Airport management and community leaders often wonder, “What can I do to help my airport get the ever-elusive federal funding?”
Aviation industry needs have continued to grow as aviation demand has rebounded after the pandemic. Unfortunately, the cost of airport projects have also outpaced the increase in available funding. Inflation and supply chain problems have driven project pricing through the roof and complicated project implementation plans. These challenges are leaving many airports wondering what projects they should and/or can accomplish, and ultimately, how can the project be brought to fruition? Our goal is to provide you with a few simple steps that may increase your odds of funding your project and thus, assist in developing an implementation plan that makes your project a reality.
After 35 years of developing airports, I firmly believe that a plan without funding is no plan at all. Most airports, with the possible exception of large-hubs, are heavily dependent on funding from sources other than local airport revenue. This funding commonly comes from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), State Aeronautics/State Department of Transportation, and the local community. As stated above, funding is a necessary ingredient of an implementation plan, so this article focuses on providing airport managers, consultants, and community leaders a straight-forward method of improving their odds of garnering funding for your airport projects.
4 Elements to Tell a story
To gain political and funding support for a project, we start with the goal of helping the public, funding agencies, and community leaders understand your project, why the project is needed, how it gets implemented, and what they can do to help. Experience has taught us the best messaging comes in the form of a story. Your funding application should take a similar approach and include the following components:
1. Background
This section of your story should provide data about the community, region, or state that is relevant and correlates to the project justification. Typically, this data contains information on population growth, economic successes, increased tourism, changes in industry practices, etc.
2. Issues and Justification
This is the most critical section of your story. With project costs increasing faster than available funding, competition for taxpayer funds is increasing. How your project competes against others will be heavily scrutinized and compared to other airports across the country. At state and local levels, your project will likely compete against other local projects and budget priorities. In order to be successful, your audience needs to understand the project, why it is needed, how it will be implemented, and what is needed for implementation.
Your story should convey information in a manner that allows the targeted audience to digest and understand the information in a reasonable amount of time. People have busy schedules, so time is precious, and you need to keep that in mind when developing the narrative. Simplicity is key here. Only provide the basic data or information that supports the need for the project; three to four key factors at most. People are often compelled to over-explain justification, but more information is not always better.
Experience has taught us that when you exceed the three to four key factors, audience members will only remember a few they felt were important or the message will be lost entirely. Allow the target audience to focus on and understand the most critical points. This does not mean we don’t make all the data available to them, but we provide briefings with the critical points provide data for those truly interested as a follow-up. Most people, in our fast-paced world, do not have the time or energy to read and digest the full set of data, thus rely heavily on presentations and briefings.
Data provided may include items such as community information relating to the need for the project, technical limitations that restrict operations now or in the immediate future, or best of all, a combination of both. The data should correlate directly to the agonies, frustrations, problems, complaints, or limitations that bring you to the “why” of the project. In short, explain the cause and effect.
Consider a few of these simple, fictitious examples:
- With the retirement of the 50-passenger regional jet, the airport is experiencing upgauging of aircraft from 50 to 76 passenger aircraft, causing the holdrooms to be undersized leaving waiting passengers without seats.
- The baggage handling system was installed prior to 9-11 and is not configured in a manor to efficiently process passenger bags, especially with the increase in passengers and new security screening requirements from TSA. The existing process is cumbersome and inefficient requiring additional staffing. With labor shortages, this is becoming an operational concern of the airport.
- The community recently added a large amusement park and a new dinosaur museum driving increased tourism. The additional passenger traffic led the airlines to upgauge their aircraft, creating queuing problems at both the airline ticketing area and the TSA checkpoint.
- The airport is receiving calls from airlines to provide additional service in and out of the airport but due to limited number of gates, we must restrict access to the times that gates are available.
3. Simple Project Description
As previously stated, our goal is a clear and understandable project description. It should include basic details without including frivolous items that can cause confusion or overwhelm your audience. The description needs to provide key components of the project that correlate to airport-specific issues and project justification. References should be provided as to where to find the project’s full description/details.
4. Implementation Plan
If all goes well, your audience now has sufficient background of the local area, recognizes the issues at hand, and understands the project designed to address these issues. The story concludes with the implementation plan. This section identified when the project will begin, the key steps in the process, such as environmental approval and working with likely funding sources, and the anticipated costs of the project. Make sure the project is correctly sized to solve the identified issues; do not underestimate or exaggerate costs at this step. The project size and costs will likely be scrutinized to ensure the funds needed appear to be consistent with comparable projects. It is critical the size and estimated costs are accurate and defendable.
Getting it Just right
The implementation plan brings our story to an end, but make sure you captured these key plot points to gain support for your project:
- The elements of the story must be simple and easily understandable.
- Background information needs to correlate to the Issues/Justifications.
- The Project Description needs to address all the Issues.
- Project costs must be accurate to the greatest extent possible.
- The project must be right-sized to the issues being resolved. The story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears says it all – not too big, not too small, but just right!
Good luck on your story, and I hope you find your project funding/pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
