Prestige not enough to attract sponsors

The tight economic climate spells doom for a proposed Harvard technology conference in Pinellas.

By LISA GREENE, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published April 25, 2002

Nothing carries quite the cachet of a Harvard degree.

So you might think that, when Pinellas companies heard that Harvard faculty would come here for a technology conference, local executives would leap at the chance to help underwrite the event, hoping that a little of the Harvard mystique would rub off.

But it didn't happen.

Earlier this month, Rick Dodge, the county's assistant administrator and leader of the county's economic development efforts, wrote to Harvard.

"It is both disappointing and embarrassing for us not to be able to fulfill our promises," he wrote.

County officials had called everybody, he said, from the governor's office to leading local companies. He couldn't raise the $100,000 base funding needed to hold the conference in June.

The conference would have featured Harvard faculty members discussing how public managers and government leaders could use technology to improve their performance. But even the Harvard name couldn't beat the sober economic climate of the post-Sept. 11 world.

"It's really the temper of the times," Dodge said this week. "Everybody is just, appropriately, holding on to every nickel and dime."

As companies cut their budgets, sponsorships are one of the first places to go, said Mike Meidel, president of the Clearwater Regional Chamber of Commerce.

"People still seem to be in the wait-and-see attitude," Meidel said. "There's a whole mood of 'Let's not do anything rash until we see what's going to happen.' "

Meidel said he's had trouble getting companies to sponsor business events for the chamber, and in some of the charity work he does. And signing up anyone for $100,000 is "a big ask," he added.

"To obtain high-level sponsorships is tough," he said.

Dodge wrote to Jerry Mechling, co-director of the "E-Government Executive Education Project" at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. He told Mechling that he and Commission Chairman Barbara Sheen Todd had worked on similar events for 15 years "and never have had this difficulty before this attempt."

Mechling said he wasn't entirely surprised.

"It is not an easy year for raising money out of the private sector," he said.

But Mechling and Todd stressed that they still hope to bring such a conference to Pinellas within the year.

There just wasn't enough time to line up the players, Todd said.

"I talked to some other private sector people who are interested and will be working with us," she said. "But we were running out of time."

The fact that the conference would focus on the public sector, not on private business, might also have hurt efforts to find a primary sponsor, Dodge said.

The county asked the governor's office and U.S. Rep. C.W. Bill Young's office to help out, but no state or federal money was available. They also contacted Florida Power, but rules on its foundation giving wouldn't allow the utility to help, Dodge said. Todd wouldn't name the companies she is talking to.

The county's role was to help bring in sponsors, but tax money wouldn't have been spent on the event.

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