Learn. Inspire. Grow. with Brandon Burton
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Brandon Burton 0:00
This is the Chamber Chat Podcast, the show dedicated to chamber professionals to spark ideas and to get actionable tips and strategies to better serve your members and community.
Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your hosts Brandon Burton. And it’s my goal here on the podcast to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community.
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When it comes to publishing a Chamber Map directory or Community Guide, Community Matters has a trusted experience to help your chamber accomplish your goals. With different advertising sales models and publication styles, Community Matters will help you create a non-dues revenue machine!
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You’re joining us for a special episode in our 2024 ACCE Chamber of the Year Finalist Series and our guests for this episode is Becky Bartoszek. Becky is the President and CEO of the Fox Cities Chamber in Wisconsin and having relocated to Wisconsin in 1998. And Becky’s previous experience included vice president of the Great Lakes for Alltel wireless market leader for the q ti group, and small business owner of a State Farm Agency. Becky currently serves on the ACCE board of directors. The new North board of directors, Wisconsin Chamber of Commerce executives is the current chair WMC board of directors and is currently appointed by Governor eavers to his Advisory Council on Workforce Investment, Becky and her husband Brian, or freedom residents, and they have the two of them together have two adult children as well. But Becky, I’m excited to have you with us today on Chamber Chat Podcast. And I need to start by saying a big congratulations to you and your team for being selected as a chamber to their chamber of the year finalists. This is exciting and, and reflective of the great work you guys are doing but wanted to give you a chance to say hello to all the chamber champions who are out there listening and to share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better.
Becky Bartoszek 2:31
Well, thank you so much brand new appreciate being here today. And yeah, it is really, really exciting for our team to be able to celebrate being nominated as a finalist on our 100 and 50th year anniversary or ever chamber. So we’ve been able to do some really cool things bringing in past board members and you know, doing time capsules and everything this year, it’s been just a blast. So thank you for the you know, the background information. It’s I think people are always interested or find it interesting that my I actually grew up living in a convention center. So the chamber, our local Chamber of Commerce, would have events almost weekly at my house. So that was quite the preparation for getting into the chamber industry. Ultimately, when it was just kind of a normal everyday thing, the way that I had grown up. It’s quite
Brandon Burton 3:26
the training ground. I mean, most people enter the chamber world and they didn’t even know what a chamber was. And they started but you grew up with literally it all around it. So that’s absolutely, yeah, that’s cool. I think that’s a first for us on the shows having somebody that grew up in the in chamber. Yeah.
Becky Bartoszek 3:43
So next time when somebody’s clearing your plates at the dinner. I think that could be a future chamber.
Brandon Burton 3:49
Exactly. That’s right. That’s right. Well, and tell us a little bit about the Fox Cities Chamber just to kind of give us some perspective, the size here chamber staff budget scope of work, just to set the table for our discussion before we dive into the meat of this topic.
Becky Bartoszek 4:06
Oh, sure. Absolutely. The Fox Cities Chamber is hard to find on a map because the largest community in our in our region is Appleton, Wisconsin. So think of it this way. We are south of Green Bay and north of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. We serve two and a half counties. So we’re pretty good size, footprint. And we are not only the chamber, but we are the regional eto as well. We are current even though we’re the fourth largest community in the chamber, we are the second largest chamber as far as member count. We are over 1400 On our way to 1500 members currently, and we have a staff of 12 that most times 13 right now because I’m an intern, right revenues a little under 2 million about 1.8. And we just continue to grow and grow. In addition to our our traditional Chamber members. yours. We also have about 700 young professionals that have membership with us as well.
Brandon Burton 5:04
That’s awesome. So that’s in addition to the 1400. Members, that’s a different type of membership within the organization. That’s great. I know there’s I’ve heard of other chambers out there that are trying to get young professionals or even high school students involved with the Chamber in some degree, and trying to figure out a model for that. So that’s that’s
Becky Bartoszek 5:25
worked well, for us. We went from 140 to 700 in a year.
Brandon Burton 5:29
Yeah, I would say something worked. Yeah. That’s awesome. Well, on these chamber the year finalist series, I like spending the bulk of our conversation really diving into and discussing the two programs synopsis that were included on your chamber, the year application, and we will, we’ll take a quick break and when we get back we’ll dive in deep on what those two programs are and how they’re moving the needle in your community.
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Alright, Becky, we’re back. So as I as I mentioned before the break, we’re gonna dive into the the two programs that were submitted on your chamber the your application, if you would just tell us what the what the first program is that you’d like to highlight. And we’ll we’ll dive into that one. So
Becky Bartoszek 7:55
everybody’s always intrigued by our Connect free model. And that is a program that we started exploring in February of 2022. Basically, we brought in Sherry And Kelly from ACCE to do some strategic planning with our board of directors. And there was a great discussion about how we could come together as a community and specifically a chamber and really move the needle with the resources that we have, in our community, our biggest challenges, we just don’t have enough people for the growth that we’re experiencing. So in the state of Wisconsin, in general, if you remove international immigration, we’ve been net negative population growth for a while now not specifically in our market, but overall is it state. So we were trying to find a way that we could attract more people to want to come and live work and play and the Fox Cities Wisconsin area. Now we know that people can get a job anywhere now. And it’s really people decide where they want to live. And then they find a job. So it’s truly quality of life driving it. And we know that is driven by the small business environment. Nobody’s saying, Boy, I want to find the biggest Best Buy. And that’s where I’m gonna move. They want that fun restaurant shopping, kitschy experience. So we came up with a program that we launched six months later, which is called Kinect free. And it is a completely free membership for small businesses that have five or less full time employees, nonprofits that have 10 or less full time employees and all freestanding restaurants. So for example, if you’re a restaurant in a casino, it’s not free. But if you’re a freestanding restaurant, we just have a great robust package that we can provide you to help you get to the next level and to help track people attract people to our community.
Brandon Burton 9:55
So yeah, tell us tell us more how that model works. Oh, obviously, we can’t all work for free as nice as that would be able to do that. How does it operate? A? Are they you see them and participate in different programs and events that do have a cost to it? Or do they move on to a different membership tier? Or what how do you how do you make it work.
Becky Bartoszek 10:19
So that was our biggest challenge. And of course, I was I was very nervous going into this. So we had the first discussion with the board. And the first thing they asked us is, model this financially model it and see if we can make it work. So we spent three months modeling it, and the way that the financials work on this free membership model, from a chamber perspective, now you’re getting more members, you’re touching more people, so your marketing is worth a lot more. So that helped us to be able to recoup revenue, because we were able to sell our marketing at a higher value. In addition to that, you have more people that are invited to your events. So your membership revenue goes down, but your event revenue makes it up. And the only thing that’s not included in our free membership model are things like we don’t do free ribbon cuttings for now for free members. So they have to pay us for that. If they want to use our building or our meeting rooms, they have to pay us if they want to have discounted health insurance through us, that’s an additional add on fee. So there a lot of little ala carte functions that they all want to receive or benefits they want to receive that are an additional fee. So there’s a lot of reasons why somebody would want to get up to the paid level. Now, when we modelled this, we did anticipate number 150 year old organization, we did anticipate a lot of net negative, you know, revenue from migration to a free model. We anticipated on the on the higher end, it can be 80 to $100,000, right away in the first year. And what we’ve actually experienced over a two year period, we’ve only had less than $12,000 in revenue from people dropping down to the free model. And we’ve also seen a lot of our larger investors come forward and say I’m going to give you a larger economic development contribution to help pay for those free members. So it’s worked out quite well.
Brandon Burton 12:28
Yeah. Have you guys made any asks to any of those larger corporations to like that for the economic development? donations? Absolutely.
Becky Bartoszek 12:37
So we did see those contributions go up. And we didn’t know how it was gonna go. First of all, when we when we launched it, we were we were concerned about that. So we did spend another three months, making sure that we can market it correctly. So during that time, we actually did a full rebrand, and launched a new website, because we really, the the biggest challenge with a free membership model is it can’t be a big lift on your team. It has to be something that’s mostly automated. So we did spend about three months, you know, we did probably three years worth of work in six months to launch this. And I can tell you, we had a huge splash for the launch of this event where we actually invited the press in, we invited the politicians in the board, community leaders major investors, and made this big announcement. And we were the lead story on all of the local TV channels that night. And we had boy, probably about 100 Plus applications within the first few days. So that
Brandon Burton 13:42
was my next question. So the business still has to fill out an application. They’re not just getting a membership because they have a business in the Fox Cities area. So so they fill it out is is there any kind of approval process? Or do they fill it out? And then the remember or what you like you mentioned that the automation process, it has to be there. So it’s not too much of a load on your staff? Where Where does the staff interaction take place? What parts are automated, just to kind of give us an idea of how this works? Well,
Becky Bartoszek 14:15
the one thing that we did learn pretty quickly. Yeah, they fill out the application, and then it has to be approved. And the first thing that we were worried about was we were worried about upsetting the chambers around us. And so we were really trying to monitor that you had to be in our footprint to qualify for that membership. That was a crazy lift on our team because you know, we cover half a county here and you know, cities are split in half. So it took us not too long to figure out. We’ll just go and meet with the Chamber’s and talk to them about how to sell around us. And so we we actually did move away from monitoring that everything was in our footprint because it wasn’t a huge to impact but it was taken a lot of time. And then, you know, we are currently transitioning software systems so that more of our marketing touches, as follow ups, you know, 3060 90 days outreach can just be automated. But you know, of course, our ambassadors and our team, you know, we’re reaching out to everybody as quick as they could, especially when the first big group came in, I can tell you, the program has been launched by I think, about 22 months right now. And we have 632 small businesses that we’re supporting today that we weren’t in the past. Wow.
Brandon Burton 15:39
And I love that approach. Instead of we have 632, free membership level, free members, it’s 632 businesses, you’re able to support that you weren’t prior to this model. And that’s huge, because those are often the businesses that need the most support. And they’re underserved and, and end up being the ones that kind of go by the wayside and, and maybe don’t stay in business as long as they would have hoped so. And the cool
Becky Bartoszek 16:07
part, too, is that we’re finding partners in our community that want to do more with us. So for example, the YMCA came to us and said, We love your small business program, we’re going to put together a discounted package for you, so that we can work on the health of our small business owners. And then we had an insurance company that came to us and said, We see this as a great opportunity, we’re gonna offer discounted insurance for your members. So there’s, there’s been a lot of the community that stepped forward and says, We love what you’re doing. How can we help? Yeah,
Brandon Burton 16:41
yeah, I love that. So let’s shift gears a little bit into the second program, if you want to introduce that and tell us what it’s all about. Sure.
Becky Bartoszek 16:52
Our largest program that we hold each event that we have each year is a huge Oktoberfest event. So it’s actually two days. So on Friday night, we have a huge car show. And that car show is completely dry event. But it brings in about 100,000 people on Friday night. Wow. And then on Saturday is really the big event that we have. And that is a full blown Oktoberfest. But it’s not a lot of Oktoberfest bands. It’s not your traditional Oktoberfest with the German bands. We actually have really popular kind of pop pop bands fans
Brandon Burton 17:33
that people want to listen to. I’ll say it Yeah. And
Becky Bartoszek 17:39
we bring in it’s, it’s estimated between 200,200 20,000 People that day. And we started, the event actually starts at nine in the morning, with a big craft vendor business expo at one end. Then we have a ton of food trucks throughout the event. And then 13 hours of live music forum Friday night through Saturday. So
Brandon Burton 18:09
how long have you guys been doing the search? I guess first of all, is there a name branding it? Or is it just is it October fest is that just it’s
Becky Bartoszek 18:18
Appletons Oktoberfest so what we’ve actually talked about in our in our application for the award is focused on the past two years, because that program has Appletons Oktoberfest has been going on for 42 years now. And we were always involved, but it was always run by a community steering committee. And when ochman COVID hit, and you know the world shut down. Obviously, we didn’t want to be known as the super spreader events of the Midwest. So we didn’t have it the first year. And at the end of that first year, we lost most of our steering committee. And we also lost a lot of our volunteers. And to pull this event off the way that we have been doing it. It took about 1200 volunteers each year to make it happen. So come second year of the event, the world is starting to open up again. But our community was really scared about a surge. And we really didn’t want to put people in harm’s way. And some of our largest investors in our organization are our health care systems. And based on their input, there was a second year that we cancelled Oktoberfest. I mean, we planned it right down to the last minute. And we just could not make it happen because we didn’t have the volunteer population come out to do it well, and it would have been the 40th anniversary. So at that point, we took a step back and basically had to revamp the entire program. Now what’s is all about our Oktoberfest is it’s a gigantic give back to our community. So think of this as a street long or a mile long venue that’s just jam packed with people. And, you know, it’s free free admission, nobody pays to get in. But every food vendor that’s there has to have a sign in front of their location, saying which nonprofit they are sharing their revenues with. And then all of the money that is raised by beer sales, which we don’t tell people how much beer we sell that the proceeds from that go into a large grant fund, and those dollars go back into our community to support our nonprofits. And for many of our nonprofits, that’s their biggest fundraiser of the year. That
Brandon Burton 20:52
is huge. I love seeing chamber being able to sit to partner and support other nonprofits and their missions, and what a great way a big community driven event, and you’re gonna get the foot traffic, people are gonna buy food, they’re gonna buy beer, they’re going to do all the things, right. So being able to tie that in. And I imagine each vendor has the choice of which nonprofit they want to support. Do you provide a list to say, here’s our local nonprofits to choose from? Or can they go outside of a certain list of parameters? Or how is that structured?
Becky Bartoszek 21:28
No, it’s completely up to them. And if they come to us and say, Do you have somebody we can make a connection for them, but it’s really up to them to decide which nonprofit they want to support. So you know, we do we see everything from wrestling teams to the police department, you know, the police and fire departments are they’re, you know, challenging each other and, you know, chili cook offs, and everything else. But for us to be able to make this happen. And that’s really what our focus on the application was, we had to change some things, we had to bring really the bulk of the lift into the chamber directly to make this happened. And we bought a new software program where we were able to really get get our hands around the complete management of the of the process. In addition to that most of the food vendors historically that had been there were the nonprofits themselves setting up food booths. Well, we changed it so that it was food trucks and restaurants coming in to support those nonprofits and do revenue sharing. So our need for volunteers went from 1200, every year, to closer to 800. To have the same impact.
Brandon Burton 22:44
Oh, wow, that that helps. I mean, 800 is still a big number. But that’s that means 400 less, so that’s good. So you mentioned the software that you purchase, is that an event specific software? Or?
Becky Bartoszek 22:57
It is it is it helps us map out just about everything you can need on the mile that we’re putting together it, you know, historically, you know, the steering committee would have a spreadsheet and the first time we went through it afterwards, it said, you know, ice for Oktoberfest, okay, there’s ice for 200,000 200,000 people, you know, six bags or six trucks? It really, you know, helped us how was all of the information that we needed to know, to make sure no, no matter who we had on the team at the Chamber, that there was a footprint to follow. Yeah, and for years to come. So those are just a couple of the changes that we just really did a deep dive to help increase the efficiencies. Ya know, we even started doing surveys of people that were our food vendors, and getting net promoter scores on whether they would recommend that their peers and other people join the event. And that helped helped us fine tune a lot of the things that we were doing as well. Yeah,
Brandon Burton 24:00
that’s huge. Go get that feedback and be able to make those adjustments for year to year and really improve the overall program that the the event, that’s great. So each of the vendors who they register with you imagine they have to to be able to get everything in order and be able to have their spot and be able to, you know, tie it into whatever nonprofit and all that stuff. Exactly. It’s
Becky Bartoszek 24:26
quite a process. Because think about it this way it’s taking over our main street. So we have food vendors that we need to very carefully map this treat, so that we’re not putting a pizza vendor in front of a pizza restaurant, you know, and we do work with those local restaurants to give them the first opportunity to be on the street and to be able to capitalize on making the most revenue that day.
Brandon Burton 24:51
Yeah, so and I imagined whoever’s in front of, you know, whatever booth is in front of their business or restaurant, it’s still going to drive people in door ers into their shops, hopefully beyond to use the restroom. Right? Exactly. Spend some money, hopefully. So, exactly. Well, that sounds like an amazing event and being able to fine tune it and make improvements on it like you have that’s, it sounds like a fun one to to attend. So
Becky Bartoszek 25:21
well. And to tell you a little bit more about the economic impact. Now with the new software and partnerships that we’ve created, we’re finally able to figure out a little bit more about what the event is doing for our community. And working with our tourism, convention Bureau and state analytics, we’re able to get a better idea, but not completely. So this is a cash only event. So when we can track the actual dollars that are spent on credit cards, and the dollars that are spent on overnight stays, we’ve been able to find out how many people are coming to our community, where they’re coming from, and they’re coming from all over the Midwest for this. And we know before we even look at the cash input implications that this event is having, on average of $43.2 million impact on our economy.
Brandon Burton 26:14
Whoa, that is huge. That’s way more than I would have guessed it would have come nowhere close to that. Wow. So as we, as we start to wrap things up here, you guys are obviously moving the needle and making an impact in your community. And being a chamber the year finalist, you guys are kind of at the top of your game at this moment. And I wanted to ask for listeners who are interested in taking their chamber up to the next level, what kind of tip or action item or piece of advice you might share with them to try to accomplish that goal.
Becky Bartoszek 26:51
Well, you know, it’s funny, I was new to the chamber industry about five years ago. And I can tell you what, what worked for me and what worked for us. I actually did a deep dive into all the information I could find a both chambers of the year. So for example, when Ocala was the chamber of the year in our category, I stocked their website, I looked at everything they had. And I found that videos were really working well for them. And I thought, well, I don’t really have the resources to do that. And we talked about it as a team. And we actually went to the local TV station and said, Now, come on, your tagline is we are Green Bay, but you’re covering our market work with us. And it resulted in us for the past two years, having the opportunity to bring a guest onto a local show, and spotlights something going on in our community and having beautifully professionally done videos for zero cost. Yeah, yeah. None of that would have would have happened, had we not been looking at what the chamber of the years were doing. And it’s just given us great ideas to make them our own. Yeah,
Brandon Burton 28:03
but those news agencies are always looking for stories. They’re looking for content. And if you can provide bring a guest on and provide some valuable content to their viewership. Yeah. They cover your market, why wouldn’t they do that? So that’s great partnership and very budget friendly. So I like that I like Yeah. And Ocala is a great chamber, obviously being a chamber the like, they’re, they’re great. Kevin and his team, there are amazing. I like asking everyone I have on the show, as we look to the future of chambers of commerce, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?
Becky Bartoszek 28:41
You know, it’s funny, because it’d be in our 100 and 50th anniversary this year, we always talk about our mission today. This is the same as it was 150 years ago. And it’s bringing our business community together to help those businesses thrive, but to create a better place in our community for people to want to live work and play, obviously. But you know, realistically, I think that that mission is going to continue, but we just need to continue to evolve. You know, when we’re looking at 2025. You know, we’re looking at cutting back awards programs, and launching AI opportunities for, you know, a summit and things like that. And it’s just constantly evolving, and really keeping an understanding of what’s impacting our businesses and our lives and making sure that we remain relevant. And I think as long as we can do that, now, we’re hopeful our chambers got at least another 150 years.
Brandon Burton 29:38
That’s right. That’s right. That’s great. Becky, I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners who may want to reach out and learn more about how you guys are doing things there in the Fox Cities Chamber and more about the programs. You talked about what would be the best way for a listener to reach out and connect with you?
Becky Bartoszek 29:59
Absolutely. So Obviously all of our information is on our website FoxCitiesChamber.com. My contact information is on there as well. And you can always reach me at bbartoszek@foxcc.net.
Brandon Burton 30:12
Very good, and we’ll get that in our show notes for this episode as well. But, again, just big congratulations to you and your team for being selected as a finalist this year for chamber the year and I wish you guys the best of luck in Dallas.
Becky Bartoszek 30:27
Thank you so much, Brandon.
Brandon Burton 30:30
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Below is an auto-generated transcription. Because this is auto-generated there are likely some grammatical errors but it is still a useful tool to search text within this podcast episode.
Feel free to join our Chamber Chat Champions Facebook Group to discuss this episode and to share your own experiences and tips with other Chamber Champions.
Brandon Burton 0:00
This is the Chamber Chat Podcast, the show dedicated to chamber professionals to spark ideas and to get actionable tips and strategies to better serve your members and community.
Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your hosts Brandon Burton. And it’s my goal here on the podcast to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community.
Our title sponsor is Community Matters, Inc. With nearly 20 years in the chamber industry and over 100 media awards presented to their chamber partners, community matters provides the R&R that every chamber needs, revenue and recognition.
When it comes to publishing a Chamber Map directory or Community Guide, Community Matters has a trusted experience to help your chamber accomplish your goals. With different advertising sales models and publication styles, Community Matters will help you create a non-dues revenue machine!
Let’s hear from Becky Womble, President of the Bastrop Chamber to hear about her experience with Community Matters.
Becki Womble 1:03
I’ve been using Community Matters for probably six or seven years now. And in a previous life, I sold commercial printing so I can highly recommend Community Matters because it’s a complete turnkey job for any busy chamber exec and it’s a wonderful, beautiful printed product whenever you’re finished. And I just I’m very sold on Community Matters. And with a printing background I just big endorsement from me.
Brandon Burton 1:44
To learn how Community Matters can support your chamber with your next publication. Please visit communitymattersinc.com/podcast To request your free media kit and request a proposal to find out what kind of non-dues revenue you can generate.
Our guest for this episode is Christine Cribb. Christine has been at the helm as the President and CEO of the Cleveland County Chamber in North Carolina for the past two and a half years. With an infectious energy a hunger for smart growth and a passion for helping businesses thrive. Christine has now left her mark on two chambers. Christine’s impressive track record and chamber world speaks volumes about her dedication and expertise. In her previous role she led the largest chamber per capita in the state of Washington, and accomplishment that exemplifies her talent for driving success. The chamber team not only grew the chamber, led and represented the business community but the Oak Harbor Chamber Fourth of July festival was voted number seven in the country by USA Today’s readers poll. In 2019. Christine was voted Community Leader of the Year by her peers solidifying her reputation as an exceptional leader. After spending most of the pandemic in Italy, Christine returned to the States to continue the work she loves. Chamber world took her to Cleveland County Chamber of Commerce where she conducted a listening tour and has since become a unstoppable force of innovation and growth. Her contagious enthusiasm or it has propelled the Cleveland County Chamber to new heights introducing over 15 New trailblazing chamber events and programs that have invigorated the business community all over the county and beyond. Her leadership has grown the chamber Upon her arrival at 325 members in July of 2021 to 619 members today. So Christine, I’m thrilled to have you with us today on chamber chat podcast. And I’d love for you to take a moment to say hello to all the chamber champions that are out there listening and to share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better.
Christine Cribb 3:51
Well, thank you so much. Thank you, Brandon for having me today. Team, your chamber champions, I so much admire and respect what you do every single day you bounce so many hats. And it’s just a profession that has so much pride and joy. And very few people know what’s going on behind the scenes at or on on any given day. So I just I love this world and love being part of it. I think most interesting thing about me, of course, I’m a new grandmother. So to me, being a brand new grandmother is for the first time is just a pure joy with my family on a personal level. I will share that when I went to Italy. I left for Italy in January 2020. And the pandemic hit that February and I was in Italy for a year, which was about the best adult timeout you could imagine. And being from Can you imagine being from chamber world. Please don’t anyone feel sorry for me in any way because I do Drink a lot of wine. And I learned how to cook Italian. And when the airport’s opened back up, I knew that I needed to go back doing the work I love to do. And I did a nationwide search to return to chamber world to make a difference for businesses. Very
Unknown Speaker 5:15
good. My
Christine Cribb 5:16
little gold. Yeah.
Brandon Burton 5:18
So I figured there was more of a story there to the Italy detour with that some people would say stuck there. But it sounds like you didn’t you didn’t feel stuck you if you enjoyed your time there. So
Christine Cribb 5:34
exactly. And when I came here, I enjoyed hearing people’s stories on how they pivoted. And it was really meant to be moment when you can’t do anything. I’m in Italy, I cannot do anything. But watch, listen here. Watch how businesses were trying to pivot watch what they were doing differently. So I came back. So it just feeling very energized to to continue to help businesses. So yeah, but I did learn how to cook a lot of Italian food, I can tell you that I enjoyed. I enjoyed that as a
Brandon Burton 6:11
great skill to have. So will tell us a little bit about the Cleveland County Chamber just to give us an idea. We talked about the size and 619 members now but what is the staff situation look like the type the scope of work, you guys are involved with? Budget, that sort of thing to kind of set the stage for our conversation?
