Tim O'Brien
More than 600 people will walk through the Raleigh Convention Center’s doors Sept. 18. They will pass under the center’s towering ceiling, wind their way through the 500,010-square foot building and eventually take their seats at the Achieve! Campaign’s gala.
The event will bring together the donors and volunteers who helped the campaign raise more than $1.2 billion during a three-year period.
About the same time in 2005, organizers, including Robin Banker, kicked off the campaign in the Prestonwood Country Club in Cary.
Its size limited the amount of guests to 420.
“Before the Convention Center,” Banker, assistant director of donor relations, said, “there wasn’t really a nice place in Raleigh that would hold that many people for that type of event.”
The campaign has also hosted smaller events on campus, but Vice Chancellor for University Advancement Nevin Kessler said none have equaled the Convention Center’s capacity.
Kessler said campaign organizers chose the center because its location would draw more people to the event.
“The novelty of the Raleigh Convention Center will be an additional attraction for people to accept our invitation,” Kessler said.
Although Kessler said campaign organizers will use some of the center’s technology to show a video, he said there is “nothing so unique about the technology we’re using that have not been available at existing facilities.”
A ‘new industryIt’s this type of untapped market Raleigh Convention Center planners were looking to rein in.
Roger Krupa, director of the Convention Center, said meetings and conventions are natural necessities of facilities that compose the Triangle and its surrounding area.
The Triangle’s innate qualities, Krupa said, includes large businesses in the area, centers like Research Triangle Park, colleges and universities.
“We were hoping there was a pent-up demand for a place to have these meetings,” Krupa said. “When the Convention Center became a reality, everybody was surprised at the number of people who came out. There was definitely an untested demand.”
In fact, the area’s facilities generated three to four times the demand planners were expecting.
According to Mara Craft, the Convention Center’s sales manager, N.C. State has booked the Convention Center for 20 different events that take place between Sept. 18, 2008 and Nov. 2, 2014.
“N.C. State is one of the leaders in helping us find events to populate the building,” Krupa said. “The different departments have each had a hand in booking different events.”
After the Achieve! gala, NCSU-affiliated organizations will host the Regional Biomass Conference (Sept. 22), a conference on 4-H youth development (Nov. 15) and the Institute for Emerging Issues Forum (Feb. 8).
The College of Design, the N.C. State University Foundation, the FFA Convention and the Department of Poultry Science, among others, are also hosting events in the upcoming years.
With this demand comes a need for a meeting place — one that can, according to Craft, accommodate more than 12,000 people, spatially, and guarantee 700 to 800 rooms in downtown hotels that are located near the center.
These conventions will bring “some of the best minds in the country,” Krupa said, each of whom will need a place that can accommodate their minds and bodies for a few nights.
But Raleigh, a city that Krupa said was essentially built to be a meeting place, lost that aspect for about 20 years when Mission Valley’s main components closed down.
The hotel population moved further away from the core of the city and away from the NCSU campus.
FeasibilityIt wasn’t until 2002 that Raleigh Convention Center planners decided to discuss the feasibility of building a center and hotel that would accommodate such gatherings. That same year, they commissioned world-wide advisory firm KPMG to conduct a study that would see if it would be viable to build a convention center in Raleigh.
When KPMG approved the possibility of such a center, planners formed a steering committee to get the project’s specifics like the building’s cost, square footage, location and potential for business.
Planners organized 130 meetings that furthered discussion of feasibility and design.
SynergyBecause conventions and meetings will bring delegates, or people who attend these conventions, to the area for an extended period of time, Krupa said it was important for the center to develop a synergistic connection with a downtown hotel.
The solution was to build a new hotel. The result was the Marriott on Fayetteville Street.
“The City gave the hotel developer $20 million to be the Convention Center’s partner,” Krupa said.
It took another $75 to $80 million to build the hotel. The center itself cost about $221 million. A new, 1,000-car public parking deck was built close to the center, adding another $40 million to the tab. Combined, the Convention Center and its synergistic components total about $336 million.
Local connectionsSeventeen of those working on the main team involved with the actual planning, construction and execution of the Raleigh Convention Center are NCSU graduates.
They are the architects, public directors, project managers, traffic engineers and even a city manager who compose the team.
“The team is laced with N.C. State grads,” Krupa said. “There’s a huge N.C. State connection.”