The success of businesses owned by people of color in securing contracts is an indication that the city has followed through on its promise to use the convention to stimulate and raise the profile of small and local businesses.

“We are very excited to make this convention as inclusive as possible,” said Karen Grant, one of two deputy executive directors at Boston 2004.

When Boston won the bid in 2002 to host the convention, Mayor Thomas Menino trumpeted Boston’s diversity. Some saw Menino’s move as an attempt to erase the negative image of Boston as a racially divisive city, an image which dates back to the 1970s, the decade of court-mandated school desegregation by busing.

From the start, the planners of the convention saw the gala event as a chance to build a new image for Boston as a diverse, racially harmonious place.

To further this aim, the host committee hired the multi-racial Causemedia advertising company to write an outreach plan that would spell out how the city planned to include people of all ethnicities in the convention.

The outreach plan was the first of its kind for a Democratic National Convention.

“The plan can now be duplicated and used as a model for other conventions,” said Causemedia President and CEO Donna Gittens.

The main vehicle for signing up small and local businesses to bid for convention contracts was a vendor directory.

The directory includes hundreds of small and local businesses, many of them owned by women or people of color. The host committee conducted hundreds of meetings in neighborhoods across the city to inform business owners about the opportunities presented by the convention.

Host committee staff promised to consult the vendor directory first when soliciting bids on contracts, and only to go outside the directory for services not provided by businesses in the directory.

The result of this strategy is the high value of the contracts that have gone to businesses run by women and people of color.

Many of these businesses strengthened their bids by partnering with other enterprises.

“It’s been great working with the other groups,” said Gittens, whose company partnered with Michael Wasserman and Associates, Estelle McDonald and Associate and Kortenhaus Communications to host the convention’s massive and lucrative media party. “Otherwise, I don’t know if we would have ever worked together. I’m sure a number of small business owners who have gotten business would say it raised their visibility.”

As for staffing, the host committee’s record on diversity is mixed. The host committee has hired African Americans to fill its two deputy executive director posts. The two deputy executive directors, responsible for community outreach and other tasks, are Karen Grant and Will Dorcena.

“It’s been a lot of work, but a lot of fun,” said Dorcena, a former publisher of the Boston Haitian Reporter and a trustee of Roxbury Community College and Boston College High.

Seven of the 32 full-time staff members are non-white. One quarter of convention volunteers are people of color, meanwhile, according to Grant.