Christine Cribb 6:31
Oh, sure, absolutely. So when I joined the chamber, we were in July 2021, we were still attached to economic development partners. So that was well over a million dollar budget. But most of that was economic development partners. So we started from scratch. When they separated from us. We had at the time, five employees. We took it down. By fall of 2021. We took it down to to an administrative assistant and myself. So I wore all the hats of membership sponsor sponsorship, invoicing, billing, and I had an administrative assistant that was doing the scheduling that I told her, I was brand new in the community, I wanted to meet with every person I needed to meet with. And so she set my schedule, and I set out Google Maps, and I started to just meet people and cultivate and establish relationships. It was a it was, it was really a challenge. We also updated the website. So internally, we were putting a brand new website together, we flipped databases, which everyone knows that that can be a nightmare, I foolishly thought it would take us three months. And it actually took us almost a year to get it within really good working in a good working way. And then I hired my our master plan with the board was to hire more people as contract employees instead of employees inside the chamber building. So we have a two story building three offices upstairs. So we filled those three offices upstairs with leasing. And that funding was the revenue stream to help improve capital improvements for the chamber foundation. So people wonder what what the great value is of a chamber foundation, the foundation owns this building that that were housed in, in Uptown Shelby. And that leased property upstairs funnels for capital improvement projects to take care of the building. So we now have three employees. I’m I’m answering your question in a long, long sentence but it but it’s really exciting because we took bookkeeping out of office and the end had that, that contract. We took some marketing off and put that into contract employee. We our Monday minute our newsletter that was all done remotely as with a contract employee until I just brought her in last year. So now we have 2.8 members of the staff with a and looking to hire in fourth quarter one more member of the team. Awesome.
Brandon Burton 9:21
So going along with our topic for our discussion today’s we’re going to focus on the rapid growth that you guys have seen, especially coming out of the pandemic and since you’ve arrived there at the Cleveland County Chamber that plays right along with seeing the staff numbers as you guys you know had the economic development you know parts and you see those staff members leave but then building it back up to kind of match what you guys are doing with membership levels there is pretty impressive. So I am excited to dive in deeper on On the discussion for today and really learning what you guys did to really drive this rapid growth and I know you’ve got this infectious personality and a drive to really make things happen, but we’ll dive in deeper on that as soon as we get back from this quick break.
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All right, Christine, we are back. As I mentioned before the break, we’re going to focus our conversation today around the rapid growth that you guys have seen since you came on board there at the Cleveland County Chamber and especially coming out of the pandemic. I know, through the pandemic, obviously chambers everywhere were challenged, but also were able to really show their value, which at a time where their member businesses might be struggling chambers were able to really step up to be that that resource that they go to to help strengthen the business community. But I’d love to hear some of these experiences and kind of what those drivers were to help with this rapid growth.
Christine Cribb 13:25
Door. Thank you. So we I had a philosophy and I had it in my previous chamber that we don’t chase members, we attract members. And so that’s probably one of my best gold nuggets is I have not knocked on one door, nor has anyone on my team and said, you are a member of the Chamber of Commerce. Here’s my card. Let me tell you about the chamber. I’ve been very dependent on the chamber board ambassadors and fellow Chamber members. Now when I got here, it was kind of like the perfect storm brand. And because we’re coming out of the pandemic, there is one annual month or one monthly event and two annual events. And I remember telling staff that there there will be five in the next year monthly events. So I tell people, we introduced programs that do not if you only had a business after hours, and people would say well, I have to get home and I have to cook dinner for my children or do homework bla bla bla, I can’t attend a business after hours. Well, that that wouldn’t work in my chamber world because we have a business over breakfast, which is for the morning people which is a networking opportunity and a gold nugget speaker and then we have our member luncheon where we introduce our new members along with networking and a great gold nugget of a keynote speaker. And then we also have business after hours and every month we have to lunch and learns. And so I tell people if you if that doesn’t fit in your schedule any one Have those, I’m in bed by nine o’clock, and I can’t help you anymore. But I’m imagining that it would fit, you know, offering enough programs that fit with people with their schedules. So that was kind of the the brainstorm behind it is to create enough programs not to be I wasn’t afraid to fail, create enough events and programs that members would fit into member schedule to participate and be part of the chamber. And then really messaging what the chamber does, you know, we do not do community events. So we’re in my past chamber, we did, like four major community events here we don’t we are resources, marketing, continuing education, and networking. And we just drive home that if anyone was to give our 32nd speech, spiel of what the chamber does, we get to share, we are these four things. And our sole purpose is to help businesses succeed, we are not funded by the city, the county, or the state, we are a member driven organization with the goal of helping businesses succeed. That’s all it takes. And then when people repeat that, that’s where the growth comes from our social media presence had a lot to do with it. People walked in the door and said, I’m watching what you’re doing on social media, and I want to be part of it. So it was it was twofold. It was people talking about what we do and understanding when people say, oh, yeah, I’m a member of the chamber. Well, why are you a member, our ambassadors and our board? And those people actively involved in sponsorships and things like that? They can answer that question very easily.
Brandon Burton 16:41
Yeah. So let’s lean into those two areas a little bit more. So I think word of mouth is always the best form of marketing. So you said you’re trying to lean on other members and your board members, investors, that sort of thing to really drive is the buzz about what the Chamber’s doing. You’re not out there knocking on the doors, as you said. So what built that enthusiasm, that energy would infuse that energy to get these members talking? Was it the creating the events first? And then they were talking about them? Because they came in and experienced it? Or did you create a buzz that led to the events? Or what? How did that origin even
Christine Cribb 17:23
deeper? That’s a great question. So the first thing I did July through September 2021, is I went on a listening tour. And I made sure that what we were going to create as a team. And what I was going to pitch to the board at the board retreat in that October was what members wanted. So we did surveys, and I did a listening tour, I learned the past, I learned about the future and learned about the state of the businesses coming out of the pandemic, which is very different than before. So I listened. And then I vetted numerous things, not only from my past, that worked well, but I wanted to make sure they would work well here. I vetted it through the ambassador program, we each took a program, or an event that we had that had been pitched to me and we vetted it among the ambassadors. And then at the board retreat that October, I pitched the following year, what we were going to do. So when we share, you know, here’s what we’re going to do for 2022. We’re going to introduce nine new programs and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, it had all been vetted very well, it wasn’t just, you know, I have the enthusiasm and I have the the risk, I’m willing to take a risk in something failing to try to do something different than what had ever been done before. Also watching from the sidelines during the Chamber’s had to pivot drastically and make sure that their value was so relevant in the community, I didn’t want to just be, you know, when you ask someone, why are you a member of the chamber? Oh, we’ve been a member for 40 years, because we always have been or we should be, I want the answer to be. We’re a member the chamber because why wouldn’t you be? That’s the answer that I want one woman out.
Brandon Burton 19:13
I like to elevating that what that answer is in thinking is people are asking what is the better answer providing that experience for them to have the better answer that better response.
Christine Cribb 19:23
So we meet the other thing Brandon we do, which is just a staple in this chamber and with the ambassadors is we do not say the word no, there is no negative. The sounds kind of corny, but it’s just my philosophy. There are no negative words expressed. So if somebody comes in and says, I want you to blow up my logo in nine places, and I want you to do it for $100. Well, of course that answer is going to be no, but we never say the word. Now we say let’s Sit down and talk about the sponsorship packet. And let me show you what’s available. We we train staff, that there is never a negative word spoken in the office. And there is never we work around making sure that we do not use the word no to our members. Because we all know that chamber membership is an option, not in necessity. We’re not the electric bill. But we want to make sure that people feel like they cannot live without their business will not succeed without the energy that this chamber is putting behind them. Right?
Brandon Burton 20:31
Yeah, I’d love that mentality. So tell us a little bit more about the social media experience in the presence that you guys built there. And now you’d mentioned that you had now have that outsourced to do the marketing, if I understood that correctly. But what were some of those drivers on the social media front that really created engagement and, and brought people out?
Christine Cribb 20:56
Sure, the advantage I had was social media, specifically, Facebook was very active during pandemic coming into Cleveland County, North Carolina from Oak Harbor on would be island in Washington State, I had brought a following with me of chamber people if I could and businesses that wanted to see what what we what what I was going to do next where where I was. And so I actually started with my following personally, and then would forward it on to the chambers to the Chamber’s Facebook page and started to drive some traffic that way. And we focused on the energy of every single thing we did, about, for example, yesterday, we did, I spoke at BNI, presented at BNI at 730. In the morning, we did a ribbon cutting at four in the afternoon for a new nail salon. And then we had our gentleman’s bourbon dinner and tasting last night that started at 630. All of those went up on Facebook, to just remind people of all the things we’re doing to help businesses succeed in Cleveland County. So we put everything up there that the answer, the simplest answer is, the recipe is simply be positive in your posts, and post what a joy it is and how humbled you are to serve and get those posts up to show people the energy and what you’re doing. If you’re not on social media. How will people know what you’re doing? You know, if you’re so bogged down in the the the constant tasks of doing your chamber work? How do people know what you’re doing? And I feel like Facebook has been really a great tool for us.
Brandon Burton 22:47
Yeah, that’s interesting, taking your personal following and helping to build your your chamber following the chamber Facebook page that says interesting approach. I love how you mentioned when you came on board at the Cleveland County Chamber, you did this listening tours even around and want to know the businesses what the community was all about. Since then, the membership has almost doubled. I mean, you guys are knocking on the door of doubling the membership. And so that tells me there was a lot of members in the club or a lot of businesses in the community that were not currently members. So as you did the listening tour, as new members join that maybe been in the community for a while. What were some of the some of the feedback that you received have, maybe were, you know, things have been missing the mark in the past or things that you were doing that they noticed that they wanted to be a part of. I’m curious what some of those responses
Christine Cribb 23:50
are. So are. The message that we put out is definitely that we represent the business community in all of Cleveland County. So some people thought maybe the chamber was a little more exclusive. Some people thought maybe the chamber was more about the big businesses and not small business. Some people thought it was you know, a little bit of an old boys network down here. And I just reassured everyone that it’s it’s the Cleveland County Chamber of Commerce represents all businesses in Cleveland County, like we are a membership driven, but we were the biggest networking organization in Cleveland County, and we represent everyone. Now everyone also knows that coming out of the pandemic businesses started at such a historic pace that we also grabbed a hold of an awful lot of them. People that were small business that said, I’m going to get out of that work I have done in the past and I’m going to live my dream of being an entrepreneur and doing blank. So we welcomed them, we partnered with the Small Business Center at the community college to make sure that they had business plans and were prepared for things that would come up that they that were not their expertise, and just nurtured those. Now, we also all know, and we’re very realistic. So while we’re proud of our growth, we’re very realistic that only 70 that 75% of all new businesses will fail in the first five years. So at that growth that came out of the pandemic, we’re probably going to plan a decrease three and five years from now knowing that not all of them will succeed, but they did the energy that has already been established. Somebody says, I’m starting a business, they are going to come in, and we’re going to help tools and the resources to succeed. Some businesses had left the chamber prior to pandemic, for whatever reason, didn’t find the value. And we heard they, you know, we saw them come back, while businesses didn’t know that small businesses could be part of the chamber. And with that domino effect of people talking about all the events and the programs that we were doing, that brought them back in the door. So it was kind of multifaceted of who came in the door. But it all led back to someone telling someone else about the energy or the programs or I’m starting a business. Oh, you should go talk to the chamber. So getting the word out about what the chamber did was was the most critical, critical of that to make all that happen? Yeah,
Brandon Burton 26:31
absolutely. So when you came onto the the Cleveland County Chamber Did you? Did you have a goal when it came to membership is that? If you did has that been shared? Have you exceeded that? Are you still working towards it? I’m curious.
Christine Cribb 26:49
Let’s this so that anyone that knows me knows that I would have a goal. So that’s the first board retreat, a board retreat in 2021. I shared with the board that there was no reason this chamber and at the time, were 340. Probably by then. I said there’s no reason this chamber is not 1000 member chamber. And I remember the awkward silence that attacks there, because they just thought that membership was a struggle, right? That that chambers get that that stigma that you have to knock on a door and pitch somebody why you need to be a chamber member, and it’s not the right fit for everyone. So to me, I don’t need there’s 20,000 registered businesses and the registered deeds in Cleveland County, I don’t need 20,000 of them. I want to help those that want that need these benefits to help their businesses. And there is no reason we’re not going to hit 1000. I did not think we would accelerate at this pace. I’ll be honest, I thought it would take five, seven years to get to that 1000. But I anticipate that we’ll get there in the next two or three years now.
Brandon Burton 28:02
Yeah, that’s awesome. I love the big goals and the ability to believe it and to go after it. And it’s happening. So congratulations to you guys.
Christine Cribb 28:15
Thank you, Brandon. I also want to share that that the one I mentioned earlier that I’m not afraid to fail, we did it programmed, that did not work well. And I had no problem saying, you know, we gave it three shots, and it did not work. And so let’s do something else. So I’m not afraid to fail. So we introduced something. And if it works, that’s awesome. And if not, let’s just keep reinventing it. Let’s not stick in be stuck in what we’ve always done. Let’s do something new and different, or change it. Last year, we introduced a professional women’s luncheon. And to me, we needed I had one sponsor, and we needed 40. Women to to for me to think that I had it be a success. Well, we had RSVPs of 100. And that was capacity. And so we were sold out and we had a great keynote speaker come in and share stories. And it was very inspirational. And this year, so people were already asking what are what is the plan for next year. So 2024 we took it to a bigger venue. We’re going to be sold out at 200. We have a keynote speaker from the Ritz Carlton Leadership Center coming in, and we just reinvented it and made it bigger. So I am not afraid to just take a risk. If that professional women’s luncheon had not been successful, we would have gone on and tried something different. But that one was was a home run home run
Brandon Burton 29:41
for sure. I love that being able to cut the ones that aren’t serving you and lean in harder on the ones that are and before we started the recording, I had mentioned that the new event that you guys added last night, right for the first time. I’m going to tell a little bit about that and the success from there.
Christine Cribb 29:58
Absolutely So bourbon is a really a big deal here. And the people I’ve met that collect the bourbon that look for unique bottles, just kept resonating with me. And so last fall, I had this idea because we have a building that will be 40 years old and in 2025. And we have a revenue stream that supports some capital improvements. But we needed to beef up that funding a little bit more to get more work done. So we started something called the gentleman bourbon tasting and dinner. And it is at a new venue, which is has a like a speakeasy feel, and the the revenue made from it will go toward capital improvement. But it sold out we did small just like professional women’s luncheon, or Yeah, the professional women’s lunch, we did smile, we did a dinner a beautiful dinner with for 24 and did a very phenomenal raffle item. And both were sold out within three days. So we added a second night, which is tonight. And we’ll do an instant replay of the bourbon dinner and tasting. But I’m also and it does seem to be it’s going to net a few, quite a few $1,000. So it’s, it’s really great. But once again, if it wasn’t, I’d be totally okay with that. Like, if it didn’t work, then we’ll go do something else. But apparently I hit the nail on the head with this bourbon theme.
Brandon Burton 31:39
That’s fantastic. I love hearing the stories and, and being able to own up to when it’s not going to work to be able to cut the loss. So I love that
Christine Cribb 31:48
right. And let me share one let me serve on because I know that lots of chambers, they have a hard time pitching their board. And there’s some a mentor of mine once said, you manage up and you manage down so you manage your staff, obviously, but you also manage your board and you make sure they’re the board is crystal clear on what their responsibility is. And if a board member is passionate about marketing, then there’s a chairman of your marketing committee. And they you’re you’re tapping into what they want to contribute to the chamber. The other thing that’s really important to me is a good healthy relationship with your board of directors is really, really critical. But I’m also not afraid to ask anyone for an extra sponsorship. So somebody pays their membership dues. And oh, and we had a huge dues increase. Brandon this past year. So a year ago, I’m a believer that your operations need to equal your dues rather than your your revenue from your dues. I think most chambers operate that way. So programs and events, build better programs and events. That’s what they’ve that funding should do. But membership dues needs to equal your operating costs. So your operation budget and membership dues should be pretty much in line with each other. So we did a membership dues increase. And my philosophy was if somebody is not complaining about how much they’re paying for dues, then you’re not charging enough. Yeah. Think about think about that. So we increased from a basic membership dues here was $300. We increased it 25% and went to $400. And we have zero pushback. Wow. Not one person said so. And now that funding is equal to our operations budget. So that that was a, you know, an end to convince the board that this is best practices is that the Chamber revenue from their membership dues equals your operations budget. So let’s make that happen. And if we lose members along the way, I promise we’ll gain them in the long run. And we did not lose one member.
Brandon Burton 34:04
So
Christine Cribb 34:06
taking a risk like that, yeah, take a risk like that. Brandon, where if it had failed, I was prepared to say the worst case scenario is we start to lose members, but we will gain them back with the new members that will join that will pay $400. And we did not lose a member I we were taking a risk again, right? Yeah. So you have to be a risk taker. And you have to be positive about it the whole time. Like you can’t say, you know, I’ve listened to some cohorts that and they feel so bogged down, that their energy resonates with their staff, it resonates with their members, and it needs to be positive. So my background is in Macy’s specialty stores. I was their new store coordinator in the Midwest, a long, long time ago, but their philosophy was when you hit the floor, it’s showtime. And that’s kind of the philosophy here you know, you might have had a flat tire or the baby spit up on you or what Whatever. And I’m really sorry. And we can talk about that behind the scenes. But when you’re in front of a member in the community, it’s showtime you are you represent all the energy. And so your energy equal, what is in your membership? So if you’re positive and happy and you know, get it going on, then then that’s what’s your membership is going to resonate. And do you make everyone happy? No, but I’m a full. I’m a firm believer that we don’t need to make everyone happy. And if it’s not the right fit, you are welcome to leave the chamber. I don’t we don’t have to have a person that’s unhappy with the Chamber of Commerce as a member happily say goodbye. I’m sorry. Not a good bit.
Brandon Burton 35:41
Yeah. Such a great lesson there. And for chambers out there that are looking at needing to increase their dues, yeah, the revenue from their dues. This is a great example here at 25% increase with zero pushback. And I understand every community and chamber is different. But there’s one there, there’s room to increase and grow. So thank you for sharing.
Christine Cribb 36:07
Absolutely, and preparing for the worst case scenario. So someone came in and said, You know, I can’t afford $400 a year if they had said that, I would have obviously wanted to coach them on their business plan. But then I would also work with them. Right. So we could do quarterly payments, or we can do very seldom do I do monthly, but I could have done, you know, I was willing to say the worst case scenario, and somebody says that. Yeah, I was willing to work with him. It wasn’t just black and white. Yeah,
Brandon Burton 36:40
I love that. So as we start to wrap Yeah, as we started to wrap things up here, I wanted to ask for those that are listening who are looking to take their chamber up to the next level, what kind of tip or action item might you want to share with them that they can maybe take back to their chamber to implement?
Christine Cribb 37:01
I would do. Let’s see, when I walked in the door, we have a non negotiable list and that that positive attitude is non negotiable. So there’s that starts in house, I would take a look at not why it wouldn’t work. But what if it did work? Like I would give everything you’ve ever pitched thought of that anybody has said, you know, people come into our offices, and they say, You know what the chamber should do. And they say that as if you’re sitting, sitting back eating bonbons all day, right? Yes, and you want to say, oh, gosh, thank you so much for that. Now, I will give up my my cheesecake here and I will go do what you asked me to do. I would say throw everything on the wall and see what sticks. You know, throw all that spaghetti on the wall and take a risk. And don’t be afraid to fail. But along with that comes a great positive attitude. It comes with a great board relationship. Because if I ever thought I had to you know, if I had to think twice about the job I was doing because of my board of directors, I would not be doing this, we would not be as successful as we are right now. We have 100% support of a board that was huge. When I got here, we downsize it. I’ve an advisory committee, I vet things through them. Every I communicate with them regularly, there is no doubt in the board’s mind what’s going on at the chamber and what we’re doing, having them along for the ride. And then build programs that attract people don’t chase members build programs that attract but do it in a way that members had a part of what was going on. They had a part of creating it, man, you get a piece of that. You give someone an idea. Somebody gives you an idea, and you’re actually taking it and bringing it to fruition. They were thrilled. You know they’re there. They’re part of your chamber, then that’s more than just writing and chat.
Brandon Burton 38:58
Yeah, that’s awesome. Yeah, they become an advocate for where you guys are doing them too and helping to share that. That greater good. And there
Christine Cribb 39:09
goes the word of mouth. The word of mouth. I’m telling you, I’ve not knocked on one door and not given my card to one person and said, Are you a chamber member? I’ve not done it. So even last night at the Bergen event, seven of the attendees were not Chamber members and three of them came up after and said we used to be members and now I’d like to rejoin So my number is going to increase in just just this week alone. But and I didn’t say a word it was the premier sponsor said if you are not a chamber member right now you you need to think twice about that decision. And we got three members and I never said a word I never pitched other than what we do and what the funding was going toward for the event last night. Yeah,
Brandon Burton 39:56
I love it and it wasn’t exclusive member only event. So you open it up and you know, opportunities so good.
Christine Cribb 40:04
We also most all of our events, so even a lunch and learn is no fee for a chamber member but a $10 fee for a non member. And generally at every lunch and learn there is someone who is a non member, and we get to I get to come in, they do a roundtable, and I introduced the chamber and what we do, and that’s it, most all of our events have a member and non member fee. Right?
Brandon Burton 40:28
Yeah, I love it. So as we look to the future of chambers of commerce, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?
Christine Cribb 40:40
I feel if I, when I give my 32nd Get a pitch about a chamber, we have to constantly reinvent ourselves and stay relevant. So when I did that listening tour when I got here, Brandon, I could get a lot of appointments, but I could not get one appointment with a elected official. So it told me that the chamber was not relevant when it came to elected officials. Now, we have a legislative affairs committee, we have a legislative affairs agenda. And last spring, we had 195 people attend a Monday morning at 730 legislative breakfast. So cultivating those relationships and being relevant, like don’t think it’s just the way it’s always been, is the way we can do it going forward. Before I got here, I did a nationwide search and I interviewed with six different chambers. And I got six different job offers, which told me I probably have a screw loose to get back into this business. But I was just passionate when I came back from Italy about coming back and helping businesses succeed. And in doing that some chambers weren’t even opened back up yet brand and like they were still scared about what the future would hold. And I would say you have to take risks and you have to reinvent yourself all the time, you have to be relevant, reinvent yourself to what is relevant, and stay positive and energize. And when you think what we do what our responsibility is as a chamber is to offer business resources. We offer marketing, we offer continuing education, and networking opportunities. Those four things are what businesses need to succeed. So as long as you’re reinventing yourself to focus on those four purposes, at least, that’s within our chamber. If those four pillars are the reason we’re here to help businesses succeed, those are what we have to reinvent every year and make sure every one of them is at the best capacity we can provide to help businesses succeed. That’s the future of the chamber, I believe. Yeah,
Brandon Burton 42:47
I love that love that glimpse of the future. I wanted to make sure you had a chance to share any contact information for listeners who might want to reach out learn a little more from us figure out how you guys are doing things are in the Cleveland County Chamber, what would be the best way for someone to reach out and connect with you?
Christine Cribb 43:07
Well, that’s wonderful. They could connect three ways you can certainly connect over messenger on Facebook at my Facebook is Christine Cribb. You could connect via email christine@clevelandchamber.org. And I’m happy to give my spell out 360-632-6533 To reach out best way is a text. If you email as all chamber world knows if you’re at the first email when I sit down, you are in luck, and you are thrilled that I just replied. But if you are the 80th one, you’re like, why isn’t that woman replied to my email yet. So anyway, any of those ways, I’m happy to reach out I’ve mentored a few chamber directors. And I’m just thrilled at this work. I love that we make a difference in the business community. We had a member that came in wanting to do something that was a sponsorship. When I first got here, he did website. And he then got involved in the chamber just from a conversation with staff and myself. He went from seven clients to 32 clients and he’s hiring two new part time people. And it’s because he just immersed himself in getting his card out there and talking to people and attending events and he became an ambassador and he contributes his success with with getting involved in the chamber. So it works.
Brandon Burton 44:39
Yes, I love it. I love it. But Christine, I have enjoyed having you on the show today. I love the enthusiasm, the passion that you bring to your chamber work and sharing the experiences and stories that you’ve experienced, especially over the last two and a half years. As you’ve seen this rapid growth or Cleveland County Chamber I appreciate you putting aside time to be with us today. And wish you the best on reaching that goal of 1000 Plus members there at your chamber thing. Thank you for being with us today.
Christine Cribb 45:16
Thank you so much Brandon. It was such an absolute pleasure and I love this world and I love I love chambers and helping businesses succeed. It’s an absolute pleasure that you had me on as a guest. Thank you.
Brandon Burton 45:28
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Brandon Burton 0:00
This is the Chamber Chat Podcast, the show dedicated to chamber professionals to spark ideas and to get actionable tips and strategies to better serve your members and community.
Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your hosts Brandon Burton. And it’s my goal here on the podcast to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community. You’re joining us for a special episode as part of our 2023 ACCE Chamber the Year Finalist Series.
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Becki Womble 1:03
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Brandon Burton 1:44
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Our guest for this episode is Amanda Lea Kaiser. Amanda is a keynote speaker and author of Elevating Engagement: Uncommon Strategies for Creating a Thriving Member Community. Through her research, Amanda is at the forefront of exploring how member and attendee engagement is rapidly changing when within professional communities. I’ll have to say as a side note, as I read through her book, I very much was able to visualize all of you as listeners, both attending your state and national chamber conferences and engaging on those levels, but also taking some of these lessons learned to your local chamber organization. So as we go through our conversation today, I hope you can see some of those parallels as well. But Amanda, I wanted to welcome you to the show give you a chance to say hello to all the Chamber Champions that are listening and if you wouldn’t mind sharing something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better.
Amanda Lea Kaiser 2:58
All right. Hey, Brandon, thank you so much for having me here on your podcast and hello Chamber Champions. It’s it’s great to be here. Okay, something interesting about myself. So I got my start at Crayola and I rose up the ranks and marketing so I’ve got a classic marketing background. And and now I’m the keynote speaker but maybe even more interesting than that. I’ve got a two kittens adopted me during COVID I don’t know if if you’re a cat dad, but they adopt us I don’t think we adopt them. And and I named them after Muppets. So I love the Muppets, Kermit and all of those guys. So so my cat’s names are Robin in between. And you might see them running in and out because that’s what they do. Awesome.
Brandon Burton 3:44
Yeah, I did notice the Kermit quote in the book as well. So that carries through. I’m not a cat, dad. But I understand what you mean. It doesn’t matter how much you like the cat they have to like you to adopt. Right? Well, I am excited to get into our topic of conversation today. I think chambers across the country, even globally, are constantly thinking about the ways to elevate the engagement of their membership or their investors or those who participate in their organization at at any level. I often will out I’ll hear chambers talk about doing the yellow highlighter exercise where they will print out their membership list and then with a yellow highlighter, go through and mark any chamber member who’s participated or actively engaged with the Chamber in any way. And that may be the main sponsor of their annual banquet. It may be the sponsor of their board room, or maybe just somebody who’s constantly liking their Facebook posts. So literally any level of engagement and as they do this yellow highlighter exercise, oftentimes there’s not a whole lot of Yeah, low on that sheet once it’s marked up. So I think we’ll, we’ll be in for a treat today with a lot of these tips and ideas around how to elevate engagement with our memberships. So we will dive into this discussion as soon as we get back from this quick break.
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Donna Novitsky 7:36
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Brandon Burton 8:31
All right, Amanda, we’re back. So as I mentioned before the break, we’re, we’re talking about elevating engagement, you’ve got a book all about it. Some could say maybe you’re an expert on it. And I’m a little bit hesitant at all really setting the stage that way. I think I told you before we got on the recording. It’s like introducing a comedian and telling everybody how funny that comedian is and then your your setup to deliver. So you know, no pressure at all, but I’m looking forward to an engaging conversation. Good. So maybe let’s just start with why did you write the book like what what was it about your background and maybe personal history that led up to this moment where you’re like, there needs to be a book about elevating engagement of these membership organizations? Yeah,
Amanda Lea Kaiser 9:21
so Okay, so let me give you just a kind of quick, sober, quick, speedy history to get us to this point. So like I said, I started at Crayola. And then I had a couple of jobs in my career where I worked at an advertising agency and then I landed in a NAT at a national association. So I worked I worked in for a higher ed Association. Super cool. It was the first time that I even realized that associations and chambers and they were even a thing I just didn’t know until that point until I started working for them and I was director of marketing there. And and it just completely We opened my eyes. And I was so delighted by how collegial these professional groups are. They’re, they’re really fantastic. So I decided to open up my own business. And I was a qualitative researcher, my, my marketing focus has always been on research. And I decided to pursue the qualitative research side of things. And during my time, as a qualitative researcher, I worked with 33 different associations and got a chance to personally talk to 477 members from all different walks of life. And the conversations with them did two things, one, I would ask them about their industry or their profession. And the second thing that I asked them about was, what is it like to be a member? What is it like to attend? You know, what is engagement like, and all of that, and as I was conducting these interviews, one thing that I found is there’s this gap between members, and attendees and, and leadership, right. And so, so that’s why I wrote the book, I wanted to close that gap. And just to give you a sense of the gap is, is, you know, members, our members are having an experience there, whenever they engage with us, they’re having an experience, and very often when we’re on the inside, and I can say this, for sure, as the as being a staff person on an association, a lot of what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to provide value, we’re trying to do the administrative stuff very right. And we’re not, we’re not focused on the experience. And so, so that’s what this book is all about. The book is all about closing the gap. And and I’m also doing a ton of keynoting. Right now. And so I start out every time by saying we’re here to close that gap between you and your members.
Brandon Burton 11:52
Yeah, I like that. I think that’s a good summary. And that does kind of set the stage a little bit here. So my background is in chamber publishing. And often I’ll even joke with some of the different advertisers Chamber members that were selling ads to that. I often will hear a chamber member say that they want to advertise and whatever the chamber publication is, because there’s almost a sense of guilt, that they join the chamber at some point. And they see all the emails from the chamber about the networking mixer, the after hours, the Chamber luncheon, annual banquet, you know, there’s always something that golf tournament. And there’s a sense of guilt that they can’t be at all of the things, you know, they work during the day, so they can’t go to the luncheon or they’ve got family life after work. So they can’t go to the after hours. So they see doing some sort of advertising with the chamber as a way to engage. So how would you look at engagement? How do you define engagement? As you look at a membership organization, I guess what counts when it comes to? To engagement? Yeah, yeah.
Amanda Lea Kaiser 13:04
So So advertising counts and attending accounts. So so let me let me kind of step back, though, because what I tend to do is I tend to define engagement, the way a member would defined engagement and the way members define engagement is almost solely around emotions. And I actually, I asked when I when I keynote, I asked my audience this, I’ll ask them what is what does engagement feel like when you’re really engaged? What does that feel like? And I’ll ask them to, to recount a professional or personal community that they’re very, very engaged in, you know, what, when that makes their heart very happy. And so this is some of what they’ll say they’ll they’ll say, I feel valued. I feel welcomed, I feel belonging, connected, excited, inspired, it’s energizing, I feel included. I feel focused, I feel peaceful, I feel worthy. I feel like I’m being seen. That’s just some of the words this is I got 139 responses. But those are some of the key words that came up over and over again, so. So engagement is all about emotions. And when you’re when your members or our members are making decisions to engage, they’re making very emotional decisions. That what they’re what they’re what they’re trying to work out and might not be even conscious. But unconsciously they’re trying to say is this community for people like me, do people like me join a chamber like this? You know, do people like me go to events like this? Do Am I gonna find my people here? Am I gonna be long am I you know, all of those things. That’s, that’s the kind of what’s going on in the back of their minds. And so, I, I love to define engagement all around how members see engagement, because you’re right when we when we on the business side, talk about engagement. We’re talking about joins and when rules and registrations and opens and reads and click throughs and all of that. So we’re talking about the metrics of engagement. But I love to think about engagement as that, that very emotional emotions and feelings that drive those decisions to engage. And so that’s that’s typically where I’m coming from. Yeah.
Brandon Burton 15:26
What you said almost sound like a Seth Godin quote, right? People like us do things like this. Yeah. And it’ll often talked about enrollment, right? So the engagement level kind of at Next stage is yes, I want to engage. And now I’m going to enroll I am all in, I’m going to fully participate. And I know that’s a few steps down from where how you kind of break down that, that member journey, or that the experience journey. So maybe touch on that a little bit, because I think so much of that, the beginning of that membership journey is where that emotion really is probably at its peak. There’s some reason why they’re choosing to attend the conference or choosing to join the chamber. And I’ll say everybody does it for slightly different reasons. But understanding what that emotion what that driver is, I think, is so key to being able to help them have a successful journey going forward with the chamber. Yeah, can outline that for
Amanda Lea Kaiser 16:28
us? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So I’m so glad that you started touching on well, you know, what, what happens at the beginning, because So, for most professional communities, what they find is new members are the most fragile members. And, and so, you know, people, if you look at your metrics, you might see people join, and then they never engage. And then it’s not a surprise when they don’t renew, right, and, and so, so they’re very, very fragile. And, and so what we need to do is start appealing to their emotions, one of the one of the things that I often will say, when people are asking for, like, what is the definition of engagement, I’ll say, there’s two parts, there’s, there’s value, so we got to provide value. And the other part is positive experiences. So you want to provide good value and positive experiences. And when you do that, members will engage. And I would wager to bet that your chambers provide lots of amazing value, you know, people, all of you chamber pros, you’re doing all of these events, you’re publishing, you’re emailing, you’re providing all kinds of really amazing things and lots and lots of value. And it’s, it’s frustrating when people aren’t joining, and or it’s or renewing or engaging in, in some way. And so the, the piece that’s often missing is the experience part, the the part that triggers all of the emotions, and, and so this is very salient for new members, you know, new members join, they often don’t understand how to really engage, there is the old the emails are coming in there is I’ve heard that, Brandon, that guilt factor that you were talking about in so from so many different types of members, you know, they’re, they’re sending me emails, I feel like I and what they will say is, I’m not engaging, and it’s, it’s my fault. It’s not them, they’re, they’re making every effort, it’s me, right? And, and I can see that there’s a lot of benefits, I can see that there’s a lot of events and in what they would normally tell me is I feel like I’ve got to start going to these events, which I can never do, because the timing doesn’t work out. Or I’ve got to spend a lot of time on their website, understanding what they do. And I just don’t I don’t have the time yet. And, and so I think what we need to figure out is how to connect a lot quicker with them, you know, how to have how to provide a teeny bit of value so that they understand that taking that leap to come to your events makes a lot of sense. And also connecting on that emotional level. And you do that with experiences. So are there phone calls? Are there? Is there kind of a special quick Fitbit fun email that you could write to them, you know, what are all of the experiences that you can provide to new members that will get them saying this is not only going to be worth my time, but I think that this is going to be a really fun group. There’s a lot of energy. I’m super excited.
Brandon Burton 19:35
Yeah. And as you’re saying that it reminds me in the chamber industry, there’s a lot of focus on with the engagement of members to try to make the shift from being a transactional relationship to be more of a transformational relationship and that way, hopefully, if that’s communicated and modeled in correct ways, the guilt factor hopefully isn’t there. as much because they’re not in it, they didn’t join to say what’s in it for me, but they’re they joined to be part of something bigger, that’s making a positive impact in their community. I see some chambers that have the option to join their chamber right on their website, we can enter your name, credit card information, and click Submit. And you’re done. You’re a member. And I’m sure there’s the onboarding emails that come in. But that chamber doesn’t know anything about that member, why they joined, they didn’t really share their mission, their vision, any of that. And oftentimes, those are coming from another member as a referral. So you know, you need to be a part of the chamber, right? So I think right from the beginning, there tends to be a little bit of a disconnect. And I love in the book, you talked about doing a listening tour. And I think that could probably come in and in a couple different stages along the member journey. But to really tap into that emotion and their why you want to maybe expand a little bit on the listening tour, and how that can kind of pull on that emotion. Yeah,
Amanda Lea Kaiser 21:08
absolutely. So let me let me give you a couple of tangible stories that I heard dirt while I was while I was interviewing members. So. So there’s a couple of associations that were doing a really good job, and I got a chance to figure out what they were doing from their member saying I was on I was the recipient of the listening tour. And so there’s one, one association that did a very interesting thing. Now they had not very many members joining. It wasn’t like they were having hundreds of members join every week, they might have been having 10s of members join every week. And and so the the director of marketing of that particular organization, would schedule a call, it was about a 20 minute call with every single new member. And during that call, she would ask them a series of questions, you know, hey, tell me about yourself. And when did you start working at this company? Or when did you you know, when did you start the company? She would, she would ask them questions about projects, they were working on what their goals were, what their mission was, what if they’re having any challenges, she might even ask them, you know, what, tell me about some trends. And she would, she would take careful notes, and she listen intently. And at the end of the call, probably with maybe, I don’t know, three, four minutes to go, she would say this has been so interesting. And there’s a couple of things that I heard you talk about, that we might be able to help out with, there’s you talked about this really interesting project that you’re working on. And not many of our members are working on a project like this, but I know that Sue is. And I would love to introduce you, it’d be okay, if I introduced you to Sue, I think she’s a couple of steps ahead of you. And, but you know, I can introduce you via email in and then she will, she would also say and I also heard you talk about this system, that we’ve got some data from some of our research, or we’ve got an event coming up where we’re going to be talking about this topic, we’d love to have you I’m going to follow up with some emails. And so you know, she get off the phone and immediately send some emails, one introducing that new member to sue a longtime member and tell in telling Sue and you know, reminding this this person while why she was introducing them, and then she would follow up with a separate email saying, hey, you know, as we were talking, I told you, I was going to send you this research report and this invite to this event and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So that that’s very time consuming very hands on for this organization that works. Because they don’t have a lot of members. Other organizations, there is the listening tour where you get into your car, you know, or your your get your staff into a van, and you book breakfast, lunch and dinner. Or you go to people’s offices or places of work or factories and and you spend 15 or 20 minutes with them doing the same kind of thing, asking them questions, touring, just being there letting them be seen. And it’s such a pleasure because now when they come to an event, they already know a friendly face. So there’s there’s that part. The other thing is if you are with a chamber that’s maybe spans a large geographic area, there’s a virtual orientation events. Now the virtual orientation events are not orientation webinars, there are much more responsive than that. So so people come you know, your new members come into a Zoom meeting. And then you ask them the same kind of questions, you know, where, where do you work what what kind of organization is your company? Tell us a little bit about it. What are some of your goals? What are some of the projects that you’re working on? And then as everybody’s feeding information to you, you the host can do some pattern matching for the biggest things that people are They’re struggling with and then make that link for them between their problem back to the to what the chamber provides in terms of, of benefits or upcoming meetings or something like that. So. So I love that you were talking about, you know, these these member listening tours, because there’s so many ways that they actually work, Brandon. And that’s really the key to it all. When when you know your members and you hear them talking over and over about their goals, then then we serve them a lot better. Yeah,
Brandon Burton 25:30
there was one chamber executive I talked to one time and he talked about how he’ll do three breakfasts each day, they’ll go meet with different members there. The first one maybe is just having a coffee is the second breakfast, awesome makes the third one, maybe a phase three. So he’s breaking it up. But he’s getting to three different member businesses to have these breakfasts. And he’s meeting with other members there. So like the levels of engagement with the organization with the members is on multiple levels, and able to gather a lot of that very important information to be able to better serve the member. And I love that. So it does kind of seem like though in today with everything digital, and we’ve got in person events, we got virtual events, we get emails, get social media, we’ve got podcasts, we’ve got YouTube, we’ve got all these different ways to get our messaging out there. Does that make it harder or easier to engage members? Like how it I think I can see both sides of the coin, but I’d love to hear your approach and maybe how chambers might want to look at this. Yeah,
Amanda Lea Kaiser 26:41
what I’m hearing across the board is, is engagement is getting harder, it’s harder to engage attendees most virtually and in person, it’s harder, harder to engage members, it’s harder to get those opens and reads. It’s just I think it’s harder. And some people are saying, you know, this is not uniform. There’s some associations and some chambers that are seeing these bright spots, like, hey, we went back into person. And and, and we’ve got some of our in person events are doing amazing. And we’re still doing virtual, and some of those are doing amazing. So this is not, engagement isn’t universally going down the tubes. But I think it is getting harder. And one of the reasons why it’s getting harder is is really time and attention. You just hit on it, Brandon, there’s so many ways that we’re trying to reach members. But there’s so many ways that they’re getting content and they’re connecting. And they’re you know that it’s just sort of, we all have a very frantic pace of life these days. And so we’ve got to do something different to engage members than what we did before. And I’m so glad that you asked that question about communications, because this is sort of a really great time to talk about how you not only provide value, but you also provide the experience so so every time we communicate, there’s two things that we’re trying to do. The first is the what we say. And that’s the value, it’s the message we’re trying to get across. The second thing we’re trying to do is is or the second thing we communicate is how we say it. And this is the tone, it’s the voice. And and this might be something that you’ve talked about a lot in publishing is the tone or the voice. And so I love to think about tone on a continuum. And so on one side of the continuum, there’s the very institutional tone, the very professional polished tone, it’s a lot of big words, it’s when we’ve got our business hat on, that’s the tone we tend to fall into is the institutional tone. On the other end of the continuum, I have a what I call the best friend forever tone, sometimes we’ll also call it the happy dog tone. So if you go into your personal email, and you read, you just quickly, like scan your personal email of all of the brands and companies and products you really love. They’re talking to you and the happy dog tone, there’s emoji, there’s hashtags, it’s casual, they’re talking to you like they’re your best friend. But for some reason, when we’re doing business to business, and we put our business hats on, we talk very, we tend to talk very institutional. And so I just like to remind everybody, that tone is on a continuum, and you can pick anywhere you want to be, and especially with your new members, they’re they’re looking for all of those cues on whether to belong, you know, is this the place for people like me, they’re looking for those belonging cues. And when you can warm up your tone in your emails or warm up your tone and your phone calls, you know, or any of the information you’re sending out to new members. They the sense that they sense that this is going to be a happy, warm, lovely place for them to meet other people and connect.
Brandon Burton 29:54
Yeah. So when I think of, maybe an in person or even a virtual event I think to on an event stage, it’s a maybe a little easier to gauge the engagement. You can see if people are looking down at their phone or distracted or getting up to get a drink or, you know, just the distraction, where as we try to with these communication channels, I’d love that you brought the the tone and the voice into the happy dog messaging. Besides maybe some of these metrics that we look at the open rates and social engagement tools, are there other ways that we can see if our message is landing, right? If we’re how do we get that kind of feedback when we’re not in a room or a Zoom Room even to be able to get that that instant? Hopefully, positive feedback. Yeah,
Amanda Lea Kaiser 30:47
yeah. So people are always asking me how, how do you measure engagement and and there are, you know, I think when your members are doing the yellow highlighter exercise, they’re measuring engagement, looking at your renewals, it’s a measured metric and a measure of engagement. And so as you’re engaging members and attendees differently, you’re going to see that metric go up some some organizations use Net Promoter Score, some of them do things as sophisticated as Engagement scoring. And so again, over time, if you’re, if you’re focused on those experiences, you’re gonna see those those metrics go up. But, but it’s engagement is a tough one. Because it’s very hard to make one change, it’s very hard to say, Okay, we’re gonna make this one event more experiential, and we’re gonna see renewals fly off the chart, that’s not the way it works, right? There’s, there’s, there’s not a lot of like one to one direct comparisons, you just sort of see a general lift over time. So So I think sometimes we have to measure engagement, again, with our own emotions, which is, you know, is there what’s the energy like? Okay, so we’re making it we’re making some improvements to try to be more engaging and say this one event? Was the energy better? Did people walk out smiling, you know, for virtual, one of the things that I think is a really good predictor of a virtual meeting is what’s going on with the chat. Now, you can do a lot of things to have a really robust chat and as a, as a very often speaker, I love the robust chat. I love when I’m talking. And people are busy in the chat and they’re talking to each other. And they’re asking each other questions and they’re tuning in to listen to me and they’re plussing up what I say and then plussing up what everybody else says. And that’s for me that schools because because they’re sure they might be listening to me and engaging with me, but they’re in if they’re engaging with each other. That’s lovely, too. So, so if you’re doing lots of virtual events have chat ambassadors in there. And that can be a micro volunteering opportunity for one of your members. Or it could be a staff, you know, job, but have those chat ambassadors in there that are, you know, they’re plussing up what other people say? And they’re asking questions, and they’re, they’re kind of saying, Oh, this, you know, the speaker said this, what do you think about this, everybody and, and really try to foster that excitement and get it going. And that’s, that’s You’ll sense the energy, you’ll, you’ll sense it, whether you’re virtual or in person, and that that’s almost I think, is Valley or it is as valid as some of those tangible metrics.
Brandon Burton 33:26
Yeah. So I hope this doesn’t feel like we’re taking a step back. But I was thinking about the emotion as people engage with an organization that emotion is, you’re able to maybe give them some small wins along the way. So in the book, you talk about, like speaking from stage, there’s little engagement questions or things you can do to warm up the room, right. So they’re engaging on a very minimal risk or risk free environment where they have nothing to lose if they just participate and engage. And as a member joins an organization. And there’s other little quick wins, I’ll say that you can do to kind of trigger that emotion or positively reinforced that emotion of yes, you’re here for a good reason. We’re here to listen to like, all of those things. Are there any strategies or tips that you want to share around maybe those small quick wins to warm up the audience or the new member, to help encourage them to give them that confidence to be able to engage at higher levels as they progress through their their membership journey?
Amanda Lea Kaiser 34:38
Yeah, let me let me tell you about a totally unexpected story that I heard when I was doing those interviews and it’s a it’s a story that I heard over and over and over in different ways with different words. But what I would hear people say is I went to my very first event for this organization. And while I was waiting in the registration Mine welcomer I didn’t know it at the time, but people were circulating, and they were talking to all of us in the line. And in somebody stopped and talked to me, and it was maybe just two sentences. And it was it, it made me feel like this community is super open and warm and welcoming. And it and I felt like I had to step out of my shell and I am going to, to just talk to other people, I’m going to introduce myself to other people and just see how it goes. And so, so it’s like, new members come in, and we have to give them the teeniest little nudge or a teeny little bit of permission, so that they can go and make their experience great for themselves. And so whenever we can do that, it’s great. So So let’s see, how do you do that you can do that with welcomers that in person events, you know, kind of warming up the crowd for in person or virtual events. Think about your icebreaker, you know, what is what is a an icebreaker question or an activity that is super safe and super easy. And so I’ll give you just an example, when I’m getting together a group and I want to get them to be really creative, I want to I want the group bubbling up lots of ideas, I want them collaborating with each other. And the topic is not is not very serious, you know, it’s we’re working on, we’re just going to work together on this problem. And we’re gonna have a really great time doing it. One of the questions that I love to ask is, would you like to be a dragon? Or have a dragon and why? And in the why is the key, you know, you can pick either one, but I love to ask why. And so you can ask that, you know, in person, with a smaller group, you can ask it on, you know, virtual meeting and get people responding in the chat. But that, you know, again, you’re you’re popping them out of the expected stuff. And in the their professional world, and you’re bringing them into sort of a different surprising experience where they can have a little bit of fun with it. They tap in their answer, and now they’ve started participating, which is half the battle, because once once you start once, then you’ll you’ll form that habit and you’ll keep participating. That’s
Brandon Burton 37:12
awesome. Having read the book, I knew that was the question you’re gonna you’re gonna bring up it’s I was waiting for the dragon question. So I’m glad you glad you brought it out. As we begin to wrap things up here, I wanted to ask usually I’ll ask for maybe a tip or action item for listeners who want to take their organization up to the next level. And what you would offer I think I may want to read phrase that too, for an organization that a chamber listening who would like to level up the engagement of their members to the next level? Where should they start? Yeah,
Amanda Lea Kaiser 37:50
yeah, absolutely. Oh, let me backtrack and tell you one other one. So if you’re looking for more icebreakers, or energizers the other one that is surprisingly, super fun, and people get you know, they have this very fun argument about it is, is a hot dog a sandwich. So what do you think Brandon? Is the hot dog sandwich? Or is it not a sandwich?
Brandon Burton 38:13
I’m gonna go yes. Is it the same way a cheesesteak is the sandwich.
Amanda Lea Kaiser 38:17
Oh, there you go. Yeah. Yeah. So so interesting. Usually, usually groups completely divide. And there’s some squabbling around if a hotdog is a sandwich and to my knowledge, there’s no real answer, you know, just like, Alright, are you know, is white chocolate, chocolate, you know, again, you get the you know, those are those are fun cup questions to ask.
