FPRA - Florida Public Relations Association Blog

Project Hometown as a 501c(4) tax exempt organization created to promote new and renovated community venues designed to significantly enhance the quality of life of all central Floridians through arts, education, entertainment and sports.

The goal to build a new performing arts center, new events center, and renovate the Citrus Bowl Stadium.

Challenges were to educate the community on the tourist tax. The tax could only be used to enhance tourism and entertainment in the community, but could be partially used to build these venues. Therefore, by using the tax as a partial funding source coupled with with a variety of other funding sources, this would accomplish full funding for the projects.

Issues with the public: why not use the money for crime, roads, and social issues? Tourist tax by law couldn’t be used for these issues.

Tourist tax would be increased from 5 to 6 percent creating enough additional revenue to fund the venues.

Opportunities for the community:
Economic development: Jobs, Ancillary Impact, Relocation.
Quality of Life: World Class events, education school programs
Something for Us: Downtown/Hometown .. No more travel to other cities/states for world class entertainment, sports, and arts.

3 Venues - 1 Vote:
Managed to get all three venue projects and benefactors to work together, rather than competing for public opinion ad dollars.

Two series of town hall meetings delayed scheduling the vote.

Next came legislative hurdles which resulted in further delays to getting a vote.

Honorary Chairs made up of leadership from the Chamber, Economic Development, Tourism, Construction, and the Arts to be co-charges to build community support.

Community Support:
Orlando Regional Chamber of Commerce
Metro Orlando Economic Development commission
Central Florida Sports Commission
United Arts of Central Florida
Orlando Performing Arts Center
Florida Citrus Sports
Orlando Magic

Each organization provided support through Resolutions, Inserts, Handouts, Mailings, Billboards, Videos.

Outreach: Delivery of messages thorough Newsletters, Emails, Publications, Meetings, Presentations, Booths, Print, Electronic Media, and Website. All messages in both English and Spanish.

Lots of resources donated.

The county mayor and the city mayor shook hands in widely published photo.

That made it look like it was a done deal... but there still had to be a vote.

Many commission meetings held. Campaign to get citizens to call the commissioners urging support. It was so intense, that the Project Hometown received criticism from some commissioners for the intensity and volume of the Phone calls.

Hotelier campaigned to get the entertainment venue to move out of town. Citizens disagreed with the effort to move one of the venues to a tourist area out of downtown. This really helped to galvanize support for downtown as a project for locals... not tourists.

Some were criticized

Website -- Project Hometown.com

Website was a major help in promoting the projects.

The vote was successful and a billboard campaign was rendered to than the citizen’s and celebrate the victory.

Groundbreaking for the new entertainment venue was held ten days ago (July 2007).

“It was really a campaign where you wanted to be proactive, but because you never knew when the vote was going to be held throughout the campaign, we really had to be reactive during most of it,” explained Cynthia Johnson.

Total length of campaign, though ground work had been laid for years, was one-and-one-half years.

BLOGGER ANALYSIS/OPINION: Having the three dissimilar entities (arts, events, and sports) working for a common goal coupled with a concept of having tourists partially pay for it through the tourist tax dollars saying its time that we do something for us and the tourists (not just the tourists), really made for a successfully engineered campaign benefiting everyone! Brilliant strategy and leadership centering on hometown pride with full support from the tourism industry. This shows how PR can truly move mountains in a way no other entity can.