Tampa wooed Bollywood and the city’s economy won.
Last weekend the Florida city hosted the International Indian Film Academy (IIFA) awards and all its related events. It was an unqualified success for the city, predicted to have brought more than $11 million to the area economy. It was also the first time the awards were held in the United States. It’s all great but London, Singapore……and Tampa?
As the Tampa Tribune said in an editorial, it was no accident. It all started with complaints from Indian constituents about a lack of cricket facilities at Hillsborough county parks. County Commissioner Higginbotham responded to their concerns and then grew those contacts into a tireless recruiting effort to attract the awards. He partnered with prominent Indian businesspeople in the community (there are more than 23,000 Indians living in Tampa). Yes, it took an investment of public funds, about 90 percent of which was covered by the increased hotel tax revenues, but it also took community commitment.
A commitment to cultural awareness.
Businesses responded to the challenge to make the thousands of visitors feel welcome. Tampa is home base for several large steakhouse chains and there are dozens of beef-centric restaurants. This is not necessarily appealing to a culture where a large percentage of people are vegetarian and Hindu, the predominant religion in India that also holds special reverence for cows. So the community learned about Hinduism, restaurants and hotels modified menus, and organizers worked with different cultural perspectives of time and punctuality.
The moral of this story is that cultural awareness helped Tampa achieve so many great things with this one event.
- Although the economic impact study on IIFA has yet to be completed, the informal consensus is that IIFA was very good for business.
- The partnerships that grew out of the effort to woo IIFA have made Tampa a stronger community that will be better educated and prepared to face any culturally based challenges that may arise.
- Local citizens who became involved in any way increased their knowledge of other cultures.
- The events laid the groundwork for further collaboration. In fact, a concurrent Global Business Forum was organized by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce in cooperation with many Florida entities to discuss a variety of topics related to growing relationships.
Talk about a win-win-win situation!