Brandon Burton 38:40
In cornbread, and you have a corndog. Now, that’s a whole nother topic. I don’t agree with that. Yes,
Amanda Lea Kaiser 38:47
yeah. Yeah, that feels not sandwich like to me, but yeah, yeah, absolutely. Okay, so. So what, you know, what can they do to take things to the next level, what, what I would suggest is go and start identifying all of your transactions anytime you have a transaction. So joining as a transaction renewing as a transaction, opening an email is transaction registering as a transaction registration at your events as a transaction. And in so think about and so like, anytime the staff has a job to do, you’re doing administrative stuff for that transaction. So think about how you can seamlessly keep doing the administrative part of it, and then layer the expensive experience on top of it. So that’s, that’s how you close that gap is to keep doing what you’re doing in terms of the transaction and the administrative stuff, but now figure out how to layer the positive experience on top. It’s easier than you think it is. So like, let’s say you’re, you’re you’re doing registration at one of your events, and you’ve got you know, 100 people coming through the door, and you need to give them all badges within 10 minutes or something like that, you know, people are coming at you, and you’ve got to log them. And you got to give them all their badges, even even in those moments where you’re so busy and so frantic, just smile, like just keep giving them a genuine smile. And now you’ve layered on that positive experience. I
Brandon Burton 40:22
love that. And I was thinking, I don’t know, man, I don’t know if this holds true all the way through or not. But if, in talking about those micro wins, as you know, micro positive experiences and micro engagements. Hopefully, if they’re engaging on that small risk free level, a way of maybe measuring that as if they’re engaging again, like if they’re taking another step, you know, on that journey. And if they’re, if they’re stalling out, if you make that initial engagement, and they stall out, maybe the communication needs to be refined, maybe you need to get more information. But they hopefully should be making another step and other engagement along the way. Would you agree with that? Or is that just totally my own thought? totally
Amanda Lea Kaiser 41:13
right. So I have identified it fine. I’ve identified six stages of engagement, and is exactly what you’re talking about that that at each stage, there’s generally speaking, a barrier for people to take that next step into the next stage of engagement. And so to the extent that we can be aware of all of those six, six stages, and just constantly helping people have those micro wins, and in sort of taking that next step, if they want to, one, one thing that happens is you know, sometimes like, boards will get burnt out and a new member, a new face will come to an event for the first time and a board member will rush up and say, We’re so happy you’re here. Have you ever thought about being on the board and the new members panicking and saying, oh my gosh, I don’t even know who you people are yet. And so you can’t rush people up the six stages of engagement, but what you can do is make the opportunity available if they want to. So if you you know, the book is elevating engagement, and right there in the beginning, I detail all of the six stages, and each chapter is devoted to one of those stages. And I talk about the the kind of go no go decisions that members are making at every single one of those stage stages. And then I just try to give you hundreds of ideas for helping them move from one stage to the next. Again, if they want to work, we don’t rush them, we just make those opportunities all available to them. And, and yeah, I think I love I was taking notes while you were talking Brandon, because this idea of micro wins or micro engagements. I just I love that terminology. And I hadn’t thought about it or articulated it that way. So if you don’t mind, I’d like to steal that from you. Because I think it’s cool.
Brandon Burton 43:04
Yeah, just reference me twice. And then you can own it after that. So a real life example that, that I was reminded of and reading the book, you you mentioned that the board members, you know, maybe seeking a replacement for their seat during the board recruitment. So my, my wife was the volleyball Commissioner for our local youth volleyball organization. And our two youngest, well, all of our girls played volleyball through it. So we felt invested. And she was giving back to the community and doing her thing and just ended up with a lot of things on her plate. And she was completely overwhelmed. It was draining all of her energy. So she would talk to the other volleyball moms, she would say, this is wiping me out. Do you want to take it from me? Do you want to do you want to do this? And everyone kept saying, No, it was like, You need to change your approach. This doesn’t have to be a bad thing. It doesn’t have to be a negative experience. You don’t need to lie to them, but just share what it entails, share what the upsides are, and let them make a decision. But if you sell it as you know, this is so time consuming and is totally drained me. I think the example he gave in the book is a board member saying you know, I’ve I’ve been affected finite, you know, negatively financially, you know, in serving on the board. Nobody’s gonna want to take your spot, right. So you don’t want to scare people away with being over engaged, maybe? Yeah, yeah.
Amanda Lea Kaiser 44:35
And then then a staff members, we can also get a handle on that as well. You know, if, if we feel like it’s hard for volunteers to volunteer, we can look at their roles. We can look at the time commitment, we can look at dividing things up we can but just like it just like we were talking about with new members, you know, we want to take new members and give them that little nudge to help them keep progressing along their membership journey, you can do the same thing with volunteers. I love thinking about the volunteer journey as well. And, you know, start the volunteer journey with a micro volunteering opportunity and then slowly build. And I think a lot of time as a staff people, we tend to think about volunteer roles is very specific things if you’re on a board, if you’re on a committee, those are volunteer roles, but to members welcoming as a volunteer role speaking is volunteer role hosting as volunteer role, right, and, and so, so think about all of those non traditional things that we want to do to engage members like like being a chat ambassador, and have that be a volunteer role. And, and so, you know, maybe people are spending three minutes volunteering, or 10 minutes volunteering, or 30 minutes volunteering, but now you’ve just flex their muscles so that if there’s a chance to do another volunteer role, they might take you up on it. Right.
Brandon Burton 45:59
I love that. So I like asking everyone that I have on the show this question that as we look to the future of chambers of commerce, and I’ll broaden that and say, just associations in general, how do you see the future of chambers and associations going forward?
Amanda Lea Kaiser 46:17
Yeah, I see it really bright. There’s, there’s such a need, you know, when, whenever there’s a need in the community, there’s the business propositions, I think the future is really bright. And it’s just about how to engage differently. And I, from the research, I see that the answer is in the experiential side of things. And again, I think I said this a little bit earlier that I would wager to bet a lot of your chambers are offering a ton of value. And if you offer even more value, that’s great. But it might not get you to engagement, what you got to start doing is focusing on those positive experiences. And so a really quick way to think about that in this is something that you can play with you with your staff or talk to your board about or your committees about is just start saying, you know, the any, anytime somebody starts asking what do our members need, you know, what do our website visitors need? What are our attendees need? What do people need? Start laying or layering on that question, which is how do we want them to feel? And so? So when you ask, how do we want them to feel? And this is an easy thing that we that you could try even tomorrow, right? The next time you’re writing an email, think, how do I want the reader to feel and you kind of lock in that emotion in your brain that you want them to feel happy or joyful or hopeful or something like that. And when you type your message will actually totally change in quality? In in, that’s a really great experience. So just always, always keep asking, How do I want people to feel? How do I want them to feel when they come to our website? How do I want them to feel when they walk in the door of our event? How do I want them to feel when they’re advertising or hosting or sponsoring or any of those things. And that that’ll that’ll get you to the experiences part. I
Brandon Burton 48:11
love that that’s a good gauge right there just to kind of make sure that what we’re doing is the right thing and getting people to to engage and feel good and hit on those emotions that brought them there in the first place. So Amanda, I enjoyed this conversation and having you on the podcast, I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners who may want to reach out and connect or share where they can find your book or anything like that, that you’d like to share with the audience feel free.
Amanda Lea Kaiser 48:42
Yeah, absolutely. So you can find me at amandaleakaiser.com. It’s Amanda, Lea, and then Kaiser like the role.com. There’s information about the book there. It’s there’s information about speaking, there’s a newsletter all about engagement that I put out once once a week that you can sign up for if you’d like or you can type elevating engagement into Amazon or any online bookseller and you’ll find my book there.
Brandon Burton 49:09
I love it. Well get that in our show notes for this episode. But like I said, this has been an engaging conversation and I hope the listeners feel so as well. And that it may prompt them to make some micro wins to put themselves out there a little bit to touch on those emotions understand why their members are there and what can you do to make them feel the way that you’d want them to feel. So Amanda, thanks again for being with us today and for sharing your your insights and for for sharing this book as well.
Amanda Lea Kaiser 49:41
Thank you so much, Brandon, this has been delightful.
Brandon Burton 49:45
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Brandon Burton 0:00
This is the Chamber Chat Podcast, the show dedicated to chamber professionals to spark ideas and to get actionable tips and strategies to better serve your members and community.
Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your hosts Brandon Burton. And it’s my goal here on the podcast to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community. You’re joining us for a special episode as part of our 2023 ACCE Chamber the Year Finalist Series.
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Becki Womble 1:03
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Brandon Burton 1:44
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Our guest for this episode is Velma Knowles, Velma is a Gallup strength certified coach, human behavioral expert and best selling author from helping to build the Conservation Legacy of the Bahamas to leading award winning membership growth for associations. Boundless passion is helping organizations build a value driven culture of belonging. Velma enjoys photographing birds riding bikes and pretending she likes to exercise, Velma and mix excited to have you with us today on Chamber Chat Podcast, I’d love to give you an opportunity to say hello to all the Chamber Champions who are out there listening and to share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little bit better.
Velma Knowles 2:37
Well, Brandon, thank you so much for having me here today on your Chamber Chat Podcast. And thank you for the kind introduction. Something that listeners might not know about me, other than you’ve revealed my big secret, which is I’m from the islands of the Bahamas, now living here in the United States. But one of the things that they may not know is that I cut a demo recording at the age of 17 in the hopes of becoming a big country and western singer, which we know by the end of this episode, that did not happen.
Brandon Burton 3:18
That’s exciting, though. Not everybody can say that. And it’s kind of putting their their neck out there. So to speak, and and take a risk. So good job. So I’m curious where in the Bahamas are you from? Yeah,
Velma Knowles 3:31
so I was originally born on the island, the island of Nassau New Providence, like so officially now. And I have family throughout mostly in the Abacos and in Long Island.
Brandon Burton 3:43
Okay, well, hopefully you have a chance to get back there often.
Velma Knowles 3:47
So I do try to go several several times a year. Yeah, that’s
Brandon Burton 3:52
great. So I like giving all of the guests that I have on the show and opportunity just to tell a little bit about the work that you do. Kind of your business structure how you serve, especially when it comes specifically to Chambers of Commerce. How your your work aligns with chambers. Sure.
Velma Knowles 4:12
Yeah. Thank you again for that opportunity. For those that might not know me or a little bit about me, my career includes 20 Plus, and I always say plus because after 20 years to stop counting, but yeah, does 20 years working inside so I’m one that has been inside the not for not for profit space, especially in the association and world of providing services to members. And my span of expertise encompasses marketing, a membership engagement, retention and growth board, strategic planning and engagement and then of course, leadership development. And I want to just caveat that leaders To me are across the organization, they’re not those that are in higher positions. But I think everyone in the organization is a leader in one way or another. My last position was the vice president of member experience with a little brand that folks might have heard of called AAA. And so today, triple A services about 60 million members across the United States, and then Canada, Europe worldwide for the other arms of that Federation. In 2017, I had the opportunity to venture out on my own, and I felt called to serve more associations. And so today, I have my own business. It’s called leaders pathway where leaders go to grow. And that word leaders means you as the individual and your organization, I believe that your organization can only grow higher as you as the leader grows higher. And so it all starts inside, in order for it to grow outside. I work with chambers, not for profit, which could be donor based organizations, member based organ associations across the country. And my focus is really to help them create this culture of belonging where the members, the employees, and the board, which is that that ultimate leadership in there, they feel like they belong in that organization. And I know we’ll talk a little bit more about that as we go forward. But I truly believe that when you as an a leader of a member based organization, when you create that culture of belonging, you’re going to solve the challenges that you face around engagement, which I know is like top of the line and on everyone’s buying, retention, which we are we’re struggling with across the board, and then ultimately moving from stagnation or, you know, a declining growth to a sustainable model for growth. So I hope that level sets a little bit about me, I do executive coaching, I do strategic planning, I do public speaking for workshops, and conferences. And I also do employee retreats and membership planning. Very
Brandon Burton 7:18
good. Now, that definitely gives us a good snapshot of the work that you’re involved with. And I love the focus on leadership. And I think no matter what position you serve at at a chamber, that you are a leader, you’re helping to drive the vision for your community. And if you are the chamber executive, you should be thinking about training the next leader, right? So at some point, you will leave and you want to make sure you’re leaving the organization in a good position to continue growing and have that strength. And I love to you when in the context of leaders, you talked about kind of hitting the the potential and everything I think it’s John Maxwell talks about the lid, yes, the organization is only as as good as the leader right if the leader caps at a certain point and the organization caps so we want to be able to unleash that lid so that the organization can grow so well Velma and I’m excited to get into our conversation today. And we’ll be focusing our you know, the bulk of our conversation around the idea of fostering a sense of belonging as you alluded to, and specifically to impact membership growth. So we will dive deeper into this conversation as soon as they get back from this quick break.
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Donna Novitsky 10:52
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Brandon Burton 11:50
All right, Velma. We’re back. So as we talk about fostering a sense of belonging to impact membership growth, what does that look like? From your perspective? I know you had mentioned, you know, fostering a sense of belonging for members B, it also mentioned for the board. So how do these dynamics play together for the strength of the organization? Yeah,
Velma Knowles 12:12
sure. Well, if the if you haven’t heard me speak yet, you’ll you’ll hear this message over and over again. And that is that I believe that there are three things that everyone everyone wants in life, it doesn’t matter if you are the board member, the member of the organization, the staff and employees, there’s three things that everyone wants. And what they want is to be seen, to be heard, and to be valued. See, to me fostering a sense of belonging is you have to build a connection. And in order to do that, you need to be able to see people for who they are to hear them the voice and the things that are on their mind. And then to value them and their contribution. Engagement is not an activity. And when I when I look at what the you know, my my clients are doing what chambers and associations or member organizations in general, what they do is there like a heavy focus on engagement, and I totally my whole heart understand why. But engagement is is not an activity that you do, you don’t, you know, have this webinar or have this conference to get people engaged or recruit people into volunteer, it’s about a connection. And when people are connected to the mission, and when they’re connected to the individuals. That’s when you see this sense of belonging happening. I’ll give you a good example. Myself, okay, I was a member of an organization that shall remain anonymous, because we’re not promoting anyone. And then, you know, this worldwide pandemic, came into play some time in our life here. And in the end, all of a sudden, a lot of things kind of shut down. And so when it was time to renew my membership, I was like, Well, you know, I can’t I can’t go to the functions that can’t do things the normal way. And so I, I paused, I know, I paused my membership, or full disclosure, and I said, I’m not going to renew. And then you know, as things started to get back into what we would consider the next stage of this work, force, the next work environment that we’re in and, and moving on to the future. I said, you know, what, I miss my connections. I miss the people that I was so close to when I was there. And so literally, I really, you know, reinstated my my membership and they took me back. And the big idea whether it was a webinar, which is, you know, a service you provide, or whether it was the annual conference, or whether it was the mag Xen I got or whether it was, you know, a lunch and learn that they had or coffee club that you got to go to whatever the Chamber’s had available to us. It was an opportunity to connect with those people that I have a relationship with. And so I say that to say that when you create a sense of belonging, you’re really creating a place for people to connect. People need to feel like I’m seeing when I’m there, people recognize me, Hey, Brian, great to see you. I, you know, me, and you’re connecting with me, you hear me? If I tell you that I have this problem or this challenge in my business, you hear what I have to say. And it’s not just listening for the sake of listening, but it’s listening with a focus on how do you help me solve that? And if you can’t solve it specifically from the chamber, how can you connect me to a resource that you might have that can help you solve that? And then do you value me, and I don’t mean value in the sense of the dollars that I pay for my membership, I mean, value me in the sense that you appreciate what I can bring to the table, maybe there’s a specific strength that I have, or a specific expertise that you could tap into, that is a resource for someone else in my community here in my chamber, that that has a need. And so I just feel like personal connections, build engagement. And engagement is, is fortifies retention, and retention gives you results. But connections are not products. It’s a personal connection. It’s not a product, like a webinar, or conference, or any of the beautiful things that we use, those are just vehicles to help us create that connection.
Brandon Burton 16:59
So you’re really upsetting the paradigm they’re not an activity and personal connections are not a product. Right? So, man. I appreciate the three things you talked about. Everybody needs to be seen, heard and valued. And, and I think from a board perspective, as as a chamber executive working with the board, I think those three things are, they’re super important to implement. And I think you can be very strategic with how you do that. Because you’re, you’re dealing with a limited, you know, a finite amount of people, right, that you’re trying to have seen be seen, heard and valued. As you open that up to the membership in general, everybody tends to join the chamber for different reasons. They I mean, they all join probably to raise their bottom line, right to make a little more money, benefit their company, but the way they the vehicles to get there, they see different value with the chamber. Right. So as a chamber approaches individual members, how do you make those personal connections to help them be seen heard and valued? Sure.
Velma Knowles 18:15
Yeah. And I think it gets to how do you create those communities within the community. And and I say that because coming from, you know, working inside a very large Association, and then working voluntarily with some chambers offering support to help them in their membership growth. As a member of that chamber. What I’ve found is that, you know, all members are important. Get ready for this one, but all members are not equal. And so what that means is that if you as a an association, you have a very small staff, even if you’re a big chamber, you have a small staff, and you can’t be all things to all people. And so marketing segmentation, which is not anything new here, but really trying to understand that 8020 principle, but warming what is known as these micro communities, or a community or, you know, a special interest group is another way of labeling it, but it’s a community within the community. So you have a member base, and then you look at that member base, and you say, who’s really, you know, my, my big 8020? Right, the the members that are truly engaged, that are volunteering, that are sponsoring that are doing the things that elevate the whole chamber, and then you say what of those individuals what is the needs that they have and form groups so that other people can connect on a smaller scale to get their problem solved and see a greater value in In the return for the dollars that they’re investing in, so I think it begins with really understanding, you know, where it where are the chamber champions, we will use your word a coin here, which I love. Where are those champions, those chamber friends that are inside the association and organization? And how can you create those sub communities that allow others to come in and feel seen, heard and valued, because it’s a smaller group, where everyone can have a place? You know, when you when you when you look back, and you research the whole idea around? Why chambers exists? Why, why what is a chamber of commerce, a Chamber of Commerce is really a place to, we’ll use the word network, which is the kind of the old school hat, right? Because that kind of has a different connotation. What is networking, ooh, nobody likes to network, I want to bring that forward to today’s and I want to modernize it in the 21st century. And it’s connection, it is not networking here, here’s a business card like speed date, it’s truly connecting and being seen, heard and valued. And I think when we can put on that, that member, first that people first sense of, of a culture, we’re trying to build those connections in a genuine way. And I really want to say genuine, genuine rapport. That’s when you reap the benefits of greater engagement, retention and growth.
Brandon Burton 21:34
So great, great response, the thought that comes to my mind, is this unnamed organization that you are a member of and drop the membership for a short time and then miss the connections that you had. Was it the connections with the leadership of that organization? Or was it the connections with the other individual members of the organization?
Velma Knowles 21:57
Very good question. And so let me let me do this. First and foremost, it is the members first, and for to me, they were members in that association or organization that I couldn’t wait to hug again, I couldn’t wait to see to talk of old stories and to make new memories. But did I have a connection within the leadership, I would say that it was selected. And, and it’s because you know, when you when you have, when you have a staff, and I’ve been in those shoes, you’re working in a small organization where you got a lot of members, but you’ve got a job to do. And so you’re very focused on trying to get the job to do and, and sometimes you can miss the person, when you’re focused on getting that project. And this is in any organization, you know, we tend to focus on project project project, but then we missed the person. And I think for me, it’s been where certain individuals in the leadership of the organization has seen me, and they hear me and they value me, and they’re like, oh, yeah, great, you know, and there’s that connection. But then unfortunately, that doesn’t trickle down to the entire team, even if their entire team is five people. And so that’s why I go back full circle, that, to create that culture of belonging has to begin on the inside, you know, if your employees feel like they’re seen, heard and valued, you’re going to foster that type of behavior, that’s going to then trickle outside. And then any member in your organization any prospective or like, I like to call them future member, any future member is going to be like, I gotta belong, they have random makes me feel like I missing out on something, I gotta, I just want to be there. Because I want to be among that, you know, people like Brandon. And I think that’s where the opportunity, that’s why I’m heavily passionate about, you know, your, your leadership has to in leadership across the organization, they have to buy into this culture of belonging, and then live that out every day for your members to be able to experience that and then want to stay.
Brandon Burton 24:10
I thought that’s where your response might go. So like,
Velma Knowles 24:18
oh, my gosh, I feel like Okay, pass the test.
Brandon Burton 24:24
So, I love the line that you had said about how all members are important, but they’re not equal.
Velma Knowles 24:31
Yeah, I
Brandon Burton 24:32
just need to let it sink in. Right. Yeah. Usually
Velma Knowles 24:35
when I say that, when I’m at board, you know, when I’m with my clients, and I do a board strategic planning session and, and, you know, we were talking about membership member engagement, member experience, and then they’ll, you know, they kind of throw some things at me and I’ll say, Well, you know, just let this sit for a minute. Okay, I’m gonna let this just let this plane land here. And and I tell them, you know, members are important. And everybody’s like nodding their head. Absolutely. You know, because they’re all members, everyone on the board is a member, right? Yeah, in different levels of capacity representing their companies. And I said, but all members are not equal. And then I’m like, will they ever bring me back to work for them again, right? So you know, and then it kind of sinks in, and then one or two people will say, Well, can you expand on that a little bit. And so I think that it’s, it’s not to take anything away from the the value of each individual in a member, you know, organization or customer if for that matter, because, you know, I wrote the book, the valuable leader, that’s my shameful plug in. And so I, I truly believe everyone brings value, but you’re running a business, the chamber is a business, it’s not for profit. It’s not nonprofit, right? It’s a it’s a business. And so you have to apply some strategic business processes. And that that’s one of them. Yeah,
Brandon Burton 26:03
and I think oftentimes, those members that are of higher value and value, there’s different ways to assess value with a member, right. But you talked about an 8020 rule. So you may look at that 20%, that are really bringing in 80% of those key metrics. And that may be a good pool to look at, as you’re looking for future ambassadors there, people get what your chamber does, or people who can get on board with your vision, and help make those connections with other businesses in the community. So I love that you point that out, you draw attention to the 8020 principle, and, and lean into that. So there’s a lot there. So I feel like I have to ask you, you have a term called Tiger Teams, can you tell us a little bit of Tiger team is and
Velma Knowles 27:00
yeah, tiger team. So when I was working inside the association world, one of the things that I got tasked by the CEO to do was to turn around a membership deficit. Now, you know, this is a big number. But if you put everything in perspective, wherever you are in the world, if you are losing members, it is a big number. Okay? Because it’s a problem that you have a big challenge you have to face. And so we had a, we had a huge member deficit that needed to turn around. And I was in the marketing department. And if you work in any support area of a company, you know that you’re there to serve the operations teams. And so to be called on to lead such an important task. First and foremost, I had the considered it a career opportunity for a promotion, or a career limiting move. And, and so thankfully, it turned out that I had the opportunity to literally turn this deficit around. But I didn’t do it by myself. And I always say that whenever I engage or work with, you know, coaching for for clients, or if I’m a part of the board planning, I always say that I don’t, I don’t have all the answers. But all the answers are in this room. And so I had this idea creatively, to tap into the various what I would call experts in each department. And so no matter how small your organization is, it’s got individuals that have a different discipline, a different set of lenses, if you will, that they look at the business every day. And so they see things and have a perspective, that’s very different than yours, right? And sometimes, I know we can, we can have such a deep focus on what we’re doing that we end up with blind spots, I like to call them blind spots where we just can’t see what’s what’s outside of our vision, and someone coming from a different lens can see what maybe you can’t and so, the idea was to bring together this group of people and the marketer in me said, nobody wants another job to do especially in a small organization. How do I how do I, how do I motivate? Or how do I inspire? How do I, you know, just bring this group where they want to belong to this to this challenge that we have this task force and it was called the task force, the membership retention Task Force, and I was like, Ah, I think you know, that just painful, right? And so I decided that I was gonna rebrand it, and I came up with teen Tiger. And so the tiger was a inside marketing strategy, if you will. that I created. And so I came up with a new name. And the team Tiger consisted of those that were going to be very passionate about running after, you know, running after the members that we were losing in the hopes of bringing them back and setting the stage to really give a roar, if you will, around how important it is to belong, the value proposition that you would get and really shoring up some of the things that that we felt we were missing. And so team Tiger became known throughout the organization, I just started talking it up. And it was interesting, because within eight months to a year, after testing a lot of ideas, I had people volunteering, can I be on Team Tiger? And so I was like, Well, you know, we’re really right now we’re just trying to kind of manage, because we didn’t want it to be too big either. Because then it becomes, you know, it becomes a place where it’s harder to have everyone be seen, heard and valued, right, becomes too big. So we did, we did rotate folks off because of other responsibilities and to bring in new perspectives. But it worked. So well. And you know, that it, we not only turned around the deficit, but we exceeded our goal within the time of budget. And so it’s safe to say I was able to keep my job. But then after, after that time, in the in that organization, I got tapped by another CEO, because sometimes people think, well, that’s a one and done. And, you know, it was a silver bullet. And you guys had some tricks of the trade. And for a while there, I thought that to Brendan, but then I got tapped by another CEO. And he said, I heard about what you did in this organization leading this team Tiger. And I was like, wow, you know, news travels. And he said, I would like to, I’d like to talk to you about doing some consulting workforce. And I was like, Well, I don’t really consult but I coach, there’s a big difference, you know, because I think you’ve got the power and you’ve got the talent, they just need a different lens, a different perspective, right, someone to come in and kind of cheer them on champion them and their cause and their tie in and reenergize them. And, and so I had the opportunity to engage with them, it was three weeks of doing some preliminary roll, you know, just kind of getting the lay of the land. And then I was asked to go to present to the board. So they flew me up for a 20 minute presentation. And I couldn’t even go to the board meeting, this was so funny, because they flew me to did to go to the board. But I can only come in the board room at the time of my presentation, which was only going to be for 20 minutes. And so I was like, okay, so I went in, I really didn’t have anything to report on. I mean, it’s three weeks, so you can’t really get a good feel for Okay, here’s, here’s the solutions you need right now. But I, I did present a business case. And, and not only a case, but a pathway forward, if you will, I call it the pathway principle. And it’s just really four things for them to have to look at, you know, know your numbers. And so really getting into your your data, your member data, know your numbers, know your resources, you got to know resources. And when I talk about resources, I talk about who you have in the organization, and who you have outside your organization, resources, like staff, or like members that are a part of your organization in your chamber. And they have expertise, but but also your partners, and your vendors, right, or industry vendor partners, because they’re due or different. Sponsors may be different as well. But those expertise, so know your resources, number three is you have to know your value. So is the value that you bring to your member base, relevant, as my good friend, Mary buyers would say, is the relevance there today as it was when you first started. And I think you know, for all of us, we have to take a look at what our value is, as we go forward. And then the fourth step on that pathway principle is really to know your plan. And that sounds very simple. But it’s not easy. Because everybody’s got a day to day job. And so I just presented that pathway principle and the thesis that I had so far, and at the end of 20 minutes, my my time was over. And we met when we met at around six 630 for cocktails, and it was then in there that the CEO said I’d like To bring you on board 100% full time, we want you to work with our organization to turn around our membership, retention deficit. And I thought, Okay, I got a year. And three years later with Team Tiger inside another organization, we won the Federation growth award for the highest net growth. Year over year, every year, we exceeded budget. So it’s not me, I really, really really don’t want to, to shortchange anyone here it is the collective connection. I’ll go back to that, again, of having the right people on Team tiger with with a focus of creating that culture where they want to belong, and where people want to belong as members to
Brandon Burton 35:51
very good. And your right, team Tiger sounds way more sexy than membership retention task force. So for anyone out there who’s on a membership retention Task Force, maybe, you know, think about rebranding it. Yeah,
Velma Knowles 36:03
I tell you, it goes. It’s just built curiosity. And you know, curiosity sparks interests, and interests, then return gives you a return on your investment.
