Vancoufur cares about the health and safety of our attendees and volunteers, and has been monitoring the Covid-19 situation carefully and following all the recommendations of the BC government, Health Canada, and the BC center for disease control, as well as working closely with our partners in the event industry.
Currently, there is a government mandated ban in effect for BC that limits gatherings to 50 people or less in a socially distanced space, and depending on how Covid-19 infection numbers are trending, this has been restricted further. It has been made clear that the prohibition on large gatherings, such as conventions in Vancouver, BC will not be lifted until “phase 4” of the BC Restart plan, which will not occur until a vaccine for Covid-19 is widely available. This is currently projected for fall of 2021.
Due to this, events such as Vancoufur, which last year saw an attendance of over 1,200+ people is not currently possible in-person. Currently, the Covid-19 infection rate in BC is trending upward, and not downward. Because of this, and the lack of availability of widespread vaccination until late 2021, Vancoufur cannot have a physical event for 2021.
However, we still want to make sure that you get a chance to have some VF fun, so for 2021 we will be hosting a virtual convention event, featuring a ‘beta’ version of our announced theme ‘Evfurquest Online’ as a preview for when we get to once again see everyone in person. The Vancoufur Evfurquest Online Beta will be held on March 6-7th.
Covid FAQ
Q. Why did you wait so long to announce you’d be doing a virtual event?
2020 has been an extraordinarily challenging year. Its been hard on our organization, but its also been hard personally on our volunteers that run this event. We’ve had a lot of unprecedented challenges, unexpected departures of key staff, and lots of uncertainty. Not only that, but we had to wait in order to sort things out with our existing hotel contract to avoid penalties and reschedule our physical event to 2022.
Q. Why are you charging for some tiers for your virtual event?
Running even virtual events is not entirely without costs. Vancoufur and our parent organization, the BCAEA has some significant costs associated with running events that go on through the year. Costs include web hosting, licensing (software fees, etc), storage fees, equipment rental, merch, etc). Our events is our main and only revenue source for the most part for these expenses and even virtual events aren’t free to run. (music fees anyone?) Normally running our event will sustain us through a year, to the next event, but we do need to try to bring in some revenue in 2021 to allow us to continue to run events through to 2022. We really appreciate everyone who helps us out by purchasing an sponsorship tier, purchasing a registration add-on, shopping at the constore, or any other money donated to help keep us going until we can see everyone in person again.