Updates From the Con Chair
Aug 31, 2023
To all of the AMKE attendees that have reached out to us over the past few days:
We want to start this off by saying that we hear you, loud and clear. We haven’t been clear or transparent in our communications. We haven’t provided the why to all of the changes we’ve been making. So, let’s talk about it.
This year, you saw a change in the overall cost of the badge prices. Much like gas prices and food at the grocery store, the cost of running AMKE has grown exponentially. Somehow, we have to balance the cost of running the convention and the revenue we generate. We also have to anticipate how that increase will be received by those that are being asked to pay more. Price increases are never going to go over well, and we know that. However, to keep up with increasing costs, combined with our venue footprint increasing, and some plans for new and exciting things for Anime Milwaukee coming in the next few years, the increase in price was necessary.
We promise that we have and will do everything we can to make sure any increases are as small as we can make them without sacrificing the convention you expect from us. We’re also committing to do more sales this year, to provide opportunities for those that might not be able to afford the increased cost to still be able to attend.
We’re going to bring back single day badges for the entire weekend, not just Sunday. To give you some insight as to why they went away in the first place, we were asked to find a way to simplify the badge types. When looking at the numbers, single day badges made up less than 5% of attendee purchases, and we felt that keeping weekend badges, and discounting Sunday would be the best option overall. Still, we should have thought more about what that meant to all of you before we agreed to that. We can see that we made a mistake, so we’re bringing them back. This is important to you, and that makes it important to us.
Also, for the first time ever, you'll also have the option to pre-register for single-day badges, which a lot of you have asked for. Check those out starting on September 1st.
Lastly, we want to talk about badge mailing and why it went away this year. Historically, badge mailing is a huge undertaking. It requires hours of coordination and a lot of volunteer labor to put everything together. This includes matching the orders, ensuring that the addresses are correct, packing all of the badges, labeling them, and then mailing them out to thousands of attendees. Our current registration system does not have a built in mailing or shipping option at this time and quite frankly, trying to make mailing work last year caused more problems than it tried to solve.
Many attendees didn’t receive their badges due to incorrect mailing addresses, or the orders themselves were mixed up because the system couldn’t provide the information we needed. We tried our best, but the majority of people who requested their badges to be mailed to them last year had a poor experience. This year, we decided to forgo badge mailing, and instead we are working with our registration provider to build out a mailing system that will improve the experience for everyone. Until that happens though, we can’t, in good faith, put everyone through that again.
The majority of us at Anime Milwaukee are fans like you and we do a monumental amount of work because we love what AMKE represents - the entertainment, culture, and friendship that changed our lives and made it better. Working here gives us the chance to see that continue. AMKE’s staff are all volunteers and nobody gets paid to work at the convention, ever. We’re also human, and sometimes we make mistakes.
So keep talking to us. And we’ll keep listening. And we’ll never stop trying to get better and better. Thanks for being there for us and being patient with us. We want to provide an event that lives forever as one of our favorite memories. By listening to and acting on your feedback, we hope that AMKE will become exactly that. We may not get everything right, but we do our best and try to do right by everyone because we know that you love it as much as we do.
Thanks for reading, and we hope to see you at the event.
