FWA 2025 was an incredible year in many ways… But it also came with a lot of challenges. In the post-con survey you told us where things didn’t work, what felt overwhelming, what communication missed the mark, and how lines and crowding affected your experience. We’ve listened carefully to everything you shared.

And we want you to know, we’re acting on your direct feedback.

Some of the changes we’re rolling out for 2026 are things we’ve been planning for a long time, and some are things your feedback pushed to the top of the list. Either way, these improvements are happening because you helped point us in the right direction.

What we’re planning:

Queue Management/People Movement Gets Its Own Division & Director

Queue management has historically been a part of our Safety Director’s responsibilities. While it has had a large team supporting it, it has not had focused direction from high-level leadership. Last year taught us that, at our current size, this needs to change. We’ve created a new division with a dedicated director that we’re calling People Movement & Circulation, whose focus is on planning queues and getting those plans communicated clearly to our attendees, as well as implementing strategies to help everyone move between our hotels and convention spaces as efficiently as possible.

As part of this effort, the People Movement & Circulation team will be working closely with our Accessibility team to ensure that guests with accessibility needs have an improved and more standardized experiences. This includes collaborating on queue layouts, hallway flow, and transition routes between venues, with the goal of reducing strain, removing uncertainty, and ensuring that all attendees can navigate the convention comfortably.

This won’t be an overnight fix, we’ve grown quickly, and we’re still learning the best ways to support a convention of this size. But we’re confident FWA 2026 will be a much better experience in these areas, and FWA 2027 will be even better still.

We’re looking for furries who are passionate about making FWA better to help with this department. If you think you fit the bill, head here to see a list of open positions.

More Convention Space

We’ve already shared that The Courtland Grand will be joining us for FWA 2026 as one of our convention venues, hosting registration and more. But we’re not stopping there, we’ll have more venue news soon, especially for vendors. Stay tuned.

Programming Spread Across All Hotels

This is something we’ve been working to do for a few years now, but something we’re pushing on even harder on now. We’re distributing events more evenly across our venues so no single hotel reaches overwhelming density. This means more panel rooms, more spaces for meet & greets, and… Maybe even more stages. (no promises… yet!)

Improved Communication

This was a big struggle for us both internally and externally last year.

Some things fell through the cracks last year due to ineffective communication, which led to y’all not getting the information you needed to best enjoy FWA 2025 until it was too late, or in some cases not at all. We’re tightening up our internal communication processes both pre-con and at-con to make sure that all departments are on the same page, and that information is flowing properly between departments, and to you.

We’re also working on improving our external communication channels, including our website, social media, and email newsletters, to ensure that important information reaches you in a timely manner. You can already see that here, with our new website as well as this new FWA news and blog area!

Expanding Into The City

This is also something we’ve been exploring for the past few years. We see this as two huge wins:

1. We’re Furry Weekend Atlanta. We want to introduce furries to Atlanta, and Atlanta to furries. We love this city, and it loves us back. We want y’all to experience the best parts of it with your closest friends who you might only get to see a few times a year.
2. It further alleviates congestion in the hotels and con space.

Thanks to our own outreach efforts and the City of Atlanta’s Atlanta Convention & Visitors Bureau, we’ve already been able to accomplish some really cool stuff like the Furry Takeover At Georgia Aquarium, The FWA Pug Crawl, the bar crawl we hosted last year, as well as a furry takeover at the Atlanta Eagle.

But we’re not stopping with just those.

Many of you may know that a group of furries have been running their own unofficial FWA car show near the convention called Cars And Collars since 2023. We’ve now invited them to join FWA as an official department, both to be able to utilize our organization’s resources and connections, but also so that we can work with them to communicate and market their event!

But that’s not all. We’re a community focused event, and being a community focused event means we need to engage with our community, so we’re exploring ways to work with and assist some of the furry event/party groups that have been creating their own shows in and around Atlanta during the con.

On that note, know a group that’s put on a show in Atlanta in the past and is interested in doing another one during FWA 2026? Or do you have some other idea for something we could be doing in the city? Shoot our Special Events team an email: [email protected].

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Our team is hard at work on even more plans for FWA 2026 that aren’t quite ready to be announced yet! Keep your eyes posted on our socials, newsletter and our website to stay up to date with us!

Growing From 7k To 17k Attendees

In 4 years we went from 7,212 attendees to 17,736. That is an absolutely staggering amount of growth. We cannot express how much it means to us that so many of you consider FWA your home, but having multiple years of nearly 50% growth in a row has put us far ahead of what we were expecting even 2 years ago, let alone when we were making plans 4 years ago. We’re now catching up with our growth, and we’re making sure that our future plans are more flexible to account for unexpected attendance increases like these.

Finally, we want to say that this organization is run by a bunch of furries who are passionate about making the best event they can for this community. Your feedback is always appreciated, it’s what keeps us motivated to continue doing this. So please, make sure you’re letting us know when you see areas you think we can improve, either via our Post Con Survey, or emailing us at [email protected]!

We’re looking forward to FWA 2026, and we can’t wait to see you there!

- The FWA Team