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New Midwestria announces its debut at Holiday Inn Carol Stream on April, 23rd 2022, featuring an all-day convention and concert!
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Climb our way back. Climb our way back home

– ASG, Dream Song

What is New Midwestria’s mission?

 

To serve the people mostly. Who these people are? We’d like to assume they are the people that get what we’re doing with New Midwestria, but to answer in a less nebulous way, we’d like to assume that they are members of the brony fandom (and beyond) who resonate with New Midwestria’s mission.

New Midwestria is what you, the community, make of it, after all. Although that is true about any convention and any kind of public entity. That is true about anything that exists in a sort of cyclical, almost co-dependent, existence such as fandoms and fan conventions. It can be argued that a convention doesn’t exist without its community, and a community doesn’t exist without its conventions. (wordplay is fun).

A convention without a community is nothing more than a hotel conference area with empty panels rooms, pony branding and signage sprinkled throughout, maybe someone on a renegade stage playing acoustic guitar to an audience of three, and a packed vendor and concert hall with the same names and faces you’ve seen year after year.

Or maybe we’re just describing what we’ve seen from brony conventions as of the last five years, we’re not sure. What we are sure of, is that in a post-covid, post gen-4 world with a dwindling interest in pony content, now’s not a time to be resting on our laurels.

 

NEW MIDWESTRIA IS…

 

For the Fandom

First and foremost, New Midwestria is for the fandom. The New Midwestria fandom. But that isn’t said in any exclusionary sense. In the same way that Ponyville Ciderfest and Whinny City Pony Con are brony fandom conventions but are also colloquially considered “Charlie Cons”, so too is New Midwestria ‘for the fandom’.

New Midwestria is a ‘pony-con’ in as much of the same sense that PVCF or WCPC are a ‘Charlie Con’ and vice-versa. Seeing as Pony conventions are essentially sub-communities that exist inside of or atop the brony fandom (whichever direction you are looking at the fandom from), each convention has its own individual identity that sets them apart from each other in terms of branding but in some strange stroke of homogeneity, all seem to follow the same beats as each-other. From hiring the same volunteer staff members to approving the same the same artists in the vendor hall, to signing on the same musicians. staff, guest of honor, and VIPs, to enacting the same policies and adopting the same operational ideologies; it’s almost more like there’s a fandom for these conventions and the satellite communities that have evolved around them rather than the brony fandom at large.

Although that is just one perspective. However, that’s why we specifically say “The New Midwestria Fandom”, because in that sense we feel it’s important to differentiate and individuate New Midwestria from this cloth because New Midwestria is very obviously not for the ‘MLP Convention Fandom’, it’s for everyone, no matter what fandom they are a part of. Brony, Anime, cartoon and animation, science fiction, etc.

New Midwestria is for bronies, but it’s also for anyone, in any fandom, who enjoys attending conventions and bringing their friends to hang out for a weekend. New Midwestria is for any creator that wants to cut their teeth on a vendor floor/stage/panel room and make a name for themselves. New Midwestria is for anyone who still believes in the virtues of Love and Tolerance set forth in the early days of the brony fandom. New Midwestria is for anyone who just simply likes our mascots and the media we try to put out with them.

New Midwestria is for YOU, if you want it to be.

 

A private event-planning company

One of the first questions we received when we were publicly announced was “Who is the backing company? Pony conventions usually have a backing company”. We were a little confused by this question, because… New Midwestria is.

New Midwestria is a Limited Liability Company (LLC) just like the companies that host other brony conventions (Ponyville Bronies/Corgi events, Lunar Solaris Corp, Pegasi Northwest, Trotcon LLC, etc). The only difference is that New Midwestria is a private company and not a 501c3 Non-profit.

We noticed a trend of pony conventions registering as 501c3 non profits, and were even told by other con-orgs that we would have to file some kind of paperwork “when we filed our 501c3”, but when we asked why most pony conventions register as 501c3s, the answer we got wasn’t for any legal or copyright/Intellectual property reasons like we originally thought, but simply because “most pony conventions can’t afford to pay their staff so they register as non-profits.” We also learned that the main benefit of registering as a 501c3 are tax exemption reasons. This means your organization is exempt from federal taxes, sales taxes and property taxes. You may even be exempt from payroll taxes if you have employees. Being tax-exempt will save you money over time which is a plus to any nonprofit organization.

501c3s also have restrictions on paying directors and officers among other restrictions, which would be antithetical to one of our core tenants (explained more in detail in the next block) as a midwest event-planning company.

