HCP Develops Statewide Florida Ambassador Program for FCCMA

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (December 1, 2014) HCP is pleased to announce the Florida City and County Management Association’s (FCCMA’s) Florida Ambassador Program. Through this program, esteemed local government professionals will spread the message that “Profession Management Matters” in local government, leveraging the International City/County Management Association’s (ICMA’s) Life, Well Run campaign.

The FCCMA is a professional organization of practicing public administrators from throughout Florida local governments. Public administrators are not elected by a vote, and are present in governments with a council-manager charter. The council-mayor form of government places the elected mayor candidate in place of an administrator. The FCCMA strives to further the council-manager form of government by showing evidence of the benefits of having a professional manager in place as opposed to an elected official. The ICMA is the international organization of professional local government leaders.
The roots of this overall effort date back to a 2009 Harris Interactive poll. Data from this poll indicated that there was very weak understanding among the public of the role that professional managers play within their community; only five percent could describe what a manager does or their important role in shaping a community.
Soon after, the ICMA developed a campaign titled Life, Well Run. The purpose of this campaign was to educate elected officials, public administration students, and the public of the role that public administrators play—in many ways acting as the CEO of the city or county. The ICMA encouraged the statewide organizations like FCCMA to use materials that they developed to disseminate the campaigns throughout their cities and counties.

In early 2014, the FCCMA took their first steps in spreading this campaign, with HCP. Over a series of months, HCP developed a plan for the organization to take on the challenge. The Ambassador program stemmed from a lack of manpower to cover the full state. HCP worked with a FCCMA taskforce to divide up the state and pinpoint prospective Ambassadors that could represent an initial “test” region. HCP then developed an extensive series of “asks” for the Ambassadors, ways in which they could effectively and efficiently get information out to the groups who needed to hear the message of professional management the most—elected officials, charter review boards, up and coming public administration graduates, and by extension, the public.

The first group of Ambassadors will officially be named in early 2015, and this illustrious group will launch into a series of speaking engagements, events, media engagements, internal staff activities and more, to spread the message.