The Republican National Convention is still nearly 10 months away, but at some point next year the thousands of delegates traveling to Tampa that last week of August will start thinking about what they will actually do once they arrive in a city they barely know.
Enter Adam Goodman and Renee Dabbs of The Victory Group, a Republican media-consulting firm based out of Hyde Park in Tampa that does ad work for a slew of Republicans in Florida and across the country. (Just last week Goodman signed on to do media work for the ascendant Herman Cain campaign.) They are partnering with GOP Convention Strategies, which was created four years ago to provide strategic planning services for organizations and individuals attending the St. Paul convention.
GOP Convention Strategies was founded by Minnesota political consultant Scott Cottington and D.C. insider Darrell Henry, who are not only making the trip to Tampa this year but will be in Charlotte the following week at the DNC (under the moniker of Democratic Convention Strategies).
Cottington says that leading up to the 2008 GOP Convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul, he was hearing from a lot of Republicans who just weren't that familiar with the Twin Cities. He says he looked at previous conventions and saw what different organizations had done in putting together events, and ended up coordinating 24 in all.
When it came time to plan for 2012, Cottington called in some backup. "We knew Tampa is a place where we needed a local partner," he says. "I knew Adam and Renee, having worked on campaigns with them."
"We've already had a significant number of tours of folks coming in to take a look at the city," says Victory Group's COO Renee Dabbs. "[They're] already talking strategies… about what they want to accomplish here, and then starting to talk about details…"
Goodman says that the "point of entry" in attending a political convention can be intimidating for an individual or group that thinks they must have megabucks to get involved. But he says that's not accurate, and his group can strategically try to help them get plugged in.
Currently the 2012 RNC Host Committee and Committee on Arrangements are working on reserving gathering spaces and restaurants for meals, cocktail parties and public events, but once they know what they'll actually be doing, they'll begin to release their hold on some of those facilities next year. Goodman and Dabbs are networking with those same facilities, and will pounce on them when they open up.
Cottington says he can imagine doing as many as 50 to 75 events of different sizes in Tampa, though nobody knows at this early stage what those events will be. (The Victory Group hopes to organize events for Florida Congressional members looking to garner bigger name recognition nationally.) He spends time prodding different people to make booking commitments, but realizes he can't expect to have all the answers by, say, December — not when the actual event isn't until next August.
"It's not enough for them to say, 'well, I'll bring my political team and we'll figure it out.'" Goodman explains. "Because there are a lot of political teams around the country, but they're not going to be as squared in as to what's going on here." For example, there might be an event with 5,000 people that a Congressman will want to impress, but "We'll tell them, 'no you want to go to the event around the corner that has 15 people. … They're the top 15 CEO's in the Southeast and they're interested in what you're talking about in terms of free trade. That's the event you'll want to go to.' We'll know that."
The Victory Group's Renee Dabbs began selling the idea to Republicans in Washington D.C. and then in Tallahassee earlier this year. She says that both Tampa and St. Petersburg will be included in the events they organize, and adds, "There are going to be things that the average person will be able to participate in."
Adam Goodman details how a local businessman or woman could use GOP Convention Strategies to their advantage.
"Say you have a small hi-tech firm in St. Petersburg that's non-partisan, and they want to get more interest in their new software… We'll take them and give them a strategy to quickly plug in, and by the time they come out the back end of this, we'll expose them to a lot of big players that they in no way could do otherwise."
This article appears in Nov 3-9, 2011.