 

Dedicated to honesty, open-ness, and fairness

The responses we’ve received to the announcement of our company have definitely shaped the values of our mission, although to be fair we’ve been shaping the values of our company since our organization in 2018, and possibly even earlier, before New Midwestria was even a name and just a loose collection of values and ideals rattling around in our heads.

Over the last 10 years we’ve seen every side of the brony fandom. We’ve hung out with the analyst community, sold in artist alleys and vendor halls (from small cons like CanterlotKC all the way up to the main floor of Bronycon), and worked with fandom companies like Weimtime or the Traveling Pony Museum before completely striking out on own with a dedication to be as open, honest, and fair as possible.

That isn’t to say that the other organizations in the brony community aren’t open, honest, or fair by comparison. The purpose of this distinction is because, as we previously stated, we have been involved with fandom in almost every capacity, and that extends to the internals of conventions as well. From attendee, to vendor, to panelist, to the former marketing director of Babscon, we’ve been around this fandom, and we’ve had some particularly interesting experiences.

As an attendee we once paid $500 for a convention’s highest level sponsor badge, received a paper bag full of scrap paper (while lower-tiered sponsors received nice plastic pony bags) and none of the items that were promised. When we inquired about it, we were told by registration staff “I don’t know the badge tiers” and found out later that the convention chair hadn’t even received the items promised in the sponsor-tier and, while the convention was under way and the con chairs were preparing for their at-the-con-wedding, they were still waiting for the sponsor rewards to be delivered in the mail.

As a vendor, a common experience we’ve had from across several conventions (mostly from one convention in particular) is that our applications (staff, vendor, panels) would always come late. When other people would be posting about their approved applications, we would still be waiting for ours, sometimes having to chase around directors and con-chairs to get status on our applications, Some of them came at the very last minute, some of them came late, some of them were even completely ignored and never came at all

One time when trying to purchase a con-book advertisement -a few months after the same con we were buying from printed our first advertisement in black and white, rendering sections of it unreadable, and offered us autograph vouchers as a refund, and wouldn’t actually refund us until we froze the payment, then promised us a guaranteed spot in the vendor hall for the next convention they were hosting, to which we then received a rejection letter some months later, requiring us to contact the con chair who promised the guaranteed slot in the first place to get the situation rectified- we struggled to get our invoice paid by the deadline the con-chair gave us because they quote “had more important things to work on” that night rather than sending us our invoice.

(There was also this one time where we waited three weeks for the con-chair to deliver us designs they wanted us to work on as a test to join their design staff, only to get a whole 3 days to finish them and wouldn’t be awarded any extra time for us to deal with our family matters that weekend because “that is the speed in which we’d be required to design at” yet 3 weeks is an absolutely appropriate amount of time to make a prospective staffer wait)

One time our staff application to assist the con-chair -the same conchair as previously mentioned- with brainstorming marketing ideas to increase badge sales received a reply four months after it was submitted, and we were told “I’ve looked at it a hundred times – probably literally – and every time I just thought “I have no idea how that would work, so I’ll think about it later” and now it’s a month away from con so lol I guess not”. We’re not even exaggerating, that’s the exact quote.

We bring up these situations, not to air petty grievances, but to highlight the fact that they happened. And our thinking is, if these situations happened to us, there’s no telling who else they happened to. Who else received a received a rejection after they were promised something to be guaranteed? Who else was made to wait to the very last minute for a rejection when all their friends and colleagues had already received their approvals? Who else was made to wait a weirdly inappropriate amount of time for something as simple as an invoice or design files? There’s no way to quantify exactly how many people these situations have happened to, and, on the other hand, if we were the only one this happened to, that just makes the prospect of the entire situation look that much worse. Because Instead of just general bad business practices it turns into a case of targeted harassment; and that’s just a big bowl of yikes right there.

But we digress, the point we’re driving towards is that after these experiences we vowed that -outside of basic no-brainer stuff like having registration staff know what’s being offered at registration and having everything we promised to have available actually be available before the event begins- anyone who sends us any kind application will have it treated with the attention and swiftness it deserves. Because frankly put, we do not want to be responsible for making our fans and attendees experience the levels of frustration and bewilderment that we have been made to feel while trying to involve ourselves with one of our favorite conventions.

Artist, creators, musicians etc in the fandom have developed careers out of touring these conventions, and unlike what CMPC said about vendors back in 2018, we at New Midwestria believe that vendors ARE owed something. Expanding on that, we believe that our Musicians ARE owed something, our staff ARE owed something. At the very least they are owed the basic respect and professionalism that they deserve for bringing their audiences and fans and talent into our convention.

