovered around 1000. In 2018 I returned to staff fully though, and began running the backend for our registration system. In 2018 we were in a transition, so a good chunk of our records were still paper based, so I only have an estimate. No Brand Con 2018 barely broke 900.
Starting with 2019 my numbers get exact, as I totally took over registration record keeping. While in our early years we operated under warm body counts, starting with the new system we just go for paid attendees. Attendees are counted just once, and Vendors, Artists, Staff, Volunteers, and Guests are not counted at all. Sadly, things got worse, with 2019 only hitting 771 attendees.
And then the pandemic hit.
Our return was rough, and when we came back in 2022, we ended up with 628. It was clear that the Dells were not a good home for our event. So we went to Stevens Point in an attempt to rebuild… and only got 478. Which, uh, was significantly worse than what we needed to do financially. That’s when I had to make the now infamous post announcing our shut down.
Now one of the biggest problems was that we kept operating like a con with a four figure attendance, when we hadn’t been one for a long time. We stayed big, didn’t shrink our scope as needed, and spent like we were still the “larger” event we weren’t anymore.
And reality hit us hard on that one.
I could give the whole story of our return, how the cons debts were paid, and how we returned, but I only really want to focus on part of that story here. Effectively, when we decided to bring the con back, we broke down the money of what we wanted to do, how much it would cost, and eliminated everything unnecessary in the budget. If it didn’t face the attendees, it was out. We tightened our belts in every way we could. We’d shrunk every year, so we made our plans asking the question: What if fewer people show up in 2026 than who came in 2023. So we built the con for that.
And, uh, we kind of smashed those numbers.
In 2026 our attendance count was 645. It was our first year in a long time where the current year’s numbers were higher than the previous year’s. Now it helped that after a decade, we were bringing the con home to Eau Claire. There was a nostalgia factor in some of the attendance, and the community’s love for us one hundred percent helped. But it’s important to note that this was probably the first time since our early years that we were genuinely prepared to not make our numbers. A lot of people wouldn’t be excited by only 645 people coming to their con, when you plan for less than 400… it’s phenomenal.
It also helped that we finally raised our prices to match inflation (while still charging less than most cons in our category by a significant number).
The important thing is that we’re making our plans with the idea that we’re a small con that’s going to stay a small con. In fact, our philosophy is so focused on that, that we intend to cap our attendance at 1000 long term. We’re focusing on stability and providing a quality attendee experience. We’ve always been a small con, but now we’re finally being honest with ourselves about it.
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I did a nice thing for a stranger today. I’m not going to bother saying what it was, or give any details about the interaction beyond saying that it cost me zero dollars, just a few seconds of my time, but still made a tangible difference in that person’s seemingly rough day. I’m not saying this to brag or boast, just to say it happened.
