With the 2024 Republican National Convention roughly 170 days away, the entities in charge of executing the major political event are hard at work as they prepare to welcome more than 50,000 visitors to downtown Milwaukee and broadcast coverage of the four-day spectacle to viewers around the world.
The RNC’s two primary organizers are the MKE 2024 Host Committee, a nonprofit, nonpartisan group responsible for producing the convention, including fundraising, booking venues and hotels, recruiting volunteers and connecting local businesses with convention-related business opportunities, and the Republican National Committee’s Committee on Arrangements, a partisan organization that oversees and manages all aspects of the convention for the purpose of nominating the party’s pick for the next president of the United States.
To get the latest on the convention planning process and what Milwaukee-area businesses and residents can expect in the coming months leading up the 2024 RNC, BizTimes caught up with key leaders Alison Prange, chief operating officer of the MKE 2024 Host Committee, and Elise Dickens, chief executive officer of the committee on arrangements.
Not just four days
The actual dates of the RNC are July 15-18, but convention-related activity in Milwaukee is well underway and will only continue to ramp up over the first quarter of the year, said Dickens. Most of that activity is from groups coming into town to tour potential sites to rent out for events.
Each day of the convention, hundreds of ancillary events could be taking place in and around Milwaukee at any given time – especially in the daytime hours prior to official sessions in the evening.
“There will be official RNC events, there will be official host committee events, but then all of our affiliated groups – the delegations, corporations, media groups – they’re all going to be hosting events as well and sponsoring events all across town and the metro Milwaukee area,” said Dickens. “Those can range from as small as a delegation breakfast of a hundred people that has a VIP special speaker, all the way up to a concert that might have 500 tickets.”
The COA has a five-person external affairs team dedicated to hosting groups for pre-convention tours of the city. As of early January, the team had connected – either in person or virtually – with 49 of the 56 state delegations and had hosted 15 of the party’s top affiliate groups and committees for in-person visits, including House Speaker Mike Johnson’s team, the National Congressional Committee, the Republican Governors Association and the Republican Jewish Coalition, said Dickens. These day-and-a-half visits include a night at a downtown hotel and dinner at a local restaurant.
Accommodating modern-day media
In November, more than 400 members of the press — local, regional, national and international — travelled to Milwaukee for the Fall Media Walkthrough, an opportunity to tour the convention complex — which includes Fiserv Forum as the main venue, and the Baird Center and UW-Milwaukee Panther arena as designated media spaces — and begin planning their convention coverage strategy, from booking hotel room and venue space to scoping out prime standup positions within the arena.
Since then, the COA has been fielding requests and feedback and using that information to design the layout of the convention site and book necessary accommodations, all for the purpose of maximizing the event’s media coverage, said Dickens. And in the year 2024, that means leveraging tech platforms like TikTok, Google News and X (formerly Twitter) as well as social media influencers and podcasters.
“It’s been very interesting to see how people consume media (today) is so different even from eight years ago,” said Dickens, noting 2016 in Cleveland as the party’s most recent full-scale convention. “And we want to make sure that we’re delivering on every possible platform to make sure that we’re ultimately hitting our voters.”
With the anticipation of more media in attendance and an arena that has a smaller capacity than past convention venues, the COA is faced with a unique challenge of designing a layout that accommodates as many people as possible.
“It’s a fun, huge game of Tetris that we’re going to be playing,” said Dickens, adding the close proximity of the newly expanded Baird Center and Panther arena is “ideal” and an advantage over previous host sites.
Business impact taking shape
The COA supplies all groups looking to host events during the convention with a directory of roughly 150 venues across the greater Milwaukee area, complete with key information and photos of the space. Included in the guide are high-end downtown restaurants such as Lupi & Iris and Bacchus, casual brewpubs such as the Bavarian Bierhaus in Glendale and Raised Grain Brewing Co. in Waukesha, and large-scale event locales such as the Milwaukee Art Museum and American Family Field.
Convention and media groups are also encouraged to browse a separate directory of more than 1,500 businesses – based locally and across the state – for services ranging from hair and makeup to catering and event production.
The local host committee began registering businesses last April for the venue and vendor guides as part of its mission to ensure the local economy benefits from the RNC’s $250 million estimated economic impact. The group said recently that nearly 30% of the businesses listed in the vendor directory are considered diverse, or owned by women, people of color, veterans or members of the LGBTQ+ community. Driving business to minority populations in the region is an “important part of the framework agreement we have between the city, the RNC and the host committee,” said Prange.
Dickens said venues and vendors will start to hear from interested groups during the first quarter, and a master calendar of all convention-related events will be released a couple weeks out from the convention.
Announcements are also expected soon on the winners of the RNC’s four major contracts: credentialing services, transportation management services, production services, and general contractor. Each of those contracts will give way to additional subcontracting opportunities for local businesses, Prange said, especially for the extensive build-out of the convention complex and the transportation of the party’s nearly 5,000 delegates and alternates – which will require roughly 400 commercial buses, school buses and shuttles.
Fundraising and volunteer recruitment
As of early January, the RNC’s local host committee remains “on track” to reach its $68 million fundraising goal, said Prange, although she declined to share a specific dollar figure and said there’s still “a long way to go.” She additionally touted the leadership and support of two of Milwaukee’s most influential business leaders: Northwestern Mutual CEO John Schlifske, who chairs the host committee’s finance committee, and Ted Kellner, former chairman of Fiduciary Management and the host committee’s CEO, as well as host committee chair Reince Priebus.
Prange explained the $68 million will be used for the “non-political parts of the convention,” including facility rentals and build-out of the convention complex, transportation, parking lot rentals and accommodations for volunteers.
The local host committee needs about 6,000 people to fill 8,000 volunteer shifts during the convention. Ahead of an official February launch of its volunteer program, the group had already recruited 700 volunteers as of early January. The non-political volunteer roles include hotel and airport greeters, downtown guides, registration volunteers and venue ushers; to fill them, the host committee plans to tap into the Milwaukee business community as well as area schools and universities.
“We’re really hoping that Milwaukee’s businesses will step up and help us in this as major employers because it’s a great way to let their employees be part of a huge civic opportunity, and as a non-political way for them to get involved,” said Prange.
The COA is also working to recruit its own force of 300 so-called “professional volunteers,” usually political staffers who work on Capitol Hill but wouldn’t otherwise have a reason to attend the convention, said Dickens.
Professional volunteers will arrive in Milwaukee anywhere from one month to a week or two ahead the convention to work alongside the COA team, which itself will expand to about 50 staffers at its peak. Currently, the COA has about 30 staffers in Milwaukee and leases office space in the Associated Bank River Center downtown. The local host committee, on the other hand, has its headquarters at The Avenue.