 

“The attendee who is applying to be staff today could be your director of marketing tomorrow, and if you abuse them, they could end up your competitor by the end of the week”

So to that effect we only thought it would be fair to fandom to organize our company from the ground up with the following tenants in mind:

 

You can expect:

  • To not have to chase around applications or invoices.
    • If you apply for any New Midwestria position everyone will be approved/denied at same time.
      • if approved, invoices will go out with the approvals
      • If  denied, there will be a  detailed reason attached so you can have something to work towards for the next event and won’t be left with a generic cookie-cutter response like “we had so many applications!”
  • To be compensated for the work you contribute to New Midwestria
    • Work will be conducted on independent contractor basis with signed agreements detailing scope of work and payment
      • If we sell merchandise using artwork made for New Midwestria, the artist receives a royalty from profits generated on top of the labor they were paid
    • Members of staff will be paid at the financial closing of events they perform work at
      • Higher-level members of staff (management / director positions) and ongoing internal positions (Marketing, PR, Operations, etc) will be paid throughout the year as they perform more frequent internal operational work for the company

 

The last bullet section being perhaps our loftiest goal for the company and the fandom, and as such we don’t envision ourselves hiring any high-level positions in the outset as we need to grow financially independent first. However, as we grow and scale, and as our staffing needs increase, we feel that if someone is, per se, giving us months of professional services (Audio visual, marketing, design, Public relations, registration, sales, etc) we’re not going to rely on that labor for free when outside companies charge thousands of dollars for those same services.

As an aside, we also do not believe it is fair to take advantage of these services for free from a professional perspective, and we definitely don’t think it’s fair on principle when certain con-orgs in the fandom have been very vocal in maligning a fellow fandom member / content creator for relying on volunteer labor to produce their content when pony conventions themselves rely on volunteer labor to produce their conventions.

 

Empowering. We’ll keep the gate open for you!

Perhaps one of our most defining principles here at New Midwestria is our goal to empower the fandom. For years we’ve heard bronies say things to the effect of “this fandom is a job creator”, and if that’s the case then we want to create a space for bronies and fans of New Midwestria to be able to come in and find themselves. We here at New Midwestria want to give our attendees the ability to grow into something in the same way we were able to grow from attendee to vendor to marketing director to con-chair. Because if the bronies in this fandom were allowed to create their own conventions, communities, and careers from the fandom in the 2010s, then by all rights we should be able to create a similar space for anyone who wants to do the same in the 2020s and beyond; and once we do, we feel we have an obligation to keep the gates open and allow other people to come inside, learn, grow, and exceed themselves.

That itself is weird enough to have to proclaim. That we have, let alone deserve, the right to exist and create a space for our community to grow and develop. The fact alone that we felt the need to mention it in a mission statement is telling enough, However the one thing we’ve yet to figure out is why those organizing our current pony-cons are so adamant that pbronies SHOULD NOT start new conventions; in a fandom whose convention scene was literally built upon the Cambrian Explosion of pony conventions in the early to mid 2010s, inside of a country that gives its citizens the right to free enterprise.

After the announcement of the final Bronycon in 2018, when we first filed our articles of organization for New Midwestria, we were personally told by con-chairs and those in closest association to them -many of whom we looked up to creatively and professionally, people we sold with in various vendor halls, and people we generally just wanted to be friends with-  that we weren’t thinking clearly, that we were “being emotional and needed to calm down” and that we “should just staff instead”. The latter in fact being a common dog-whistle for this kind of dissention. That if bronies want to run a convention they need to staff one first, at least to “see what goes on internally” and see why running one is such a ‘bad idea’. Which, tangentially speaking, just opens up a whole Gordian-knot of logical fallacies that we have never received logical answers to.

Over the last three years, we have personally been told to not create our own convention. That we don’t know what we’re doing. That we couldn’t put together a simple budget. That we’re not smart or experienced enough to organize a convention. Hell, when we publicly announced ourselves in late 2021 we were told several times that we needed to shut down our company, that we needed to give up, and were relentlessly compared to failure cons like Dash Con, Fyre Festival, and Las Pegasus Unicon, simply because someone who staffed at another convention didn’t like that we had an under-construction website and only 1 staffer (me) running the show.

