#OCtober 2024 feedback

this year i conducted a survey alongside the event! here's some results from it!

there were 112 responses on the survey, and i've rounded each number here to the closest full number (no decimal points) if you're curious about the maths on these.
also i've only included the questions that i have something to say about! there were more questions on the survey that didn't make the cut here, but i talked about some of those on patreon a few weeks ago

age range: 32% adult, 57% young adult, 11% teen. do you also do martch? 85% no, 15% yes. are you following me? 65% yes 35% no

first few things i collected were some optional demographic questions - age, if people do my other event, and if people follow me! i was just curious really... turns out most ppl who did the event (or at least responded to the survey) were young adults, who follow my account & who don't also do my mARTch event. i realised after the survey finished that i prob should have included a question to see if it was people's first time doing my OCtober prompts or if they've done past years... but oh well! i'll make sure i include that next time

where are you participating? tumblr: 81 people, discord: 49 people, bsky: 24 people, in real life: 24 people, twitter: 20 people, instagram: 20 people, other: 16 people, not sharing anywhere: 6 people. any issues with the hashtag: 85% yes 15% no

in terms of where people participated, the majority were on tumblr... BUT! since that's where i host the event from there's probably some sampling bias
i did try my best to count individual participants across sites, but some were easier than others to do that on OTL tumblr has a very robust tagging system, so i was able to keep track pretty easily and count at least 241 individual participants there. other sites were a little harder because of their non-chronological feeds and search systems (instagram especially was a nightmare for trying to find things between its' sponsored posts and algorithm... bleh!) my best estimate for sites other than tumblr is around 60 people posting countent that i wasn't also seeing on tumblr, but again it's hard to be exact when the search isn't showing you everything!

some of the biggest overlaps in posting were: people who posted on tumblr were much more likely to overlap with discord and bluesky, and people who posted on twitter were mainly crossposting to instagram.
a few people posted on other sites (deviantart and cara each came up twice... youtube, unvale and sheezy came up once)
a fair amount were sharing with people IRL ... and 6 people weren't sharing anything anywhere (which shocked me, since the event is dedicated to sharing your ocs)

i also polled for hashtag issues- everyone who reported having problems with it were posting either on tumblr or instagram, and these were issues i observed myself on the first day :(
tumblr had a pretty bad problem at first where the search was showing up almost empty despite me seeing tons of event posts on the dashboard... i got a lot of direct messages and asks about it, and had problems getting my own posts to show up in there too... luckily, it fixed itself by the second day!
my best guess is that having so many posts suddenly show up after no activity in the tag for a whole year caused the issue? i did my best to go back later in the week to reblog all the day 1 posts.

as for instagram- i mentioned it before but damn, that non-chronological algorithm really screwed the event over... i tried my best to find posts to like at first, but the tag kept just giving me unrelated reels & showing me posts from two years ago :/ so after a certain point i just had to give up on searching. i don't use instragram a lot anyway, but it was still a shame to know there were posts i was missing out on

what medium did you participate with? text posts: 36 people, old art: 58 people, new art: 107 people, writing: 23 people, role-play: 3 people, other: 10 people. most common other mediums: picrews, collage, playlists

art remains the most popular medium, but i was super happy to see so many people participating with other mediums this year!! i feel like writers & other creatives don't get as much recognition as artists sometimes, which is unfair!

i was also relieved to see so many people re-use old content this year! i structure all my events to accomodate busy schedules & people who don't have the stamina for daily drawing challenges so it's nice to see people taking advantage of the accomodations i make

how many ocs fo you have? under 5 ocs: 7%, under 10 ocs: 13%, under 20 ocs: 23%, over 20 ocs: 19%, over 50 ocs: 15%, over 100 ocs: 23%

this is the question i was the most curious about - how many ocs do people have? unsurprisingly, people who do oc events seem to have a lot!
the two most common amounts people had (tied) were between 10-20, and OVER 100

this question also had an option for "just 1" ... but despite me knowing a few people over the years who have only had one oc, nobody who responded did, so i left it off the graphic here

how do you feel about the balence of days? 94% say they like the current amount, 4% say they want more mandatory days, and 2% say they want more skippable days. what did you use the skippable days for? 16 people say they didn't have a fitting oc, 15 people say they didn't like a prompt, 55 people say they were busy or tired, 31 people say they skipped because they were late or catching up, 13 just prefered to focus on the main days, and 40 people didn't skip any days at all

skippable days! these are kind of the thing that my events are known for... this year, there were 10 main days, and 21 skippable days in the list (meaning people had the option to skip two thirds of the month if they wanted to!)