Brandon Burton 36:15
Right? Well, Velma, as we start to wrap things up here, I want to ask you for any chamber champions that are out there listening who wants to take their organization up to the next level? What kind of tip or action item might you share with them that they can implement it their organization?
Velma Knowles 36:33
Right? Oh, yeah. When I thought about this question, because in full disclosure, you gave me all these questions. And, and I thought, well, what would what would I want someone to say to me, and I could rattle off several different tactics that you can test. But I think they’re shortchanged. And I don’t think you have to know more about that chamber in order to really give them good direction there. So for me, I would say, if there’s one thing I would, would challenge, or even encourage my chamber champions to do is to, first and foremost, look at, look at your, your organization, your communication to your members, and to your future members. And ask yourself, Am I focused on communicating how I solve the problems that I know they have? Or am I focused on communicating the services that I offer? I think there’s a big difference between, you know, when you say, I’m going to communicate the problem, the solutions to the problems I solve, versus the services that I offer. Services are, you know, things that you get from membership. But everyone has those services, right? I mean, just about even even for profit organizations now have member based organizations, Facebook, and Amazon, and they have magazines, and, you know, they may not have conferences, but they’ve got a lot of different other benefits that that that are traditional in our membership model. So I think when you focus on selling the problem that you solve, giving them the solutions to the things that you can provide, I think that that over the service, because it services services, that is what I expect, solutions is what I need. Right?
Brandon Burton 38:27
I had heard a quote, it’s been a few years back now, but it went to the the effect of if you can define the problem better than your future customer or client member, whoever it is, they assume that you have the answer. So if you can get good at defining their problem, they will assume that you have the answer. So to your point with communication that is key. So as we look to the future of chambers of commerce, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?
Velma Knowles 39:00
Oh, you are going to be so surprised by this one. But I think the future of my chamber champions out there, and I would, I would invite all businesses, so if they they listen in anyone outside of this listens in, I think that your greatest future opportunity is focused on connection. You know, the Surgeon General of the United States here has reported in this timeframe that we’re in that one of the greatest health crisis is not it’s not heart disease, it’s not, you know, smoking or cancer or any of those other really, you know, detrimental health issues that that we face. It’s it’s loneliness. And the solution to that is connection, and it brings us full circle because the primary reason of the existence for our chambers is to connect people So I really, really believe that I’ll use the quote that, you know, if you want to be stronger. You know, if you if you want, how does it go, if you want to go fast, go alone. But if you want to go further go together. And I think partnerships through collaboration is a way that you’re going to be able to provide solutions to problems that don’t even exist today for your future members and existing members. And it’s going to allow you to be viewed as innovative, creative, and a leader in really bringing organizations together. And I think that is going to elevate your board leadership. It’s going to elevate your member engagement, increase your employee retention, and it’s going to give you a sustainable organization for the future.
Brandon Burton 40:56
Very good. I love it. Getting back to the basics back to the roots of what chambers are all about. Well, Velma, I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any contact information or places you’d like to point people to follow you or connect with you and learn more about the services you offer. Anything you touched on today. Where would you point them to? To connect with you?
Velma Knowles 41:19
Yeah, sure. Thank you. Thank you, again, so much, Brandon, for the opportunity to be on the Chamber Chat Podcast I and to be such a an easygoing post. So I appreciate that. No real tough, tough questions here. But thank you so much for helping me be well prepared for our listeners. It’s really truly my honor to serve today. And I’m very easy to find. i My website is my name Velma Knowles and so it’s VelmaKnowles.com. And if you go there, I have some resources that are just free that you know, anyone can tap into some of them are on membership, and some are on leadership blindspots communication things that can help your team inside the organization level up, if you will, and then help your help your organization from a growth retention engagement standpoint. So I would just suggest go to VelmaKnowles.com, of course, I’m on LinkedIn, under the same name, and, and so and social media channels as well. I’m in on YouTube, I have a small podcast, a YouTube podcast called Your Leadership Chat.
Brandon Burton 42:32
Very good love podcast. So I know you check out Velma there. And we’ll we’ll get all of that in our show notes to make it easy for people to click and follow yes and learn more about what you have to offer. But I appreciate you spending time with us today. Here on chamber tap podcast, you provided a lot of value, a lot of perspectives. I took a lot of notes, and a lot of good. I don’t want to just say one liners because I think that shortchanges them but those lines that make you think you know and make you kind of look internally a little bit more and a little deeper on the the comments he made today. So thank you for for coming on and sharing that and I really do think you’ve provided a ton of value for us today.
Velma Knowles 43:14
Thank you, and thank you to the listeners and for supporting the Chamber Chat Podcast.
Brandon Burton 43:21
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Brandon Burton 0:00
This is the Chamber Chat Podcast, the show dedicated to chamber professionals to spark ideas and to get actionable tips and strategies to better serve your members and community.
Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your hosts Brandon Burton. And it’s my goal here on the podcast to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community. You’re joining us for a special episode as part of our 2023 ACCE Chamber the Year Finalist Series.
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Brandon Burton 1:44
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Our guest for this episode is Jennifer Vincent. Jennifer is the President of the Cambridge Area Chamber of Commerce in Ohio. She has a associate’s degree from Zane State College holds a license and health and life insurance and has over 15 years of experience in sales and marketing. Jennifer is involved in several local organizations and boards throughout her community. She is a 2019 2020 graduate of leadership and Guernsey. She served as a leadership Guernsey administrator for the 2020 2021 class. She was named president of the chamber in June 2021 and served as leadership Guernsey administrator for the 2021 22 as well. Jennifer’s been married for two bow for 11 years together, they have seven children and three grandchildren. And her spare time she enjoys reading, reading, traveling and spending time with family. But Jennifer, we’re excited to have you with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast, we’d love to give you an opportunity to say hello to all the Chamber Champions that are out there listening and share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you better.
Jennifer Vincent 3:12
Well, thank you for having me. I am happy to be on here. And I feel like all the interesting things about me you already talked about in the in my bio, as you said, in my spare time, which there isn’t a lot of that. But I love to run and a few years ago because of my love of running a friend and myself. We had started a run group. And we were doing things to give back to our community through our run group. And so we ended up turning that group into a nonprofit. And every year we hold race series and do some other events and then give all the money that we raise to local local charities local groups here in Guernsey County.
Brandon Burton 4:06
Nice. That is a that extra step quite literally that you took there. But that’s that’s neat. I like learning these things about people’s they have you on the show. Why don’t you take a few minutes and tell us a little bit about the Cambridge area Chamber just to give us an idea of the size of the chamber type a chamber staff budget, that sort of thing to kind of set the stage for a conversation.
Jennifer Vincent 4:32
Sure. So as you said in my bio, I guess my my story is that I came to the chamber. I officially started in July of 2021 after being named the president in June and our chamber had not had a president serving in this role for 17 months when I took this position And so through a retirement and some other things, and then of course, hate to say it, but COVID That was the reason, you know that we didn’t have someone in this job. So when I, when I came into the chamber, we were the size of it was about 390 and membership. And it was myself and the office manager. The office manager that was here was also in transition, and she was able to get her dream job. So she left right after I took this job. So there was a lot of transitioning going on. I hired a new office manager, I ended up after a year having someone also take over the leadership Guernsey program. So now we are a staff of three. And as of yesterday, we are now a membership of 500. So yeah, yeah, so over the last year and a half plus, I have added 142 new members.
Brandon Burton 6:22
That is fantastic. And that’s a largely what we’ll we’ll spend our discussion on today is the rapid membership growth. So it talks a little bit about the the transition everything going on there at the Chamber before you came in as you came in. But you’ve had a steep learning curve in the short time you’ve been there at the Chamber, but also making a big impact while you’re while you’re learning and getting your feet under you as well so excited to get into this discussion with you and and some of the things you’ve learned along the way as you’ve been doing this and we will dive in deeper in this conversation since we get back from this quick break.
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Brandon Burton 9:49
All right, Jennifer, we’re back. So you kind of set the stage for us as you came into the chamber you were taken over a role that had been vacant for about 17 months. A lot of transition a lot of moving parts, middle of a pandemic, lots of things happening. So as you came on board at the Chamber, I guess what did you see as your first priorities as you came on board in this position?
Jennifer Vincent 10:20
Um, I mean, it’s probably going to sound obvious, but, you know, coming into the job, it was basically just learning who the current members were, and reaching out to them. And, you know, just letting them know that after 17 months, that obviously now there’s someone in in the role, and seeing what it is they needed from the chamber, as well, as, you know, I was I was learning, learning the job, you know, and learning who all the members were. And, you know, my, my intention was not to come in and say, you know, my top goal was not, gosh, I want 500 members. I just wanted to bring everything back together. And again, I know, this is probably obvious to say, but we were in the middle of a pandemic. So there was not a lot of events and a lot of things happening. There were no business after hours. There were no fundraising events, there was no education programs, like there was just nothing going on. And so coming into it, I, you know, wanted to see, okay, what is it, we can get started back? You know, what events? Can we get started again, and have the networking in the community, to just to get everyone back together? So, I mean, that was kind of the first thing I did was, you know, learn who the members were, and what can I do for all of us to be together?
Brandon Burton 12:04
Yeah. So and that’ll, that’ll take you far, just learning who the members are and what you can do to advance the community. And naturally, I would see some, you know, membership uptick anyway, just by having somebody in the position now, you know, giving some attention to it. But as you have had more of a focus effort on building the membership, and and I don’t think you mentioned in the recording 500 is the highest that the membership has ever been there in Cambridge, right?
Jennifer Vincent 12:39
Correct. Yeah. Yeah, that’s, that’s an that’s a new record.
Brandon Burton 12:43
So congratulations there. But as you started to focus your efforts on on building the membership back up, what were those key priorities had to do in the middle of pandemic express the value the, you know, the unique selling proposition that you had to put in front of members or potential members, as he began signing them up?
Jennifer Vincent 13:09
So, you know, as I said it, I guess, my first thing, again, wasn’t that I just, I wanted to hit that goal, you know, so I want to make that clear, I still want the chamber to be here to be that, that voice of business. And you know, it, I guess it, it was kind of like an organic type thing, right? I just when the board hired me, they said, We want you to think outside of the box, we don’t want you to feel like you have to do what the chamber next door does. You just take this and make it yours. And so I started with just simple little things. The when a new member joins the chamber, I would email them, which I still do, but I email them and say, you know, welcome to the chamber, I want to come and see you and bring your plaque and your membership plaque. And I want to get a picture with you. And so we would in the past that, you know, the chamber would take a picture of the member with their plaque and post it on social media. So I wanted to just change it up a little bit. I’m in the picture with them, handing them the plaque. And when I would post their picture on social media, it’s a picture of us together, and I tell what their businesses and what they do and how you can find them and, you know, just give them a little bit of that, you know, five seconds of fame and some advertising. And it kind of took off as far as like you said, I’m also here. So that helped with membership growth, having someone in the position and then the other thing was What I was thinking a couple of months in, you know, these new members, they’re getting time on social media on the chamber page. What are we doing for the members that have been here? 25 years, 50 years, you know, has people forgot that company XYZ joined the chamber 50 years ago? Of course they have. So what can I do for them. So after tossing around a few ideas, I created member of the week, and every Monday at noon on social media, there’s an article that pops up member of the week. And I started that in October of 21. And I’m, I’m very proud to say I’ve never missed a single Monday, including holidays, I still run the article. But what I do with that, I could very easily just email a questionnaire to that business and say, fill it out and send me a picture. But I actually go to the business. So for the last, I can’t do the math, you have to for me, how many weeks that’s been? So it almost two years. Yeah. Yeah, we’re going on almost two years. So for that many weeks, I have made an appointment with a different business before their articles gonna come out on Monday. And I go see them. I spend time with them. I asked them questions, to be able to write that article, I take pictures of their business, I take pictures of them. And every Monday at noon on social media, that article is posted member of the week, and it gives a little story about how they got started, how they think they’re successful, you know, and been able to be in business. 40 years, I’ve met with some businesses, they’ve been in business 100 years, you know, they’re carrying on the family business. Yeah. So I think that helping our community, remember who some of the members are that have been here, our chambers been in existence, 76 years, helping our community remember those members, I think has largely helped our growth as well. It’s, again, it’s just reminding our community who’s here, and who you should be doing business with
Brandon Burton 17:25
right now. And I think that’s a great approach that you’re taking, I love that you spend the time with each of those members to do that membership spotlight member the week. And as you brainstorm or as chambers listening, brainstorm other ideas. It can be made easy for in some sense that, you know, there’s a manufacturer’s week, you know, that’d be a great week to highlight all the manufacturers in your community. There’s no national ice cream day, you know, what members of your community serve ice cream? Yeah, highlight them tell a little story about them. There’s, I think every every day of the year, there’s some national day, you know, or whatever. So play that to your benefit and highlight them and you don’t have to do it that way. But it’s just an idea as you brainstorm and create your content calendar, which you’re going to put out there be intentional about who you’re reaching out to and why. And as Jennifer seen, it draws attention, it shows that value and keeps people engaged and in renewing their membership and bringing up those members that have been around seemingly forever. So get get creative with it. Think outside the box. So there are there other things as you were given that that directive to think outside the box that you explored and maybe things that worked and things that didn’t work even.
Jennifer Vincent 18:51
Um, yeah, so another thing we started doing know a lot of people use the term lunch and learn as a business meeting, whatever, once a month. And I wanted to just again, change the name a little bit change up what we do. So we call it power lunch. And we don’t hold it every month, because I chose to hold it the first week of the month. And we tend to hit a lot of holidays for some reason. So we ended up having power lunch about six times a year. And typically what we do with Power Lunch is the speaker is from a group or organization rather than let’s say, a business trying to advertise for themselves if that makes sense. So for an example, one of our speakers has been the director of the visitors and convention bureau. And now we still have someone sponsor, so The way it works is if you want to be a sponsor of power lunch, then that is a business, right? That’s doing it, you know, for profit. So they sponsor Power Lunch, they get two tickets to come and eat lunch. And they get 10 minutes to talk about their business before the main speaker. And it’s, that’s went very well. For us, too. It’s a smaller type, venue event, we usually have Around 35 people in the place where we hold that lunch and could only have 40. Anyway, so it’s 30, fives kind of that perfect number. And that’s been really successful, because again, it’s helping to highlight the organizations in our community, that maybe we don’t know what they do, or we forgot how much they do for our community. So and then, of course, you know, we, I hate to say it, you put everything on social media, right? You you post about that lunch, and you know, who sponsored it and, you know, make sure they they get their thank yous. And that helps, too, because, again, there’s, there’s just so many organizations that our community doesn’t know why they’re in existence,
Brandon Burton 21:20
right? Yeah. If it’s not on social media, it didn’t happen. No, exactly. Yeah, I like to say that, you know, social media is used to perpetuate what you’re already doing. So it becomes that larger amplifier of your your power lunch to then amplify what you’re doing with the speakers, we’re about, you know who the sponsor was with these. Remember, the week, you know, you’re already doing the interview, you’re talking to people just naturally, you’re going to talk to others about it, but then putting it out on social media amplifies that message, and just makes what you’re doing go a little further. So directly tied back to the membership growth. Is there a process as far as you know, attracting members as far as onboarding the members that you’ve found to be successful for you? I mean, you’ve been, you brought on a lot of members in a short amount of time. So you’re either running ragged, which the chamber chamber executor has been known to do. Or you you may be starting to establish a system of some sort. But where are you at in that that process?
Jennifer Vincent 22:31
I would say it’s definitely the system. Some of the members have come to come to me and said, I see what you’re doing, and I love it. And then the other thing is, if I see a new business announced on social media, I’m reaching out to them immediately. Hey, congratulations on your new business. I see you’re going to be opening soon. I would love to help you with that. What can I do for you? When can we chat? When can we sit down. So I’m reaching out to them, I’m being proactive. And then once I meet with them, you know, I’m talking to them about the benefits. And this is what we can do for you at the chamber. They fill out their application, then the next step is, like I said, I go back and see them at their business. So I want the picture that goes on social media to be myself and the business owner in front of that business that they’re you know, that’s joining, you know, we post that and at that time, I also give them a packet of information. And just tell them, these are the ways you can get involved. Depending on what it is you need from the chamber, and just go over all those things with them again, I don’t ever want to leave them empty handed. I don’t want them to feel like wow, she got my money. I’ll never see her again. So you know, I leave them with a packet of information on how to get involved. And I always tell them, if you’re not sure what you want to do with the chamber, please don’t be afraid to reach back out to me and say, What can I do? I want to advertise more network more. I need insurance, whatever it is, whatever the reason was, I want them to reach out to me. And then after that, we’re I’m reaching out to the members again, you know, another touch point. We’d love to see you at a business after hours, that type thing because again, I just don’t want them to think, Oh, she got her money. She got her application and we won’t see her hear from her until next year when it’s due again.
Brandon Burton 24:45
Right. So I know I think I’ve shared this example once before but I have a friend who’s a he’s a realtor. And as a newer REALTOR at the time he had reached out to me he had just moved to a new community He knew I did the podcast and I worked with chambers. And he’s like, Hey, should I join my local chamber? And like, well, it depends, you know, what are you trying to do? What’s your what’s your goal? What’s your objective? Like? Would you like to get involved at the chamber? You know, see what kind of committees, you know, see what kind of work your chamber is involved with. It’s the old saying, if you’ve seen one chamber, you’ve seen one chamber. But as new members are on boarded, to be able to know what those opportunities are to see, should I join yes or no? and at what level do you want to be involved with, because there’s a lot of ways to be involved. If you want to add, I’d like that you’re spending that time with them and trying to really help them understand the the impact they can have, but also the level of involvement that they get with their membership. That’s a that’s key. Is there anything that you think for, for listeners out there is a focus on membership as a membership isn’t necessarily always the primary focus, but it’s always on your mind? Right? You’re always looking for opportunities. Anything that comes to mind that that other chamber, professionals out there should be thinking of, as they go about recruiting new members.
Jennifer Vincent 26:19
Um, I think that the, the best advices as you’re recruiting the new members, is to also be thinking about what you’re doing day to day or month over month to keep them. You know, you you want to talk to them about joining. But the next question, I’m sure in the back of their mind is okay, I’m joining today. But what, what, what am I going to do with this as we go forward? So what programs do you have that are going to retain them as well? And then, of course, you know, telling them about what you’re doing, is why they will join. And then of course, step two is how you keep them.
Brandon Burton 27:08
Right. And I would encourage anybody to use their membership software to, to put in some of those, those key benchmarks now along their memberships. So if they’ve been in for, you know, two weeks, you know, do they get some kind of an email? Or is that when Jennifer reaches out and schedules, the plaque delivery in the picture and the social media posts, and then a month later, and three months and six months? What are those touch points? Are you making a phone call? Are you sending an email? Are you making a personal visit? Are you having an ambassador go by? Or what are the what are these things to keep these members engaged and fully on boarded in that first year, and, and there’s various membership, software’s can can help you do that, and some of it automating but some of it, just those reminders of, hey, it’s time to reach out to this member and take the next step. So I hope everyone’s leveraging that. Well, as we start to wrap up, Jennifer, I wanted to see if there’s any tips or action items that you might want to suggest for listeners who are looking to take their organization up to the next level, from the things that you’ve learned in your your 18 month sprint, so far, what what stands out to you is some of the things that would really help take an organization to the next level.
Jennifer Vincent 28:27
You know, it’s showing them that, that you care about their business. You know, I gave a lot of I said that I do a lot of things with social media. But the other thing I do is I go to them, I go to their business, whether it’s to talk to them about joining, maybe, I mean, I do everything local, right. shop local, whether it’s using their business for, you know, my things that I need, if just whatever the reason may be that I need to talk to a member. I tried to do it in person. I think that that is something that we have let ourselves get away from. We rely a lot on email and texting. And while that’s a great, maybe first step or second step, I think that the in person, it takes more effort, it takes more time, and the business truly believes that you care about them. If you take the time to go see them, and it’s truly the favorite part of my job. I love I don’t even feel like this is a job. I love what I do. I never get out of bed The morning and not want to come to work. So I love going to see people face to face. It’s my favorite part. And if you incorporate that, in your day to day week over week, having members want to join the chamber is not hard,
Brandon Burton 30:22
right? And what I’ve learned from others is you need to schedule that into your day, because it’s easy for you to schedule it, block it out, and then hold it as an appointment. But nothing beats that personal connection, spending time with somebody and being face to face shaking hands, you know, spending time in their business to show that you care. Yeah. So I like asking everyone I have on the show, as we look to the future of chambers of commerce, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?
Jennifer Vincent 30:58
chambers are we’re, we are still the voice of business, big or small. And I think that chambers are needed even more so in the future. Because not every business is a brick and mortar. We have so many businesses that are that are online. They’re their storefront is not what you drive downtown. You don’t drive past them. So who is their voice? who advertises for them if they don’t do it themselves? And granted, they are doing it, but they need that extra layer. So I see chambers being even more important now than ever.
Brandon Burton 31:46
Yeah. And I think continuing to adapt and stay relevant as you talk about so many businesses doing things online now that, you know, is your chamber equipped to help them with best practices online or to help someone set up a e commerce Store if they have a brick and mortar so they can sell out the back door to? Yeah, where’s your chamber at in that process of being able to stay relevant and help your members and potential members, these businesses in your community to be able to be relevant in a worldwide marketplace these days? Thank you for that, Jennifer, as we come to a close, I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners who want to reach out and connect with you or learn more about this rapid membership growth. You’ve seen there and strategies that you’ve implemented, what would be the best way for someone to reach out and connect?
Jennifer Vincent 32:43
If they want to start with email first, is the easiest. And my email is president@cambridgeohiochamber.com.
Brandon Burton 32:58
Right, well, we’ll get that in our show notes too. And I’m sure Jennifer would welcome in person visits to if you wanted to show up in person and
Jennifer Vincent 33:06
absolutely come to Cambridge.
Brandon Burton 33:09
Spend some money and spend some time in Cambridge? Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Well, Jennifer, I appreciate it. It’s been great having you on the show and sharing your experiences in your your first 18 months or so they’re on the job and you’re making a big impact and learning a lot along the way as well. So thank you for coming on here and sharing some of these things that you’ve learned with us.
Jennifer Vincent 33:32
Thank you for having me.