In the same three years, we also bore witness to a host of conversations of pony-con organizers telling bronies that they need to stop starting new conventions, that bronies were poor, that bronies were entitled, that no-pony knows more about running conventions than those in current organization, and just a general air of snootiness and the gatekeeping of information. Someone even went as far as to unironically tell us personally -in an argument we had with the vending community that went from a misunderstanding about asking for the custom-pin creation service someone used vs asking for the actual manufacturer that company uses to the safeguarding of information available to vendors and the competitive edge that justified the keeping private of said information despite the fact that vendors admittedly share information with each other to begin with- that “information is a privilege, not a right” and thus, we vowed the opposite.

A common theme we noticed among all these conversations is the gate-keeping and privatization of knowledge. That those in convention staff, director, and chair positions are taking to the lofty positions that we as a community have elevated them to and are looking down their muzzles at us, saying we don’t have the skill, knowledge, or know-how  to run a convention or are even allowed access to any of the so-called “knowledge” needed to organize a convention unless we staff THEIR conventions first, while simultaneously refusing to tell us what “knowledge”: or “skill” they personally feel we are lacking, but are yet told we “have to do our own research” because the new crop of pony conventions are “already making mistakes” but aren’t told what mistakes, if any, they are apparently making or what they need to do to fix said mistakes, which only forces those ambitious few down the road of having to learn BY making mistakes because those who have came before them and have already experienced and learned from those same mistakes refuse let those they deem below them access to these answers because of some nebulous arbitrary skill-level that a new con-chair hasn’t achieved yet.

If you’re confused then welcome to the club, because we’re confused too. In fact we’ve been confused since august of 2018 and we’d much rather try and fail, regroup, and try again rather than try to keep up with these constantly moving goal-posts.

 

The argument could be made that those organizing new conventions aren’t entitled to that information, the vendors certainly tried to make that argument to us last year, and it was a pretty solid argument until a horse-famous fandom VA and fellow vendor DM’d us saying that they themselves wouldn’t have made it to where they were if one of their vendor friends hadn’t given them a google-doc full of information that helped them get started with pony vending (so much for that much needed competitive edge, huh?)

We bring this up, again not to air personal grievances, but to highlight that this is what has been said to us. These are real conversations we’re referencing, they’ve actually happened, and they were situations paramount to the creation of a set of values we felt we needed to include in order to ensure that we never disempowered someone in our community to the same effect that others have tried to disempower us.

 

At New Midwestria, we aim:

  • To let the underdogs have their chance in the spotlight
    • There’s no arbitrary skill-level needed to staff, vend, perform, or contribute to New Midwestria in any capacity, as long as you have a willingness to learn and contribute, you will be given a chance
    • Newer applications (vendor, staff, Community Guests, etc) will be prioritized over returning applications
    • Community guests will be required to have done something significant recently (last two years) for the community. Being a popular name isn’t enough
  • To give everyone a voice
    • You feedback/suggestions will always been considered. From attendee to staff, so long as it is constructive, it will be considered and maybe even implemented!
    • You feedback/suggestions will never be dismissed with a handwave like “that’s a logistical nightmare”
  • To encourage open communication
    • We don’t have all the answers, and we can’t do everything ourselves. Therefore we strive to value open communication and discussion of ideas from the community
    •  Attendee and fan-feedback is of the highest importance to us, since, like essential workers, the attendees and fans are what make the conventions successful
  • To create and provide a well-spring of information for our community
    • For example: Creating a series of resources and guides for attendees to use as reference in the event they’d want to get started as a vendor, musician, staff member etc
  • To respect our audience
    • We won’t shut people out for personal/political disagreements
    • We won’t weaponize our convention audience in personal/political matters
    • We strive to avoid brining any fandom drama from the 2010s into 2020 and beyond, people deserve to be able grow from their past behavior (ya know, love and tolerance, within reason of course)

” Just like those that came before them, our fans and attendees should have the same opportunities to learn and grow that we had in the 2010s.”

 

New Midwestria Business Goals / Phases

Stage one: Foundation 0
Stage Two 0
Stage Three 0
Stage Four 0
Stage Five 0

Outside of our stated values and ideals, we are also presenting our current road-map (presented one phase at a time) of our short-term goals for New Midwestria in an effort to inspire an air of transparency and collaboration!

Stage 1: Foundation

  • Establish mission and core values
  • Finish website
    • Finish pages
    • SSL Certificate
    • Set up Merch Shop
  • Establish Social media presence
    • 500 followers per main social media
      • Main Twitter
      • Main Facebook
    • 100 followers per Mascot social media
      • Melody Twitter
      • Dax Twitter
      • Gwen Twitter
  • Establish Financial Foundation
    • Establish emergency business savings
    • Grow Patreon to $30 / month

 

-Rainb0w

Conchair for New Midwestria

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Our Website is under construction