A Juggling and Unicycling Convention will be held in Corvallis, Oregon on March 30-April 1, 2007. This is our first attempt at hosting a festival and we are looking forward to a great success. Our goal is to offer the weekend at NO ADMISSION. A wide variety of workshops will be available, including different levels of unicycling and off-road events. We hope to do some trail riding (although many trails are closed until Apr. 15). In order to plan better, we’d like to know how much of a response we’ll get from off-road unicyclists. How can we make this a signature event? What would get you here, and what would make you want it to be an annual event? How can we get a bunch of you to show up? I can be contacted directly if you want to dissect this e-mail address into it’s usable form: “youreit at proaxis dot com”. Put “unicycling” in the subject line. Check out the festival web site and it’s links: http://www.jugglingconvention.blogspot.com/. I hope to get some feedback! Posted for Angela, unicycle team coach and festival team member.
One thing that’ll be an issue is that this is the week after the Moab MUniFest, the largest MUni event in the world, so some people might not be able to travel twice in such a short time.
I’m the organizer of most of the unicycling events at the Berkeley Juggling and Unicycle Festival, which has had some success drawing strong unicyclists. We had 20 people on our biggest MUni ride this year.
The advice I would give is twofold. First, make sure you have a specific list of unicycle events decently in advance of the festival. Most juggling festivals don’t have very much stuff for unicyclists, so people who are more interested in unicycling than juggling aren’t drawn to them unless you can show them that there will be stuff to do. Check out our event list; most of that unicycle stuff was listed at least a month before the event.
The other thing is that, a lot of unicyclists don’t attend juggling festivals (for the same reason as noted above–not much unicycle stuff there). So, they don’t know the lingo of the juggling festival. Your web site uses terminology that will only be meaningful to people who attend juggling festivals (renegade show, public show–your materials should describe what those things are, not just use terms which are only meaningful to insiders). Much of the stuff you have posted that sounds like it might be of interest to unicyclists, isn’t; for example, “freestyle competition,” “big trick competition”. Those terms have meaning to unicyclists, but it doesn’t sound like unicyclists are invited to those competitions. Make sure that things which are for jugglers are labelled that way, and that there’s plenty of parallel stuff for unicyclists.
In general, re-read all your promotional materials with the idea of making them understandable and appealing to someone who is not a typical juggling festival attendee; that will help draw unicyclists as well as members of the general public, and reduce the incestuousness which is prevalent at most juggling festivals.
Good luck!
corvallas mmmmmmmmmmm live in silverton and ther are 4 or 5 of us that i might get to come but i want to know more about the trails and if you are going to have muni