Brandon Burton 33:33
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Brandon Burton 0:00
This is the Chamber Chat Podcast, the show dedicated to chamber professionals to spark ideas and to get actionable tips and strategies to better serve your members and community.
Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to the Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your host, Brandon Burton. And it’s my goal to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community.
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Becki Womble 1:03
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Brandon Burton 1:44
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Our guest for this episode is Mark field mark is the Senior Vice President and membership at the Knoxville chamber and has been since 2004. Mark oversees investor development and relations events and programming, Marketing and Communications. He previously was the vice president development for the initial group and East Tennessee provider owned Managed Health Care Network. He has over 35 years of experience in sales and marketing. And he’s been very involved with several boards throughout the community as he’s an active member of his community. He is a 2011 graduate of leadership Knoxville he graduated southeast Institute in 2009, past chair of the US Chamber southeast Institute Board of Regents member of the Board of Trustees for the US Chamber Institute. And Mark is married to Vicki he has two step children and seven grandchildren. But Mark I’m excited to have you with us today on chamber chat podcast, I’d love to give you an opportunity to say hello to all the chamber champions that are out there listening and share something interesting about yourself so they can get to know you a little better.
Mark Field 3:09
Yeah, hello everyone. It’s great to be on the podcast. Brandon, thank you so much for the opportunity and I hope everyone’s having a great day. Something entered interesting about me so a lot of people might not know that for about seven years. I was on the competition barbecue circuit. And so I still love to cook barbecue obviously, because of that it got a little bit more time consuming than I had originally anticipated and a little bit more cost prohibitive than I’ve anticipated as as barbecue became more popular and but anyway that’s that’s something that I used to do a little bit of and still like to cook so that’s that’s something that a lot of people don’t know about me.
Brandon Burton 3:55
All right, so I have to ask I’m in Texas now. I spent some time in South Carolina I grew up in California barbecue is different everywhere. What is barbecue like in Tennessee?
Mark Field 4:06
You know our barbecue really kind of takes a lien from from both Kentucky and from Georgia and Memphis you know, we Knoxville Tennessee, you know kind of sits in the middle. A lot of people like the Memphis dry rub for ribs and a lot of people like the more Georgia sweet and tangy style for their pull pork sauces, so and then of course the great vinegar by sauce from Kentucky and and North Carolina are at you know, have a big influence here as well. So we’re a little bit of a melting pot on what kind of barbecue people lack in this region.
Brandon Burton 4:39
Yeah, you get the best of all of it. I didn’t hear any brisket in there, but you know, you get the best of
Mark Field 4:44
you know, it’s kind of funny. Granted, the very first brisket I cooked was a cross between what I would say a hockey puck and a conveyor belt. But But I learned I learned and so now it’s pretty good and I don’t I really don’t like any sauce on my bread. Should I really dislike my brisket? I’m a purist on that. Yeah,
Brandon Burton 5:05
we may need to talk offline. I’ve got a good Brianna rub. So well tell us a little bit more about the Knoxville chamber just to give us an idea of size, staff budget scope of work, things you’re involved with, just to kind of give us an idea of if to set the table for our discussion.
Mark Field 5:20
Yeah, gosh, the Knoxville chamber has been around since 1869. We’re old organization, old established organization, our community started as an actual board of trade. You know, and, and I would say just like any chamber, we’ve we’ve been through a lot of evolution. You know, do very well in our community have about 1900 investors. You know, our penetration rate, I’m gonna say somewhere around 10 to 15% of the businesses in our marketplace, with so for a large community that’s about standard for the industry, I think. We have 27 employees, some interns and some fellows, as well. So around 30 folks in the office, on and off, we do economic development, as well as Investor Services, investor relations. And we also have the downtown Knoxville Association. And we have the US Department of Commerce and our Tennessee small businesses wellness center all in one office. So there’s about 50 of us in the office. But chamber wise, we’re at about 30. associates.
Brandon Burton 6:28
All right. Well, there’s plenty of work there to keep those 30 Associates busy. So there really
Mark Field 6:34
are our budgets around $5 million. All in so that that’ll give you an idea.
Brandon Burton 6:39
Yeah, no, that’s great. So as we settled in on a topic for our discussion today, we wanted to focus on how the Knoxville chamber went from being more of a membership organization to more of a driver of community economics. So we will dive in much deeper into this conversation and the how that happened and what things look like now as soon as we get back from this quick break.
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Brandon Burton 10:06
All right, Mark, we’re back. So as I mentioned before the break, we’re talking today about how the Knoxville chamber went from being a more of a traditional membership organization, to more of a driver of community economics. So tell us kind of what that evolution looked like, obviously, we know what a kind of a traditional chamber looks like and see them all over the country. But what was that signal that said, if we need to get involved with more important work than just membership and business structures?
Mark Field 10:37
Well, I will tell you, Brandon, three years ago, we got a new CEO, our CEO, retired, and they did a national search. And they landed on Mike Odom, from the Round Rock chamber in Texas who had that previous year had one chamber of the year in their category. And Mike was a bright young chamber professional that was really the guy for the job, no, no question about it. Mike came in and took about six months and went around, met with about 200 stakeholders in our community and, and asked for real candid feedback from them about, you know, what does the chamber do in our community? You know, what should we be doing? What kind of value do we really deliver to you as an organization that invests with us or considers itself a member and you know, where’s Knoxville, in their opinion, in its evolution of growth and success from an economic perspective, and came back and set our senior leadership team down. And I gotta tell you, the notes weren’t pretty. There were a lot of folks that were confused about our purpose. They were confused about exactly what they got from their investment with us. There were a lot of people that said, you know, we think you’re a good organization, you have a good staff, we know you’re doing some good things, but we can’t really put our finger our mind on exactly what it is that drives the economy going forward, and what you do specifically for our business, now, we did have a lot of small businesses that said they enjoyed our networking events and our our education oriented Vance, those kinds of things, but, but the the folks that drive the community, the larger stakeholders, the banks, the health systems, those kinds of folks were, were really confused about our mission, and purpose going forward. So we sat in the room for several hours and talked about that, what were we gonna do, Mike made a statement that I think kind of shocked all of us. And that was that he believed everybody in the Knoxville region deserved an equitable opportunity to be prosperous. And that basically means get a job, have a job available, if you want, why, and it’s really driven around that. Get an education, put your kids through school, have a have an affordable place to live, be able to get from place to place to do what it is you need to do. All those quality of life issues. Now we know that people are all people aren’t going to take advantage of that. But But certainly, it should be available to them. And they may ask the question that really catalyzed to get to your point, what what changed us as an organization? And he said, can anybody tell me what that has to do with membership. And when he said that, you know, I’ve been doing this for 20 years now. And for 16, or 17 of those years, it was all about membership. For me, I was a membership guy, I was all about features and benefits, I was all about the events, all about trying to figure out how to drive more features and benefits to our members. But when he said that it resonated with all of us. And I gotta tell you, it was a real catalystic moment for all of us to realize that if you’re a small business in our community, it really doesn’t matter if you’re a minority business, or are you just have one employee or two employees or whatever else it may be can’t afford and or don’t feel comfortable being a part of a big membership organization like ours, you still deserve to have the support you need to be successful in our community. And so it’s really not about membership. And so we transitioned at that point over time, over about a 18 month period of time, away from being a membership organization, to an investment oriented oriented organization that really deliver service to any business in our community that needs it. So whether it’s a small minority business, or whether it’s a large business, we don’t ask you to invest with us to help you. We say what do you need us to do? What are issues that you’re dealing with? Let us weigh into them, think about them that figure out what we can do about them if it is something we need to be involved in. And then we rely on people in our community and our businesses in our community to invest in that work. And so that’s been the transition And that we’ve made very successfully over the last three years into being more of an economic driver and economic development oriented organization, our community versus a membership organization.
Brandon Burton 15:14
That is a bold step, right? I mean, as you look at the structure of a chamber, so much of the financing is based on your membership, and if you say, let’s step away from membership, and the structure can kind of be similar, going from membership to investors, but just that approach of what’s in it for me as the member, you know, versus you guys going and saying, Let us help you what are the things you need, and then asking them to invest back in the community to be able to help others to be able to find that that equal opportunity to be prosperous,
Mark Field 15:45
I would be lying to you, Brandon, if I didn’t say I was the one person that in this organization that had been here the longest in on the membership side, obviously, that was not really excited about it, to be honest with you, I mean, it, it scared me it it, I was fearful that it might not be received, and that the communication of it would not be received as well as we had hoped it would. But I couldn’t have been farther from the truth. In that fear, in that our community did realize that there were things in our community that needed work that we weren’t focusing on as a chamber. And frankly, no one else in the community was we’re talking about attracting the right kind of talent to our region, keeping the college graduates in our community, affordable housing. Skilled let you know, making sure our high schools and our community colleges were turning out the right kind of skilled labor to meet the needs of the businesses in our community. broadband access. During the pandemic, we found out that there were 6000 households that had children in them in Knoxville, that did not have broad but had no access to broadband access. And so that’s unacceptable, you know, reading and, and lesson planning and doing the coursework they needed to do in the hybrid environment, our school system went to, it’s unacceptable. So those are not things that the Chamber historically were ever involved in. And all of those things are front and center with us.
Brandon Burton 17:23
Right. So I think for a lot of businesses, like you mentioned, they would maybe appreciate the chambers, they are a good organization do good work, couldn’t put a finger on it. But they might think of the chamber as networking, ribbon cuttings, you know, that forward facing work that you see chambers do all the time. So talk to us more about the messaging of how you went from changing from that traditional view of what a chamber is, to more of this more important kind of mission driven work?
Mark Field 17:53
Well, I, you know, I think the thing that that I was most fearful of is, you know, how will that messaging be accepted? And, you know, are we doing it in the right way. And there was no better way during the pandemic, as we were making this transition, then to get on the Zoom, and have conversations with people. And that’s what Mike had done. You know, he went out and met with those two other stakeholders. And so the pandemic offered us this really great opportunity for people to take a few minutes out of their day and get on Zoom. And us have those conversations with them about transitioning away from this event oriented features and benefits oriented chamber, to an organization focused on things that prac practically no one in our community was, was thinking enough about, and to talk with them through it. So not really just push message down to them, which which in the past was our, our more of our model, right sentiment, email sentiment newsletter. But this was more of that one on one. Hey, don’t you think everybody in our community deserves an equitable opportunity to be prosperous? Will you admit it’s hard to find employees where you admit your employees are having trouble finding affordable housing? Will you admit that there are the economics in our community are not growing at the rate it should, we need more high wage talent, we need more entrepreneurial activity. We need more of our bigger businesses doing business with the vendors that are currently in our marketplace. All of those things as we talked about them and had a conversation, you know, resume. And so what I was fearful of is that that that one way communication that we were so accustomed to, would not be effective. But what we found out was is we didn’t have to worry about that because we decided to have conversations with people. And in those conversations, the message resonated.
Brandon Burton 19:58
Right. Yeah, we Those one way conversations often don’t even get opened or read.
Mark Field 20:05
Our open rates are in the 30% range. Right? So 30% of the people are hearing the message on average. So
Brandon Burton 20:12
so as you do have those one on one conversations with with your members or investors now, do you get some of the feedback that they want some of that traditional chamber stuff, still some of the networking some of the events that you guys traditionally involved with? Did you totally cut them out? Are there things that you still maintain?
Mark Field 20:30
Yeah, you know, I think they would like to have both. You know, and we talk a lot about the the, the difficulty of being able to manage a staff that needs to do research work and needs to be boots on the ground on these affordable housing issues, and these tax issues and these talent issues, versus having three or four people inside an organization, the size of hours working on the bands. And so we just have to have just as a business, you know, I’ve had this conversation 1000 times, as a business owner, you have to decide what are we going to focus on. And we just don’t feel comfortable right now doing both. Now, in the future, may we do a little more events than we’re currently doing. And we still do events, they’re just around, the educational type events are around those ecosystem issues. Now, we’re talking about affordable housing, we’re talking about talent attraction, trying to give employees help in regard to how to attract employees, and how to retire. But the traditional things, the networking type events, we just don’t do anymore. We we don’t do any morning coffees, we don’t do any business after hours. We hope that people will network around these educational issues when we bring them together. But yeah, I mean that we had some negative folks that felt like, you know, this is just not what I want, for my best mentor from our membership. And, and we have certainly lost some of those smaller businesses. But what we have done is we have offset that investment, by great measure with those organizations that historically were never members. And I did that in quotes, air quotes, members of the organization in the past against small manufacturing facilities, you know, research and development companies, those kinds of companies don’t have the time and never came to chamber events and therefore weren’t members, those kinds of companies are investing in our organization heavily. And when I say heavily, it’s not unusual. And not Not to brag to be very factual, it’s not unusual for us to go meet with a small manufacturing facility just did that two days ago, who had never been a member of the chamber, and never saw the value of that features and benefits model who gave us $5,000, as an investor, toward the work we’re trying to accomplish, because it affects his business in a great way. So that’s, so I have less $500 members, which is our lowest tier, and I have more members, and I always say hi, and but I would say have more small or less than 50 employed businesses that historically weren’t Chamber members now invested in the organization.
Brandon Burton 23:26
I love that that answers that question I was going to have as far as the funding goes, because he’s step away from that traditional stuff. And a lot of those are moneymakers as non dues revenue generators. So stepping away from, you know, having a bunch of the $500 members to more of those mission focused members that really are investing in the work that you’re doing is is a big part of it. What other I guess from the budget finance side, how else are you guys funding the work that you’re doing? And beyond the membership?
Mark Field 23:59
Again, the majority of that funding is coming now from, you know, from targeted funding. So we, you know, for instance, we have had some folks come to us and say, Look, I’m investing x with you is what I consider my membership dues, my investments, right? And we don’t we call them investments. Now, as I said, not semantically, it’s it, they really are investing in our work not being a member, because, you know, that’s just not our model. But we’ve had a lot of them come and say, you know, my company has a foundation, or are I’m really interested in this certain project that you guys are involved in. And I want to give you some additional funding toward that targeted project. We didn’t do that before. You know, we didn’t we normally you know, we would do sponsorships, right. But but we didn’t have companies come to us and say, Hey, I really feel strongly about this project you’re doing to increase digital literacy in our menorah A community and help them get broadband access and give them access to Chromebooks so that they can find a job and help their kids with their lessons. I really liked that. So I know I’m giving you $5,000 As my investment. But here’s another $5,000 to put into that project. We, that’s a new happening for us, right? It’s it. We didn’t used to have a lot of people come in our office or call us and say, Hey, I’d like to give you more money. Yeah, it just didn’t happen. But because of the mission work, and because of the projects that we’re involved in, that that is happening. And it’s refreshing. I mean, it’s people want to spend the dollars that they’ve made in their business, that have leadership capacity in their organizations, they want to see the community get, and they want to see those economic issues resolved. And so it’s it’s been, it’s been good to see that that kind of, and we still, we still do some signature events, we still do our our annual awards for the best businesses in our community. We call them the pinnacle Business Awards, we still do endeavor, which is our young professional Summit, where we bring them together to understand what’s going on in the community, and how, what what an important role they play. We stood up still do peel and eaten and politic in, which is our shrimp boil political advocacy event. So we still do those big we have for signature events that we did. And we still have sponsorships. But now our sponsorship model is an umbrella sponsorship over one of these ecosystem issues. So we have hired issues that that they can sponsor and they sponsor, anything that happens in that if we release a white paper, their names on it, if we do a an event, their names on it, if we have a speaker, their names on. So we have those five ecosystem umbrella sponsors now. And so that that has, again offset some of that business after hours, morning coffees, education, small education, small business education stuff,
Brandon Burton 27:14
right now. That’s great. So this work that you guys are involved with now, it’s big work, it’s important work that needs to be addressed. And it was being ignored largely. And you guys have stepped in and really taken ownership on that. So that’s a big responsibility. Because if things don’t happen, now, the fingers pointing back to you, right, as an organization. So my question is, what, what sort of touch points are you having with your investors throughout the year so they can see the work you’re involved with? A lot of times these advocacy type topics are kind of hard to see that, you know, movement happening, because it doesn’t happen overnight. Right. It’s a lot of the research and, and things like that, like you had mentioned. So how do you keep your investors apprised as to the progress of the work?
Mark Field 28:02
A couple of ways. And again, this was new for me. So I’d been at the Chamber 1617 years before my came along. And so we have issued six white papers. In the last three years, we had never issued a white paper before, we had never taken a solid stance on an issue in our community. Even politically, we always tried to ride the fence like a good chamber work, right. And so we’ve issued white papers around some of these economic issues, the most recent being transitioning the Knoxville economy into the innovation and digital age, which talks about things like high wage talent, more entrepreneurialism, more, more and better civic furniture, you know, more things for to attract young professionals to our region, and high growth companies research and development, life sciences, biosciences, those kind of things. So anyway, so we issued those white papers. And we, you know, obviously, a lot of people don’t want to read white papers, but so usually when we will, on our touchpoints, with with our investors, whether it’s through our newsletter, or just our emails or whatever else, we usually will mention, have you read? Do you know, maybe a lot of Do you know, kind of stuff? Did you realize that in our region, we only retained in the last 10 years 4% of people in the 25 to 54 H group and Do you realize what kind of effect that has on our economy? So a lot of that kind of, I guess what I would call attention getting statements about Were you aware that these things are happening in the community that again, you know, a lot of people you talk to in our community or so what’s your I would not Knoxville is a great community. We got a great college. We’re actually winning in football. Now, you know what’s wrong when Doc’s? Well, the reality is, is we’re not growing at the pace of some of our peers, and we don’t have the the economics that we should have for a community our size and with the assets we have. So we’re looking at Raleigh and we’re looking at Greenville, South Carolina we’re looking at at Tulsa, we’re looking at places like that, who has had that high wage talent and, and high growth companies located there. So So those to answer your question, I mean, we, we ask provocative questions that, that make them look at some of that information we provide to them. We do a lot more roundtable discussions now than we ever did. It’s where we’re bringing in different parts of the community together to I guess, you could say debate, those issues middle, we have become more of a convener where we shine the bright bot spotlight on an issue and and then bring people in that affect it, and collaborate and partner with them. Brandon, in this new world we live in the hardest part of our jobs, is figuring out, do we lead on an issue? Do we follow on an issue? Do we collaborate? Do we get out of the way? On someone that’s doing it well, and just promote them? That that’s a new role for us. But you know, I think Mick talked about this in the horizon initiative with ACCE, you know, chambers really can and shouldn’t be the conveners. With all the social political fragmentation in communities, certainly we have our share of that. And so we now can become that place. And that organization that says, we should be thinking about this, now we can figure it out together. But the fact of the matter is, this is an issue, and we’ve got to deal with
Brandon Burton 31:56
it. Right. Now that addresses it. Well, and as you talk about how you have those touch points was brought to questions as thought provoking questions, I guess, I see, you can leverage that in several different ways, right through through newsletter, through an email through a video posts through a social media posts, you’re able to, those are great. I hate using the word teaser, but it gets people interested, right, it provokes their interests where they want to learn more, they want to dive in a little deeper. So I appreciate you sharing some of those examples of how you’re helping to stimulate that discussion further. I wanted to ask you, if for those listening, what kind of tip or action item might you have for those listening who want to take their chamber up to the next level?
Mark Field 32:44
You know, the greatest lesson learned, you know, we were doing well as a chamber financially. Prior to this, this shift. You know, I think our community is better now, for us having made the shift in a big way. But that was all catalyzed around listening to our stakeholders. And and you can’t really survey him. You know, we do surveys, I’m not saying that you don’t survey, but you can’t use like a, what I would call the old traditional memberships are by what do you want? What should we do more? What should we not do any, because I don’t think people can have that candid conversation with you about what the real issues that they’re dealing with are. And people are not going to sit down and take 30 or 45 minutes on a survey and get the entire essay top paragraphs for you. I would just say a really strong tip to any SAS chain, whether you’re making the shift or not, is to go on a listening tour. And sit down and have open candid conversations with their stakeholders. And be willing to accept that feedback and make decisions based on that, as opposed to sitting in the office in the ivory tower, so to speak, and make decisions based on what you think your knowledge base or your experience tell you. I will tell you I couldn’t be I couldn’t have been further wrong. In my perception of what we were delivering to the community and the value of it, then what we heard and call it fall on the sword or whatever else you want to call it. I’m glad that we heard the news we heard because I think our community’s better now, having realized that we probably weren’t as effective in our community as we should.
Brandon Burton 34:52
Yeah, that’s big to admit that to that.
Mark Field 34:57
It was tough. Yeah, yeah, I can imagine A lot of what I call weeping and gnashing of teeth are
several months, right? What do you mean? We’re not doing it? Right? What do you mean? I don’t like it? What do you mean that appreciate it. But again, I mean, you know, your customers, you know, a lot of really great organizations, Apple being probably the lead that we all recognize, listen to their customers and give their customers what they want.
Brandon Burton 35:23
And I’ll say the surveys, you don’t need to scrap them all together. That might be the big one initiates that listening tour, it gives you that focus on who to go listen to first. And maybe it’s those people that aren’t responding to the surveys. Maybe they’re the ones who need to go listen to first.
Mark Field 35:38
Yeah, I think the people that we have been the most surprised by are people that were never engaged with us, that that have given us really good ideas, given us investment, have been more engaged in this new model that we have. That that’s been a really pleasant surprise is to see plant managers and owners of small manufacturing businesses weigh in and become more a part of what we’re trying to
Brandon Burton 36:07
accomplish. Right. Now. That’s great. So I like asking everyone I have on the show about how do you see the future of chambers of commerce and their purpose going forward?
Mark Field 36:19
Well, you know, I think, again, the horizon initiative that came out several years ago that MC was instrumental in in, you know, getting together, and that Sheri Ann has, has certainly continued to press on all of us that it’s important to look at what the future looks like. I would simply say there are a lot of ways that people can engage with chambers and membership organizations, and receive the kind of benefits that that we have driven to them in the past, whether it’s, again, small business education, or whether it’s networking events, and things like that. Those can be duplicated by other organizations. What can’t be duplicated, is finding out what the real core economic issues in your community are, and doing research and trying to figure out how to convene the people that can fix those that is unique for every community, what’s a problem in Knoxville may not be a problem in Chattanooga. And there, they may intersect. And if they do, then you have collaborative opportunities to learn. But I would just simply say the future for us is chambers, and I’m on the backside of it. Surely, the future for us as chambers is to listen, and to understand our marketplaces better, and affect them in a real way. As opposed to just throwing some features and benefits and services at a and calling that a day.
Brandon Burton 37:49
Yeah, gone are the days to be in a cookie cutter organization where what you’re doing is good for everybody. You need to listen and customize and, and really be willing to pivot you know, if your work isn’t resonating any more with the needs in your community, take a look at where you do need to be involved. Thank you for for that insight. So as we finish up here, Mark, I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for those listening who might want to reach out and learn more about how the Knoxville chamber went through this transition, and especially those who may have a little cold feet, it would be the best way for them to reach out and connect.
Mark Field 38:28
Yeah, and I would say you know, for us, it was about a two year process so it wasn’t quick. So I would just encourage you to go to Knoxville chamber.com There’s a lot of information about what we’re doing there. And those white papers exists there. And you can see how we’re trying to drive information and, and resources for our businesses on our website. I certainly am happy to have this conversation in more depth or around specific issues and so you can reach me obviously at mfield@knoxvillechamber.com. And I’m happy to you know, again send you any kind of printed material that we may have or or give you any conversation opportunities that you might need to help clarify and look forward to hearing from folks.
Brandon Burton 39:18
That’s great. And now I’ll get your your email and the Chamber website in our show notes for this episode so people can check that out and reach out and connect with you. But Mark I really appreciate you spending some time with us today here on chamber tap podcast. And in really this transition you guys have made is really something that chambers all over should be looking at. I’m not going to say they shall do it because every community is a little different. But they should be taking a look at what is the the important work you’re involved with and are you still being relevant. And this is a great example of that. So thank you for for sharing that with us today. I really appreciate it.
Mark Field 39:55
Right and I appreciate that appreciate your your podcast. You know we learn from each other That’s the best way for us to learn is to learn. We don’t there’s no sense of us all having to make the same mistakes over and over again and, and certainly I’ve learned from so many great chamber professionals and your podcast is another great way to learn from Greg chamber professionals operation.
Brandon Burton 40:15
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Brandon Burton 0:00
This is the Chamber Chat Podcast, the show dedicated to chamber professionals to spark ideas and to get actionable tips and strategies to better serve your members and community.
Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to the Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your host, Brandon Burton. And it’s my goal here on the podcast to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community.
Our title sponsor is Holman Brothers Membership Sales Solutions. Let’s hear from Kris Johnson, President and CEO of the Association of Washington Business in Washington State to learn how Holman Brothers has provided value for him.