the overwhelming majority of people liked the balance of days, which was good... i've tried a few different configurations over the years & i also really like this balance myself. i skipped all of the optional days and it made the event nice and easy to complete

the most common reason for skipping the optional days was people being busy or tired, which is what i expected... it's a pretty normal way to feel after drawing or writing a few days in a row.

40 people said they didn't skip any days... which is impressive but OMG GUYS I HOPE YOU'RE RELAXING AFTER THAT!! RS INJURIES ARE NO JOKE, BE CAREFUL OUT THERE!

fav week? 19% say week 1: oc introductions. 37% say week 2: backstory. 24% say week 3: fun and games. 11% say week 4: community. 9% say week 5: halloween. most popular prompts: symbolism, costumes, old oc, music, relationships, underappreciated oc, and meme redraws (most popular, mentioned 13 times). least popular: not a lot of love for likes/dislikes or pumpkin carving. most divisive: palette challenges and community week

what did people like & dislike this year? well...

the most popular week was backstory week, and while there were a lot of days people said they liked, by far the most popular individual day was the memes day (which got mentioned 13 times)!
the least popular week was halloween week, and the least popular individual days were likes/dislikes and pumpkin carving, which both got mentioned around 10 times each. pumpkin carving was a new one this year, and i think a lot of people were a little confused about it - while i said in the rules/event description that you didn't have to carve a physical pumpkin and could just have your ocs carve some, i think a few people missed that section because there was some worry in the survey from people who thought they had to do an irl one

divisive days were the same two they are every year -
some people LOVE palette challenges and some people HATE THEM!!! as someone who really loves them, i'm sorryyyy they're gonna stay in the event! but as with this year, they're gonna remain an optional day! you absolutely 100% do not have to do them if you don't like them! a few people actually suggested having an alternative prompt you can do instead of them, and i might consider that going forward...

the other super divisive one was community week - a lot of people love it & enjoy interacting with other people, and a lot of people are shy/introverted and were stressed about it. i try to take this into account - that's why there were no prompts, only vague suggestions you didn't have to follow, as well as only one main day for the whole week.
however i'm not sure i made it clear enough...i still got some responses and asks from people stressed out about setting up trades/collabs. just to be clear: there was no trade/collab prompt, that was just a vague suggestion about one possible way you could interpret the week's theme!
i'll make sure to try harder next year so everyone knows they don't have to set up direct interactions if they're shy - any interaction, even something as small as clicking like on a post, is enough to count towards community week

and finally... i included this question,

(optional) are there any prompts NOT PRESENT on this year's list you would like to see added in a future event ?

...buuuut it didn't exactly work out :p a lot of the responses were for things alreadypresent on the list, so maybe i didn't word it clear enough?
in particular, a lot of people asked for a "dnd alignment chart" prompt (that was day 17)

4 people asking for a dnd alignment chart prompt

kinda stumped as to why that happened 🤷 i also had a few people ask for "underappreciated oc" and "swap" which were also already present (day 4, day 18)

the confusion aside, there were still a some responses that answered the question, and i'm taking them all into consideration for next year! specifically; i got a couple for certain AUs, some for future halloween prompts, a few requests for templates people can fill out, aaand there were a lot of requests to bring back some of the old days i removed from past years! i'll be thinking about all of it!

when it comes to planning the next event - most of that is gonna be taking place in my discord now! consider joining if you want to be a part of the process or you wanna be the first to find out when the next list drops! discord.gg/rSnwM8zVnV

also, i don't think i'll be updating this page with new stats (too much effort...bleh!) but if you still want to leave feedback, here's the google form!