Transcript
Narrator 0:00
City leaders in Indianapolis have been on a mission for decades to revitalize the city’s economy and image and to improve quality of life for Hoosiers. A significant acknowledgement that all the strategizing, planning and marketing have delivered tremendous results came in 2012 when Indianapolis served as the host city for Super Bowl 46. In typical Indianapolis style, the event became about more than the game. It became an opportunity to bolster Indy’s community and increase its brand value in the eyes of the nation. Dianna Boyce of the Indianapolis Super Bowl host committee commented on the policy behind the events organization, saying we let our actions speak louder than our words. Some of these actions included channeling Super Bowl revenue toward helping Indy’s homeless into local shelters, installing a food co-op in a neighborhood without grocery stores, and building a 20,000 square foot Youth Center to provide educational and health programming for Indy’s families. This model of event planning was discussed by civic leaders at the Richard M. Fairbanks symposium in downtown Indianapolis on April 1, 2015. In response to a question about large scale funding projects like the Super Bowl, panelists explained that the most successful city fundraising occurs when leaders focus on improving community and brand value. Mark Miles, CEO of Hulman & Company, and a key organizer of the 1987 Pan Am Games and the 2012 Super Bowl, begins by crediting Indy’s dedicated volunteers who demonstrate Hoosiers commitment to community building.
Mark Miles 1:37
To me, the reason to do it wasn’t just the immediate improvement of the community in this crazy way. I believe that when when people get together and get involved in something bigger than themselves, they get really motivated. They get completely connected to the place in the city. We always say, you know, they figured out how to get off the couch and get involved civically, and I don’t care whether that’s about their scout troop, or the next major sporting event, or something very personal, or something with their school. The city is made up of people who are activists because they share a sense of community.
Narrator 2:14
Ryan Vaughn, president of Indiana Sports Corp, describes how to weigh the value of investing in sports within the competitive global market by considering both the benefits sports pose for a community and a city’s branding strategy.
Ryan Vaughn 2:26
There is an increasingly competitive environment for premier sporting events across the globe because people have recognized how economically valuable they are, not only in direct tax dollars, in indirect business cultivation and promotion and development, but in brand identity and what it means. There’s no funding solution that is going to be uniformly applicable to every city. The best way to address this, and it’s a legitimate public conversation, is, at what point is public investment not worth the public return? You know, how much does you have to spend to get an event, and are you losing money? And you have to make that economic decision based on the actual dollars and the very intangible, difficult to measure, brand and community value. I mean brand, global brand, but also what Mark’s talking about, what it means to your community to be able to rally around a bit like that. And that’s becoming more and more difficult metric to pan out.
Narrator 3:32
Oklahoma City Mayor Mick Cornett explains that his fundraising efforts have met with greater success when he connects city funding to issues the community cares about.
Mick Cornett 3:41
By now, I’ve been in the office a long time. I’ve run a lot of campaigns, either as a candidate myself or pushing an initiative, and I’m running for the NBA, and I’ve run them for sports arenas and all sorts of things. And well, I noticed a pattern. Inevitably in Oklahoma City at some point in the campaign, I find myself in some suburban neighborhood meeting, and I’m 10 miles from downtown, and I’m nose to nose with a guy who just is refusing to see things my way. And I reach a point where I realize this guy doesn’t like downtown, he doesn’t like taxes, and he doesn’t like me [audience laughter]. And when I’ve lost the intellectual argument with him, I close with this, I say, “Well, we’re creating a city where your kid and your grandkid are going to choose to live.” And they hate that argument [audience laughter] because they know it’s true. And that’s that’s kind of the real emotional aspect of passing an initiative. You’ve got it, you’ve got to approach people at the point where it’s what they care about, and they care about their kids and their grandkids, even though they don’t like paying taxes.
Ted Frantz 4:57
This podcast was produced by the Institute for Civic Leadership and Mayoral Archives and the Department of Communication at the University of Indianapolis. It is made possible by the support of the Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation, Indiana Humanities and the Lily Endowment. For more information, please see our website, uindy.edu/mayoral.