Kris Johnson 0:41
Well, Doug and Bill at the Holman Brothers have been a key ally in growth for my professional career working at three different chambers, a local chamber, a regional chamber, now a statewide chamber. And they’ve been the ideal solution, whether it’s a comprehensive training program, whether it’s working on individual sales growth, quarterly check-ins with the team, the ability to grow members has meaning more assets for the organization, more assets means we can do more things to serve our members. They’ve really been the perfect solution for us, a trusted resource partner and a growth partner for us all along the way. So hats off to Doug and Bill for their great success. They’ll be a great partner for you as they are for us.
Brandon Burton 1:23
You can learn more about Holman Brothers Membership Sales Solutions by visiting holmanbros.com.
Our guest for this episode is Ronnie Russell. Ronnie is an active duty retired infantry men from the United States Army with 22 years of service. He’s been deployed to Iraq twice and Bosnia once and has been awarded the Bronze Star, the Meritorious Service Medal Joint Service Achievement Medal and numerous Army Commendation Medals. He’s also a former infantry drill sergeant at Fort Benning, Georgia, where he has dedicated countless hours to training American sons. In 2010. Ronnie was nominated for the NAACP Service Award, and was the 32nd, recipient of the blacks and government Award. He is also co founder of the Texas Black Pages, a black business directory that represents 254 counties. He currently serves as the president of the Innovation Black Chamber of Commerce in Greater Fort Hood, Texas area.
Ronnie, I’m excited to have you with us today on Chamber Chat Podcast, I’d love for you to take a moment to say hello to all the chamber champions and share something interesting about yourself so you can get to know you a little bit better.
Ronnie Russell 2:37
So, again, thank you. And I appreciate the platform itself and for everybody to know and understand Cambridge business, dedicated business. So for some time ago, I was trying to figure out, like the why, because the area where we are at the Greater Fort Hood area where we’re dead center between Waco and Austin. But there was no economic representation in the Killeen Fort Hood area. So of course, I’m going out, I’m going to other chambers asking them like, can you bring a satellite chamber in our city? And I did that for a while, but then I was like, like, why am I gonna ask someone to do something that I have the ability to do myself. So I say that to say, programs that your city don’t have created, resources that your city might not have, go out and find it, and bring it into the city. So just keep looking, keep striving keep adjusting, then everything is gonna work out.
Brandon Burton 3:44
And I love that you just took control. And did it reminds me of that quote from Gandhi, you know, to be the change that you want to see in the world. So nobody else is doing it, then, you know, take it on and be the change yourself. So tell us a little bit about the innovation Black Chamber just to give us an idea of, you know, scope of work, the size, the number of members budget, that sort of thing, just to kind of give us an idea and perspective where you’re coming from before we get into our discussion today.
Ronnie Russell 4:15
All right, so the innovation Black Chamber of Commerce was launched in 2019. February 16. Two weeks later, COVID hit so we’re locked in the storm. But we weathered the storm. And that was the great thing about it because at the time, you know, a lot of organ bladder, other organizations, especially the more senior Chamber organizations, they were in in person meetings and meet and greets and whatever it is, but it took time for those to transition into the digital aspect. And we started digital. So because we started digital, we started creating workshops. We started developing new systems from the digital aspect. So we were, like the formalities of how and who we are. As a people, we’ve always gone to in person. But the hybrid is something new. So because we started digital, and now we’re at with the in person, hybrid is a development of pulling people in that haven’t seen faces in a long time, and allowing those who are not comfortable with getting in front of physical, a physical audience to keep them safe. So we develop through that time. We’ve been averaging at least 86 members a year just just growing and expanding and developing. Um, the reason why we’re called the innovation Black Chamber of Commerce, because we didn’t want to get fixed into the constitution and bylaws in restricting us by staying in the city of Killeen, because it allows us to move as fast or as slow and develop and grow into other outlying areas that do not have a demographic representation of a Black Chamber of Commerce. So we have members in Killeen, of course, Fort Hood, Parker, hi, Temple, Belton. We’re out Copperas Cove huddle, Round Rock, Georgetown, because those cities that are major within population, and rich within resources don’t have didn’t have and still don’t have a Black Chamber representation. So it allows us to maneuver in that space. So we’re as fluid as possible without the restrictions of, of the city, or county line. But we’ve grown considerably, I think the first year our budget was only like, honestly, like 25 27,000, because we were we were digital. So it wasn’t that
Brandon Burton 7:03
we didn’t have the rent and everything and all that.
Ronnie Russell 7:07
Correct. So then the budget second year, changed to maybe about 5055. Because now we were buying more things and developing more assets and digital assets as well. I do a lot of stuff. I’m a creative, I built the website, I do all the graphics, I do all of the marketing, I create everything that is needed. Like even the NFT that we develop, I did all the r&d and in bringing that to fruition. So I’m just blessed to have the ability to create where a lot of other chambers who don’t have that, that marketing in house, they have to pay that. And now it’s an expense. I don’t have those expenses of marketing, because I do it myself because I’m social media certified, as well as meta certified as well. My next certification I want Google, but a lot of that stays in house, but we were blessed. And in in the transition into our third year. Now we we I think we, the 990 has data like 108 108,000 hours, okay, and it’s just, it’s just the beginning for me. And knowing what we have. Now we have 251 members, we just we have we got a bank that we just been developing with. And last year, they put in like $2.5 million into our membership with over 750,000 in deposits and transfers into the bank, they just been doing a phenomenal job with helping us out. We’re kind of a hybrid. And I say that to say we have a lot of community engagement, as well as a lot of business development. At the same time, because we have to speak the language of the community by also understanding that we have to advocate for the business community and bring in and pull in those resources at the same time because in our area, we don’t have a CDFI at all. The closest CDFI of people fund and lift fund and Texas mezzanine as well as what’s the other one? I forgot the other one but those CDFIs we don’t have. So I have to go out like now I’m in Austin right now after go out of our way to find the non traditional funding resources and bring them back in into the city so it’s I’m not gonna call it hard work. It’s it’s a worthwhile journey. Yeah, that that I don’t believe how As a final destination, but we will always be reshaping reforming. And we’re going into changing out membership now because, you know, we hit our third year. So we’re bringing in new board members, the the, the original board members, some of them are transitioning up through the advisory board why we bring in new blood membership is changing. Seats, the our EDC is changing seat. So we’re just just growing and developing and reshaping our corps.
Brandon Burton 10:38
That’s awesome. It’s great to have that perspective. Congratulations on year over year doubling your budget. Yeah, hopefully they have clips going in the foreseeable future. So as we have Rodney on the podcast today, we’re going to be focusing our conversation around the utility that chambers can find within NF T’s Ronnie had mentioned to kind of drop that in there as he was talking about it about the chamber that we will dive deeper into that discussion as soon as we get back from this quick break.
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All right, Ronnie, we’re back. So I know I mentioned this to you before we hit record but for everybody listening, the way this kind of developed is I’m part of a small mastermind group of you know, a couple other people that service the chamber industry. And as we were meeting one evening, I was kind of sharing my vision with them of how I see chambers embracing, you know, chambers, the future embracing NFT technology for whether it be for membership or ticket sales or access essentially, a lot of times people think of NF T’s as being you know, eight images and stuff on these blockchain networks. And I think there’s so much more utility to NF T’s that chambers of Congress can really get behind and whenever you look at a an NFT project, they always talk about building a community around that project. And like you know, bingo, you know, lights went off for me and then chambers are all about building communities. So how do we integrate these two chambers of commerce in fts. And while we’re in this mastermind meeting, one of the members of our group did a little Google search for chambers and NFT. And, and Ronnie pops up that the innovation Black Chamber they have incorporated and NFT for ticket sales. So Ronnie, tell us about how that came to be, and how you went about the development of the NF T and maybe a little bit of background. So for those listening who may not be familiar with what an NF t is just to kind of bring them up to speed real quick before you dive in.
Ronnie Russell 15:37
Right? So for me, again, I wanted to be innovative in an in our approach. But in being innovative in the approach, you have to create something new and you have to create something different. So let me read to you what the NFT is, it’s first of all, just to make sure that everybody knows because a lot of times we see it as we’re more afraid of the early adoption of it. And because we’re afraid of the early adoption, then we don’t feel like it’s something that it’s something that that like we can be a part of. So NFT is a non fungible token, which means that it is unique and can’t be replaced. It is the physical is a contrast physical money and cryptocurrency. So the cryptocurrency space is, is volatile. I mean it goes up, it goes down, it goes up, it goes down. But the one thing that makes that make your NFT different is it will always have value. So what we did with ours, which we actually launched it last year, because we have a we have Texas Black Business Week, which is every second year I mean every second week of February, every year like we’ve been doing it because originally Texas Black Business Week was Texas black pages. And when when I when I launched the chamber I yielded over two IVCC because I didn’t want to compete with my own in my own city with my own events why yielded over so what we did with it when we created the NF t. So I found someone because being with Texas blank page, we have over 17,000 businesses listed within a directory. So I found a SaaS company that also build in our T. So I reached out and told him what I wanted and wanted to create a ticket item. So what happens with your ticketed item, you have to have several other platforms with metamath as well as open seat. So meta mask is where you’re going to have your cryptocurrency storage and you have to have a digital wallet. So that’s your grinder wallet. Right? Correct. Correct. And then you’re going to have to go to open sea and create that account for your crypto wallet to send the money to as well as when people buy it. So what happens is, let’s say you and your organization create the cryptocurrency non fungible token the NFT he created early adoption. So when our our opening ceremony for the Business Week, we gave away 10 fungible tokens. Well, once they give away, we have complimentary, complimentary 10 fungible token. So now that creates the early adoption, because a lot of people want to receive something that they didn’t have to pay for. So the early adopters really begin at that time. So then we did the early adopters, because we created 100 of them. So through the early adoption, we got people to want to go and find out and do research, what NFT was, and how is it beneficial for them. So the NFT that they’ve gotten at no cost to them, already had $100 value on it. So now, that $100 value for them, they got it at no cost. So then what happens is they want to go and buy more. So you as your organization, and when people purchase those NFPs they’re getting money. I mean, you’re receiving income from it. But now it holds value on there, and it’s kind of like buying stocks and bonds, but then when you buy it and then however the market fluctuates, then the value increase, but your cryptocurrency holds a much more stronger baseline with the value of it. So it just helps you out a whole lot more. Now we haven’t transitioned into the website of having a crypto platform where you can get your MBA estimate of your membership by purchasing your your membership through cryptocurrency. But we wanted to do it with events just to test the market. So if you’re thinking about going into the NFP perspective, figure out how are you going to do the early adoption? Because the early adoption is going to get people interested in learning more about what cryptocurrency is, and then you as an organization, you begin to figure out how is it going to benefit you in the organization as well, because because you’re a 501, C three, and they’re right there, they’re purchasing these products. Now they want to write it off, but the value still stays. They can write it off, but it’s still worth 100 hours. So they didn’t lose anything. Yeah,
Brandon Burton 20:40
no, that’s a that’s a neat perspective. And I love how you guys really focused on a trial with a specific event to see, you know, to build out the technology, see how it works. Go about educating your members about it. That’s uh, one of the hurdles that I see is with chambers adopting NFT technology is educating their membership base. So did you take any special steps to educate with this event? Did you just do NFT tickets? Or did you have traditional ticket sales two, sorry, two questions. And one, they’re
Ronnie Russell 21:18
both, we actually did both. So what we did is, of course, here we have the tangible ticket, and the non tangible tickets, of course, which is the NFL, the NFL, the non fungible token. So we tokenized our tickets. I’m gonna say that, again, you tokenize our tickets through the NRP, which is the non fungible token. And what we did was, we had the company that created the NFP itself, actually have them host, a Digital Workshop on Zoom, to get people to be much more educated on what the NFC was. So then the individual that won those non fungible tokens, then we had an additional workshop because they had to show them how they bow to receive it. Because once you receive once you want the NFT, you have to now be able to receive it. So I had to go in, get the go into open See, get the alphanumeric code, and then take that code and then send it to your account. So one, because you want that doesn’t necessarily mean that the work is over with no, you still have to download metamath, you still have to download and create an open sea account in order for me to thin your new cryptocurrency or your new NFT to you in order for it to digitally show up in their in their open sea.
Brandon Burton 22:57
So for those listening, so meta mask is going to be your crypto wallet that you use to receive these the NFT. In exchange crypto, it’s your storage, your wallet, that’s where you host these digital assets. Open see is more of that marketplace, right? Where you can post the NF T’s for sale. And there’s also an aftermarket right for NF Ts. So with this specific NFT that you guys created, is it good for the one event? Is it good for future events to how does it retain its value after the one after the event that you sold them for?
Ronnie Russell 23:37
Again, as cryptocurrencies so the value stays. So we can either repurpose it, or we can keep it as is because right now when you go to Open see you type in innovation, Black Chamber of Commerce, you’re going to see the hologram ticket that was created. So say this year, we’ll say this year during Black Business Week at the launch, we say now we’re going to offer a minted non fungible token from last year. So now the value is going to increase because last year’s price is not today’s price when you when you look at it, so you can just repurpose it and do the same thing. Or instead of doing a complimentary because the education has already been there. So now you can say today’s value, even do a silent auction silent auction with the NFT. So and then again, it’s going to gain more money from the donations of it. So now the winner again, they get the same thing as everybody else who did it with a complimentary service, because they’ve seen it before they understand it now. Well they have a knowledge base about it. So then if another way to do it because even to what you’re selling oxygen because it’s an NF t you take it in Put it on a big screen TV. And it you know in a rotates and everybody see you get the oohs and ahhs and stuff like that. So now through the silent auction of NF T’s, you’re going to make money. And again, in the person that purchased that NF T, they’re going to then take that whole purchase that purchase order that they’ve gotten from the NFT. And they’re gonna write that off. So you’re gonna get money from the silent auction, and they’re going to have a NFT, that they’re going to have value. So now another thing that I want you to know, when they purchased that NFT, and it’s being bought, the value of the NFT, that you have less, I mean, you have left now and goes up, because it’s purchased. Another thing that people can do what your NF t is, because it’s on a marketplace, people can go to like, now we’ve had a couple of hits, because again, open sea is an open market, we had a couple of hits, and people coming in and looking to buy our NF tees and and go through a whole auction process to where they said, Okay, I purchased it for $5 Somebody come out and see it, like no app purchased it for 10. So it just creates an ongoing marketplace by just doing one thing, by allowing yourself to be an early adopter, in creating something that, that that has a lifespan as long as it still exists in the market. Yeah.
Brandon Burton 26:28
So about two years ago, that’s when I was first getting introduced to NF Ts and and I you know, purchase Bitcoin and stuff. But prior to that, but the NF T’s were really starting to come on the scene. And at the same time I was in the process of creating a podcasting course to teach chambers had a podcast, we had a podcast. And the idea hit me, you know, if I created a limited amount, say, you know, 10, or 20 of the podcast courses, but tokenize it as an NFT. And then sell it. So once the chamber knows how to podcast, they don’t need the course anymore, they can resell that and in essence, be marketing to continue to market that course to other chambers. And you could build in a royalty with it to to where maybe you get 10% back on each resale. So it continues to be sold and promoted and produced and pushed out there. I didn’t go that course just because I didn’t have the technical know how to pull it all together. But in concept at that that could be a great utility, whether it’s a chamber or anybody else with courses in the future. But what are some other utilities that you see on the horizon for chambers to utilize and FTS and cryptocurrency?
Ronnie Russell 27:46
I mean, membership, but that’s really if you’re, if the community that you’re in, is really strong as a real good knowledge base, what NF T’s and crypto is and even offering NFT workshops for your members. I mean, even if you excuse me, even if you don’t use it to tokenize some of the things that you do, but you can still offer it as a workshop for your members as well as a workshop for the community. open sea has a grant that they do in order for awhile to assist you with teaching about the NFT process. So there’s grant money that’s out there for innovation. And that’s something that you can use to add into the scope of work with with your workshops, because it’s still early adoption, it’s still early, you know, even though it’s been out for maybe two years going on three years, it’s still early adoption is less than five years. So it’s still early Within those stages, though, I will say just take a look at it and see if it’s beneficial for you for one. And then from those benefits. Now you can add it as a benefit for your corporate sponsor. So they come in, they pay 5000 10,000 15,000 3000, whatever it is, and now that comes with the NFT. So now that corporation or that sponsor that you used to come in at a certain level, like say for your chamber banquets, or your community engagement events, so now you can tokenize their sponsorship by creating they’re taking their logo, of course getting permission, taking their logo and tokenizing their logo to say that this is the 2023 sponsor for whatever. So now you tokenize it so now you’re creating value even after the event is over. So now the event forever lives on because you have tokenized their support
Brandon Burton 30:00
That’s awesome. Yeah, I would follow a similar model, I think that you guys did as you look at memberships. So maybe you don’t do it for your entire membership and maybe a segment, right? Maybe you look at your young entrepreneurs, and you can have, they tend to be some of those early adopters. And if you can explain that, you know, membership for young entrepreneurs is done through an NF T. And that’s gonna get you access to online trainings, and all these different things that are focused for the young entrepreneurs. And then as they grow up, you know, through, you know, their business life through their, their professional career, you slowly start to integrate that throughout the rest of the chamber memberships. And, you know, if that young entrepreneur were to get a different job, or to, you know, heaven forbid, you know, move out of the community, they can either hang on to that as a valuable non fungible token, or they could go to somewhere like open sea and resell it, and be an advocate for your chamber and continuing to sell memberships. I think there’s a lot of utility there. Right? So going back to the ticketing, so you tokenize a ticket as as people showed up to the event, how do you go about you know, accepting the tickets as it you know, a paper traditional paper ticket versus ticketing on an NFT that they pull up on their phone?
Ronnie Russell 31:22
Well, on your back office, open, see, it actually, lets you know who actually purchased it. So they just create your your normal atom analog list of what you who purchased it, and then they come, then they can either they can show it, and then they can then you as organizations still line that particular NFT, owner and ticket purchaser off on your list. So it’s not something out maybe in the in the foreseeable future, which I do know there is a platform that that does do tokenized ticketing, so they can create that tokenized ticketing. And then I believe they do have a QR code, so they can check you in kind of like you do with Eventbrite and other platforms. So I think there is one that’s out there, I did find one, but I went, I wanted to go more. So more so with a open sea account, as opposed to just that one ticket item on that platform. Because once it’s over, it’s over, open feed, keep it a lot longer. So that that’s what we did. And that’s why I made that decision on not just using it as a ticketed items, but use it as a item for ticketing, which extends the life of the event.
Brandon Burton 32:41
Yeah. So I know there’s been a lot of examples out there of entrepreneurs that have launched NFT projects and communities around it. The one that comes to mind is Gary Vaynerchuk, right with his V friends. So maybe rather than going into the whole story of Gary Vaynerchuk, and V friends, people can Google that and get, you know, the background on what that was, but maybe just in a nutshell, he created these little animated characters. And anybody that bought these NF T’s, there’s like 10,000 of them, they would get access to his annual conference that he does for his fans for the next three years. So that one NFT purchase retains its value, you have an image that’s tradable, it’s non fungible, it’s your own, you know, your own property that you purchase, then there’s a lot of after sale market on that, but it retains the value for the next three years, especially with access to his conference. And then he does these airdrops and you know, other, you know, giveaways to those holders of his NFT. So, it incentivizes people to hang on to it and continues to build value on that. So, I just mentioned that put it out there. So chambers can think of other ways to maybe build on the technology and see the offerings that their chamber has to offer and, and see where some things might like that. But Ronny is, as you’ve gone through this experiment, was it worthwhile, would you do it again?
Ronnie Russell 34:16
Um, would I do it again? I will, I will approach it differently. Okay. What lessons did you learn do it again? Yeah. early adoption is is is hard with different age groups. My city the city of Killeen is a young city. But when it comes to Chamber members, a lot of them are older. So the early adoption with the older Chamber members in them is the devil like, I already don’t like to get online with you trying to shove this down my throat. Like I don’t have a habit pay for it. So I, I would do it differently. Like I would pose several NFT workshop, and just invite not just your members, but invite the community to come and be a part of it. Because now when they see your your chamber, actually doing something with NF T’s, then it allows them to feel like, okay, that’s a place that I can go to, they won’t make them feel like the chamber is a nursing home with a bunch of old people in it, right? But it allowed them to say, okay, they talk in my language. And let me go in here and see how I can be an asset. Like maybe you can begin to develop a digital committee and everything in a digital committee is totally different than just marketing is actually digitizing the process, assisting members with digitizing their paperwork, and it just totally changes the game when you’re speaking the language of the youth. So now they want to be a part of what you’re doing, instead of just being what their thing is. That’s what old people. So I will use that the early adoption workshop prior to launching in a ticketed item NF T with people who are already afraid of going online.
Brandon Burton 36:23
And that’s so important for just staying relevant as a chamber going forward. You don’t want to push your your longtime lifetime members do something new, that’s going to push them away. But for those early adopters, and to be able to continue to stay relevant, maybe do it for a segment of your of your membership population and just slowly integrate it. Was there a cost involved with creating the NFT? What does that look like you You said he had worked with the SAS company?
Ronnie Russell 36:52
There there. I think we were there. Maybe third client, okay. It wasn’t expensive. But even after we came, we had two members that we sent to them. So we got kind of, you know, some some money on the back end. That wasn’t how it started. It was like, you know, what you brought us to clients. So this is what we’re going to do for you. So it was kind of a good give and take, when it comes to I think we only pay maybe 450. Okay, for it. So again, it wasn’t expensive. But their work was good. But I will say if you’re thinking about going into the NFP look at their work, go to their open see account, and ensure that you’re getting something that was that is tailored to you and your organization. The one thing that I would do different from a design perspective, is to ensure that the design that they’re doing for you doesn’t look like somebody else’s design that they did. Because they they did a blockchain, you’re like, Oh man, that’s nice. But then you go to the, to their open sea account like, man, one thing you did to take my take their logo out, put my logo in, and then you change their color. But my color. Yeah. So make sure that you create something that is tailored and designed for you. And not a you universal and then like everybody else that they’ve done.
Brandon Burton 38:24
That’s good insight. As far as pricing the NFT. Did you price it in dollars or Aetherium or Solana or what did you price it in?
Ronnie Russell 38:34
It wasn’t Aetherium they use the theory. Okay? Because they had also look at, like, what’s the cost of the of the week that we had to deal with? So it won’t be I’m charging you this month, I mean this much. But then you got this much and gas fee. So you’re like, Man, the value ain’t the same or more because you got hit with so much. So many feeds with just purchasing it. So again, the company that went through using Ethereum, so it would depend on like, even when you’re doing it, make sure they’re there, they’re open enough to educate you about it and educates you through the entire process. Like it’s kind of like the customer journey. So have them walk you through the entire journey like like, I am the person that is purchasing the NFT now walk me through it, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Right. Now, I’m
Brandon Burton 39:31
just curious from a back end side of it, do you do you keep those sales in Aetherium? Did you convert it back to dollars as you put it into Bitcoin or how did that look after the sale?
Ronnie Russell 39:43
Of course the market fluctuates, but keeping it in, in the in the crypto space, it allows that to be a market that your marketplace so then when you do want to convert it and push it through your metamath gives me send it from Coinbase to traditional bank. I wanted to keep it any theory and because at the time the market was fluctuating as far as the cryptocurrency was was going, so I kept it in there. It’s kind of like, if you take it out too early, now you lost all this value because it unhit again. So I kept it in there.
Brandon Burton 40:22
Okay, good deal. So as we start wrapping up, I wanted to ask you for any chambers that are out there listening that are looking to take their chamber up to the next level, what tip or action item, might you suggest whether it’s related to the NFT space or anything else? What What would you have to offer?
Ronnie Russell 40:42
This, don’t be afraid of technology. Like our three buckets in the chamber itself is Business Technology, and veteran. And I want it to ensure that there was a technology agenda. Because a lot of people are afraid when they hear the word technology because there is a there are developed fears. When it comes to technology. Just because you don’t know doesn’t mean that you can’t find out. And when you begin to find out, that’s when you become an asset to be valuable to those who need the information that you just obtain. So don’t be afraid of technology, learn the technology, understand the technology, repurpose the information that you that you just found.
Brandon Burton 41:32
That is a that’s a great tip there especially like repurposing that information that you find. As we look to the future of chambers of commerce, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?
Ronnie Russell 41:48
I think chambers need to be more of a conduit when it comes to crowdfunding. Because for us we do a lot of giving. And because we do a lot of giving we we we have a lot that we receive, like for our Juneteenth festival is actually crowdfunding. Okay, it looks like a festival to the eye. But on a back end. It’s it’s a program. It’s an economic program. We give away 10,000 hours a year, during our Juneteenth festival, first prize, get five second, get three. And third, get to. So as the sponsors pay into your program, repurpose the sponsorship and pour that back out into the community. Because the community is where the members lead. And the community is where who go and support the business that are not your member. So those members that are not your members seeing what you do, because for our Juneteenth festival with the June team, grant, it can be a member or not, that come and be a part of it. But when you’re an asset from a economic perspective, so then it becomes a resource and a value to the community because you have value and you have valuable value is something that is presented valuable is a resource, it is a resource that then becomes duplicated, because it is always going to be needed, because it was always going to meet a need. Because problems is just a need that meet a need that that that needs to be met. So look at what needs need to be met, and then create a program that meets the needs of the issue.
