Concluding our 2 year plan: "The Experiment"

Hello everyone Midnight here, its been an interesting ride for all of us this past year and as we look forward to a new chapter past the dumpster fire I wanted to share with you some history of The Midnight Manor. While some of you have been with us for many years there's been a lot of fresh faces over the past two years and that's not by accident. For most of The Midnight Manors existence I took a very laissez-faire approach to organizing events. I was very new to event hosting and wanted to promote a more organic growth to the kink community like I had scene in other cities. Problem was this didn't really work, sure I was able to keep events running in one form or other but we would rise a bit, fall, stagnate and repeat. Getting just 20 people to a party was hard. By the end of 2018 I had lost a fair bit of money, wasn't having much fun and it wasn't helping my relationships. I was considering whether or not to continue...

In 2019 I sat down and thought about my options then made a decision. I was going to give it one more go and give it everything I got, go big or go home. But what was big? how long should I try this for? I didn't have the most concrete plan I just knew whether I stick with it or hang my hat I had to give it my best shot. The first few months were.... not efficient lol. I had poured over a lot of ideas and concepts but nothing really come together. Two main points did emerge that had to be built around, it needed to be big and we needed to draw in talent and people from established communities. I started to travel to other clubs, talk to people, try to get some interest for Sudbury. People didn't even know we had a community never mind monthly munches. So I pitched us as the under-dog, the wild west, but most important I saw that we were the hub, the perfect middle ground for people from the north to come for an event and not far for people down south to come visit. Afterwards I sat back down and looked at my options then it hit me. I took almost every idea I had and put it together, there be something for everyone it be so big it you couldn't ignore it. Of course I'd have no life till it was done, it might cost me everything I had saved up, no one had even thought to try it so maybe just maybe it'll work. Sudbury was going to have its first big kinky expo!

I had to work fast to make sure I'd fit the time table and found two amazing stars to headline the show, Shahrazad and Tifereth. A hall was booked, promotional material was set and so it was announced Sudbury was having an expo. It was a lot of hard work, I had built a website from scratch, fix up and expand our dungeon equipment and just promote non stop to get people excited to come see us. One amazing change that happened was our media presence, even in Sudbury almost know one knew we existed, we were always in the shadows and this was our coming out party. The Midnight Manor got accounts on facebook, snapchat, instagram and we attracted the attention of local newspapers across northern Ontario. When we did our first interview it sunk in, this was really happening, this was big, this was amazing. The night before I could barely sleep, a tsunami of doubt and excitement and when the doors opened I was not disappointed. With hundreds of people coming in that day and all-access passes being sold out it was a success. 16 hours later I collapsed into my bed tired and smiling.

We followed this up with our best anniversary event ever, a full weekend workshop with after-party stage show and dungeon. It was great, it felt like we could do anything now and thanks to Knotnice and Special Librarian for teaching and preforming for us! We had an amazing time and had upgraded dungeon now. Then we had began to expand our club to include a swinger division. Our non-major events we doing good as well, before we had one monthly munch and now had 4-6 socials happening every month. People were feeding off the excitement. We had built a campaign bringing several of the small cities (Sudbury, North Bay, Timmins and Elliot lake) together into one circle where we share resources, vetting and events where now we had a large enough population to be a sustainable community.

2020 started off really well for us, on top of continuing to host parties and socials we continued to expand into new events. Two amazing ones we did was to bring back "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" to Sudbury and help out with Réseau ACCESS Network "That's my Drag" fundraiser.

And while lock-downs hampered our in person events we used the opportunity to continue to grow with our online presence. The website received a much needed makeover, started our own Discord server to keep everyone in touch and with us finally getting a small space to run an office and storage out of we started our own podcast "Excite Me"

And now with our two years being complete its time to set a new plan with new goals to achieve. As many of you have seen on our social media we already know what that is and are slowly revealing updates to you. So make sure to stay glued to our updates as we have something really great in the works for you and look forward to having you with us for the next few years. See you soon.