Brandon Burton 43:50
I love it very well said. So, Ronnie, I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners that like to reach out and connect and learn more maybe about building an NFT or looking for a referral to the SAS company that did this for you what, what would be the best way for them to reach out and connect and learn more?
Ronnie Russell 44:11
Yeah, so you can find and follow the Innovation Black Chamber of Commerce on Facebook, Instagram. Going to website innovationbcc.org. There’s lots of social proof that’s out there. So if you want to send an email, you can send an email to info@Innovationbcc.org or you can give us a call at 254-415-9951 and I’m in the heart of Texas, Central Texas. So I have no issue with with coming and speaking whatever it is, is at no cost to you. I will pull up and show up longer it means that I’ll pull up as though
Brandon Burton 44:58
that is a great offer right there because Ronnie covered a lot of valuable information with us today. I hope everybody was taking notes, maybe re listen to this one again, dive in a little bit deeper and learn more about NFT technology and see where those overlaps are for your chamber for your community, how you can apply this sustain relevant going forward into the future. But Ronnie, thank you so much for joining us today for sharing your experience and how you guys have gone through this and, and really just painting a picture of how NF Ts can really meet a need for Chambers of Commerce. I really appreciate that.
Ronnie Russell 45:36
So thank you for that.
Brandon Burton 38:24
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Brandon Burton 0:00
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Brandon Burton 0:59
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Our guest for this episode is Kate Bates. Kate serves as president and CEO of The Arlington Chamber of Commerce in Virginia. Kate was appointed to this role in June of 2014. After an extensive national search, Kate began her tenure with the Chamber in 2007, serving in areas of increasing responsibility. Under her leadership, the Chamber increased their business advocacy efforts with notable state and local successes, as well as growing significantly in membership. Prior to joining the chamber, she worked for women in government and national nonpartisan association of women state legislators. Kate serves as chair of the Virginia Chamber of Commerce executives. She also serves on the Arlington Economic Development Commission, the Arlington Alexandria Workforce Investment Council, the Leadership Center for Excellence board of directors, and participates actively in a number of additional regional organizations. Kate was a 2014 recipient of the Outstanding Young Virginia Anna award from the Virginia Jaycees and was an inaugural honoree for the Leadership Center for Excellence 40 under 40. In 2017, she was named a Washington Business Journal 40 under 40 honoree in 2019. She was recognized by ACCE as a 40 under 40 honoree for significant contributions for community as well as the chamber industry. Kate is a graduate from the George Washington University with a BA in Political Science and International Affairs, as well as the US Chamber of Commerce Foundation’s IOM program. She is also a graduate of leadership Arlington and leadership Greater Washington, originally from small town, Illinois, Kate and her husband, Ronnie have made Arlington in their home. Kate, I’m excited to have you with us today on chamber chat podcast, I’d love for you to take a moment to say hello to all the chamber champions that are out there listening and then share something interesting about yourself so they can get to know you a little better.
Kate Bates 3:06
Thanks, Brandon. And it’s great to be here with you. Again, I love connecting with the Chamber industry and other chamber professionals. I think that’s one of the things that’s so great about our industry that you often see the surprise from people coming from other industries when they enter the chamber world is that we are one of the most supportive industries that everyone wants to share best practices and lift each other up. It’s really not a competitive industry. You know, if somebody’s coming from another chamber area, they have a great experience that’s only going to increase everything for our industry. So really happy to be here with you this morning. The fun fact questions always a tough one. But taking something that wasn’t in my bio that you read. I am a diehard Washington Capitals fan despite being from Illinois, I both my husband and I have fully adopted the caps as our team to the point where I several years before the caps won their Stanley Cup. Our wedding cake was actually made to look like the arena and had a tiny little Stanley Cup as our cake topper.
Brandon Burton 4:02
Wow. That is you guys are all in? Yeah, that is awesome. Yeah, no, I the the comments you made about the industry and being very supportive of each other. I was kind of surprised when I started the podcast about four years ago that there wasn’t a podcast out there already to share best practices and tips amongst other chamber professionals because it is, you know, so reciprocal, you know, amongst other colleagues. So thank you for pointing that out and sharing that, that fun fact about you. I’d love for you to take a moment to share with us a little bit about the Arlington chamber just give us an idea of perspective, you know, size, staff budget, scope of work, things like that, just to kind of set the table for our discussion. Absolutely. So
Kate Bates 4:46
the Arlington Chamber of Commerce is about 750 members, and our members really ranged in size from small startups, all the way up to large corporations like Amazon, Boeing and Nestle. And really every thing in between. So it’s really reflective of the business community here in Arlington. For anyone who doesn’t know Arlington, Virginia is located right outside Washington DC to the point where if you land at DCA airport, actually everything surrounding you is Arlington, I think they give the airport a DC address. But literally, as soon as you step one foot in any direction, off the airport, you are right in Arlington, so you know best known for the cemetery, probably. But there’s so much else going on in Arlington, it’s really a great place that has sort of a lot of those amenities that you get from being in an urban area, but has a lot of the benefits of you know, that placemaking that comes with other communities that are a little bit more on the small town space. Our chamber budget for 2023 is about 1.3 million. We have a full time staff of seven including myself and three part time members of our staff as well.
Brandon Burton 5:53
So yeah, this is kind of a unique, your chambers and a unique situation where a lot of the listeners have probably been to Arlington as they come visit the nation’s capitol where a lot of the chamber people that I interview are from all over the country and you know, maybe a small town Idaho or something maybe you haven’t been to but a lot of people have been been through Arlington so. So that definitely helps to set the perspective for our conversation today. And I kind of alluded to it as I went through your bio, but you’ve had an impact with advocacy there at the Arlington chamber and directly seeing an increase in membership tied back to the advocacy efforts that you guys are making. So we’ll be focusing our conversation today around increasing membership through advocacy. And we’ll dive into that a little bit deeper as soon as we get back from this quick break.
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All right, Kate, we’re back. Tell us kind of the origin I guess as you started there at Arlington chamber and kind of really boosted up the advocacy efforts. What did that look like? And at what point was the membership growth intentionally tied to it? Or how did you see that correlation and lean heavier into that?
Kate Bates 9:56
Great, so I’ll pick things up actually when I became CEO in 2004. tin again, I’d been at the Chamber for about seven years prior to that. But moving into the CEO role obviously presented some opportunities for me to be the one with the vision for the organization. So actually, in the interview process, I presented a new staff org chart. And it had two new full time roles. And the idea was to get there within five years, and we did very proud of that. But the first was a membership engagement role. So we had one membership person, and no matter how great that person was, as the chamber pros on the call, no, you know, it can be very hard. If you’re in charge of everything, recruitment and retention, you end up focusing on recruiting new members, and then also calling members when their dues are late. So that doesn’t leave a lot of time for taking care of your existing members unless they’re reaching out to you. So I knew that that was the role. I wanted to add first, chronologically, but equally important on this org chart I presented was a government affairs manager position, that, you know, I had some of that background from, you know, my education and my previous role prior to joining the chamber staff, but really saw that as the area, you know, where our chamber could grow and really be more relevant moving forward, we were in a great position, when I came in as CEO in 2014, you know, very strong organization, the good culture, a good foundation financials, in order are respected in the community. But I saw that opportunity for us to really lean into our mission more, and really have that impact for our Chamber members and our greater community as well. So I knew that it was important, I did, you know, however, kind of deliberately start with the engagement to get some more of the revenue to ultimately be able to add this role, which we were able to add in the fall of 2018. But really, you know, both in between that time, before we had the full government affairs professional, and even after, you know, it took a little bit for it to get going. But now we’re at the point where, you know, our government affairs person will not a salesperson at all, is absolutely instrumental to membership retention, and can be a really big asset for our membership team in terms of membership recruitment, as well.
Brandon Burton 12:05
So how does that work strategically, when you say they’re so impactful with membership, although they’re not salesperson? So do you have it time somehow, as they reach out to certain businesses as membership comes up? Or just because of the touch points along the way throughout the year? What does that interaction looking like to show the value that comes to the advocacy to those members to retain and to bring on new members? Sure, a minute. So
Kate Bates 12:31
I’m gonna bring that up a level first and talk a little bit more big picture. And then we can sort of sure dive into tactics a little bit more. So in terms of the advocacy broadly, you know, what we do falls into two bucket areas, you know, we do policy positions, and then we do member support. So policy positions are positions that the Chamber takes, you know, on behalf of the business community, there’s of course, a process that we go through to adopt those, you know, we did have a government affairs committee already in 2014, we grew that committee, and we added actually more meetings and now meets twice a month. So that group was working on that. And then policy positions are ultimately adopted by the Board of Directors, again, as chamber staff, you know, we we help them through this process, but they are the ones who are actually formally adopting the positions. So the value of those from a membership standpoint is, you know, it’s an opportunity for businesses to have a seat at the table on issues that they care about. So some chambers have their policy committees, application only are restricted, we do it a little bit differently, where ours are open to any member who wants to attend. So even if you know, if you have a company, if three people from your team care about an issue, they can come that day. And that is done. So you know, if we’re talking about child care regulations within the county, perhaps HR professionals will come to that meeting. If we’re talking about, you know, zoning in light industrial areas, we might get a different group of members. But we want whoever shows up to be the people who are impacted by those issues as well to make really good policy positions. But that also serves the benefit of having our policy work be beneficial to an even wider range of members. So we’re doing that broad work. But then we also do what we call member support. And that’s where we do the individual work and advocacy on behalf of businesses who are having issues typically at the local level. Virginia has what’s known as a Dillon rule state so that means that any authority not given to missa palette is stays with the Commonwealth. So we probably do about 20% ish of our work at the General Assembly level. But really, the bulk of it is at the local level and Arlington’s a county, not a city with no cities within it. So you might hear me refer to the county board for other folks that might be their city council or, you know, similar bodies there. But that member support can look like anything from you know, a business is having issues getting a signage process, getting their sign put up on their building, and they’re getting buried in County red tape, and we’re able to reach out and make those connections for them, and help them get their problem solved, or very least get it expedited and get to the right people. And what we often talk about is if you can solve one of those individual issues like that, you’ll often have a member for life.
Brandon Burton 15:13
Absolutely. So yeah, I think that really helps to break it down into what those two buckets look like. So let’s circle back with the on the policy side with the the committee meetings that you have there. So as you said, that’s open to any members who want to come, are you just broadcasting that through email? Or you’ve got your your regular set dates twice a month? And just an open invitation? And how do you moderate, that goes?
Kate Bates 15:45
Absolutely. So we they are open to all members, we do members can opt to sign up for the distribution list. So then you get the full information on a week out of who the speaker is going to be. It is a set date and time so you can mark your calendars with them. We do also for the bigger and more popular topics, we will also include an article about it in our regular E newsletter. So if you’re a member who isn’t already on that distribution list, and you’re interested in attending, there’s a way to do that. So early on, when we really beefed up our advocacy program, we separated them out. And we would usually have one that was more speaker focused, and one that was more working session focused. We’ve shifted and really most of them meetings at this point other than where we’re drafting our annual positions. Do you all have a speaker so often, you know, we set the agenda with our government affairs leadership, or our two committee chairs. And then we have a representative on our executive committee, who’s our vice chair for business advocacy. And our staff will work with them. And we set the agenda for the year, we always leave blanks because there’s always things that come up, and we want to have those spaces. But for example, we always start in January, we already had our first meeting with the county board chair. So the county board chair comes and gives, you know, probably about a 15 to 20 minute, talk about you know what’s going on for the year, especially what pertains to business. And then we open it up and do a moderated q&a. So this committee actually used to be in person pre COVID, when virtual during the pandemic was actually our first meeting to go virtual, we pulled that off quite quickly. And then we’ve actually kept other than, you know, a few special meetings, often our work sessions are better in person. But we’ve kept the bulk of those meetings virtually, because we’ve found that really that moderation is even easier to do on the Zoom than it is in person. We also have some members who you know, the commutes in these areas can be a little tough, there can be some bad traffic around and we’ve got not all of our members live or even work in Arlington. So having the Zoom really makes it more accessible for people as well.
Brandon Burton 17:42
I love that you pointed out that it has been done over zoom, because that was going to be a question as as it’s open to any chamber member, how do you have a room big enough to accommodate anybody that wanted to come, especially some of those hot topics come up? So glad to see that you’re still utilizing zoom and being effective with it and not just having the Zoom burnout?
Kate Bates 18:03
Yeah, the networking again, we we listened to our members, and it was very, very clear that the networking events, you know, we made it work virtually when we had to when things were really shut down. But no people want to physically be together for the networking. But for some more of the the meetings tend to work well virtually for us.
Brandon Burton 18:21
So this policy meetings, are they being operated by a chamber staff? Are you running that? Or is it a somebody from the government affairs that runs that? How does that? How does that work?
Kate Bates 18:32
So a mix between the two, so each of our chamber committees has a staff liaison. So again, prior to us, that is our government affairs manager. Now prior to us having a government affairs professional, I was doing that, you know, so I was the primary staff liaison, and then ultimately tapped one of our other team members to help with just some of the administrative when we’re in person, the sign in sheet and that sort of thing. But we do have a staff member for it, who’s often opening and doing more of the logistics of things. And then we also do have our co chairs who are kind of more of the public face for a lot of these things. So they’re the ones who are giving the welcome. We’re introducing the speaker with support from our staff.
Brandon Burton 19:10
Awesome. So maybe shifting gears a little bit, then over to the membership support side. So I assume your government affairs position that you’ve hired for is engaging with the members to find out what their needs are there. What what is that? How does those How did those interactions work? As far as engaging with the members? Is it reaching out to them as a waiting? You know, are there enough people coming to you with issues? Is it what, how does that direction work?
Kate Bates 19:39
Great question. So that’s really where the integration with the rest of the team and the membership team in particular comes into play. So you know, we always put you know, information, all of our newsletters, we have you know, in our print newsletter, which we still do occasionally you know, now we’re down to quarterly on that. And when we do the advocacy section, we add information that if you’re having any policy issues, please reach out Our government affairs manager, John musoni, has contact information. So we do have some of those static things. And you know, we do often when we onboard our new members, we make sure that they know about John as a resource, but really a lot of the specific ones. So some of the members who’ve been around for a while will know or who read, you know, their newsletters will reach out. But often, you know, it’s our membership team. And we have two full time and now one part time membership professionals as well, that when they’re talking with our members, and just the regular interactions, if they hear anything, then they make the connection there to our government affairs manager. So that’s how a lot of that happens.
Brandon Burton 20:34
I could see where there may be some bleed over with different positions with among chamber staff, where, you know, not everybody is a membership person, but at the same time, if somebody wants, you know, inquires about membership, you’re not going to say, well, I can’t tell you anything, right? You’re going to, you’re going to help them where you can and then make that transition. So is there specific training that you do for different staffers, it just kind of learning on the job and just kind of learning the different vernacular and what those important topics are to address members?
Kate Bates 21:06
Yeah, I mean, we’re all in the membership business, no, anybody’s in the chamber business is in the membership business, we like to say, in terms of, you know, training for membership and Government Affairs sort of working together there. A lot of it. So whenever we onboard any new full time team member, a big important part of that onboarding process, is they meet with each other team member, or sometimes by department. So we’ll meet with the membership team together and talk about how they work together. And what that looks like, will often also have, you know, especially for the government affairs, roll, them just sort of sit in on a membership meeting once or twice, we also have all new staff members go to our chamber one to one, so that they hear how we’re messaging membership to new and prospective members. But a lot of that integration to with the selling, you know, so our government affairs manager, you know, if he’s looking through a county board agenda, and that’s kind of a pro tip for any of the chamber professionals, if anybody is trying to figure out, you know, they’re not sure where to engage, look at your local government agendas, and just start reviewing them and see what topics are applicable to businesses. So there may be broad topics coming up, or there may be individual businesses that have business going before that your government body. So when that happens, you know, our government affairs manager will if it’s a member, reach out to them, if he hasn’t heard from them already, and ask them, you know, how are things going? Is there anything we can do to support you in this, you know, if they’re hearing that they’re having some problems, or they’re not sure how the vote is going to do, that’s where we would engage more, if it’s a prospective member, if they’ve got a bigger item coming before our county board, then that’s when, you know, our government affairs manager and our senior director of membership will talk together, they actually have regular meetings together and figure out a strategy, you know, who it makes sense to reach out to the prospective member and offer support from there.
Brandon Burton 22:54
So, as you have these two advocacy buckets, do you see pretty well split 5050? As far as getting feedback from members, and where the value where they perceive the value to be? I guess, because I see the value there being very, pretty equal. But the perceived value, I guess, from members, does it seem to be pretty evenly split? Or do you see one way or the other having more perceived value and impact on your membership?
Kate Bates 23:23
So that’s hard to say, again, there’s certainly more of the policy position work, and that will impact more members. But the member support will impact the business more deeply, if that makes sense. So if you’re one of those individual businesses, that’s where you will never forget, you know, I mean, I was at a just out to dinner with my husband on Friday night at a local restaurant. And the owner came by and was talking about some of the challenges he’s having and some of the new ones that he had just brought to our government affairs managers attention the day before, but just talking about some of the other work and really talking about how he saves so much by not having to call his attorney for every single question about the county, because he has us as this resource. And you know, that is a member that I would be shocked if that renewal ever doesn’t come in for us, just because he has felt that value so strongly if chamber membership. But the policy position work is also incredibly important. Because again, you know, for larger businesses, it gives them a place to engage. And for the smaller businesses, they don’t have the capacity to have somebody looking at all of these things on their behalf. And a lot of it can be playing defense as well. You know, there’s a lot of other, you know, advocacy groups, we have a very active community, which is a wonderful thing. There’s something known as the Arlington way, we’re really anything that’s going to happen as to go through a big process with lots of community input. And if nobody is watching those things, from a business perspective, a lot of things can happen with unintended consequences for business. So especially, you know, for those reasons, really the policy positions are broadly probably, I’m using air quotes that our listeners can’t see but more important, but Can the member support is more impactful to those who are directly impacted?
Brandon Burton 25:04
Right. And I know sometimes the policy stuff is a little harder to communicate the value to members like, once they see something really happened, some real traction happens. And they’re like, Oh, we’re so grateful our chambers doing this. But a lot of the work kind of happens behind the scenes, in a lot of cases, maybe not with the large companies and things like that, that are able to engage in different level. But I can definitely see, you know, where we’re at each has a place. I guess the basis of that question is where I was thinking, maybe for the smaller chamber out there one or two staff, but they want to get involved more in advocacy, like, where should they start?
Kate Bates 25:41
So, Senator, it depends on what their starting point is, I mean, at minimum, setting up, a government affairs committee is a good place to start. And maybe your committee doesn’t have to meet, you know, twice a month, or even once a month, maybe it could be quarterly, that could be a great starting point for people, and really that convening power, you know, two of the things we haven’t talked about so far are convening and access. You know, even if it’s not your chamber, doing the advocacy work, providing the space to connect your businesses with the elected officials, is hugely valuable, and making your chamber that central place where businesses can come to and connect with the elected officials, and equally important with the county staff, so or city staff, or whatever your configuration is within your local government. But you know, both the people who are the official leaders, but then there’s also often the, you know, the people who really get things done within the county or city government. For businesses, that might be a specific role. But it might not be it might be somebody in a role that you might not think but you realize that any issue you’re bringing forward, they’re the ones solving, you know, and providing that access to your members is a huge benefit. That doesn’t have to be a huge left.
Brandon Burton 26:54
Absolutely. So and I love the pro tip that you gave of looking at the your, your county or your Government Board agendas to see what those hot topics are that are coming up to be able to stay engaged with what matters to the businesses in your community. As we start looking to wrap up here, I wanted to see if you have any other tips or action items for listeners that maybe they want to take their chamber up to the next level, maybe they want to get more engaged with advocacy, what what would you suggest for a tip for them.
Kate Bates 27:25
So I love the one takeaway idea. And whenever I give presentations, I always ask people at the end to try to take one thing especially we’ve thrown a lot of information at them. For this topic, it’s really hard to make it one takeaway that works for every chamber, not knowing where every one starting point is. So if you’re newer to this space, I would offer you know monitoring what your local government is doing. And looking at those agendas for items that impact business and pick one to weigh in on you don’t have to start if you’re brand new to this and feel like you need to make an impact on every single thing. Just pick one there. Another option would be hosting a session with your membership could be virtual or in person with a local official or a top staff person. Again, it doesn’t need to be too much work on that agenda if you’re just asking them to come in, talk about what’s relevant to businesses, and then give a forum for your members to have that back and forth interaction with them. If you’ve been in this space for a while, at action items could range from finding a new way to communicate your work, whether that’s an advocacy, specific communication or newsletter, or maybe doing a better job of integrating your advocacy work and wins into your regular newsletters and communications. It could also be doing some relationship maintenance with your local elected officials or local government staff. And if your team is big enough that you do have a separate person or people handling government affairs and membership, an action item could be to encourage them to meet and see how they can work together more and how that government affairs person can support the membership efforts.
Brandon Burton 28:55
I hope everybody had a pen and paper ready to just write it or you can back up on the podcast 30 seconds, 60 seconds and write those down again, because those are some great tips. I also been a fan of podcasting for chambers that do have a podcast, I think being able to share your advocacy efforts through your podcasts, having a little advocacy moment or segment in each episode I think would be very helpful just to help spread the work that you’re doing. And because a lot of that is behind the scenes, and they don’t really know that you’re doing it unless you say something about it. So Kay, I like asking everyone that I have on the show about how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?
Kate Bates 29:38
So I love that question. And we’re at an interesting reflection point right now for our chamber because next year, we actually turn 100 years old. So I was recently asked a similar question about as our chamber hits the 100 year anniversary. What do I think that you know, our founders would think about how things look now, and I think the two questions really come connect together. So you know, I think the why remains constant. But the how of what we do obviously looks quite different than anyone could have envisioned 100 years ago. And really looking forward at our industry more broadly, as long as the Chamber’s focused on the needs of our members and how to evolve the suit those, there will absolutely be an essential place for chambers. I think that the pandemic really showcased how vital chambers can be to the businesses within their community. We were again, a little short on time, so didn’t even dive into this. There’s so many different facets, but really a subset of the advocacy is being that resource for information for your members. And chambers really shone so brightly in this area during the pandemic, as new regulations were coming out and small businesses didn’t have the resources to keep up on their own. Now, we repurposed our government affairs professional, who was still advocating, but also to discern that information and distill it in a way that could be understood by the businesses so that they knew everything that what they could and couldn’t do and where to go for all the information as well. So that’s an example of the evolving, but you know, I think, absolutely, there’s a place a strong place for chambers, as long as we continue to look to our members, and see how they’re adapting and make the Adapt adaptations to help them moving forward.
Brandon Burton 31:16
Absolutely, man, when you gave that responsive, you know, the question you were asked about, you know, 100 years looking back, you’re kind of reflective of your chamber. Think 100 years ago, 1923. You know, we’re
Kate Bates 31:29
24, so we get out
Brandon Burton 31:31
there, yeah, so but the world has changed a ton, you know, in in those 99 200 years, and even looking forward, like, we have no idea what its gonna look like 100 years from now, and, but you know, if we can go one day at a time, one year at a time, maybe five years and look into the future and, and see what’s important to your members, see what’s important to your community to business, keep them strong and thriving. That’s what we’re all about. So thank you for that. For that perspective there. I want to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for you as well, like you mentioned, we were a little bit short on time as they’re going through this, we could talk for probably an hour and a half I bet on on advocacy. But if anyone wanted to reach out and connect with you and learn more about how you guys are doing things, they’re in Arlington, what would be the best way for someone to reach out and connect.
Kate Bates 32:20
So I can be reached by email at president@arlingtonchamber.org, or I’m also on LinkedIn as well and can be found there.
Brandon Burton 32:27
It’s all right. And I will have those in our show notes for this episode as well. So if anybody’s not familiar, you can just hit your little notes, show notes on your your podcast player, and then it’ll have a link to actually the page on my website that has the full show notes and transcription. So we’ll have it there. But Kate, thank you for joining us today on chamber chat podcast. And he provided a lot of value and perspective and would encourage anyone listening to reach out and connect with Kate to learn more about advocacy and how that can help impact your membership as well. Okay, thank you very much.
Kate Bates 33:03
Thank you so much, Brandon. It’s really been a pleasure.
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