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Category: Podcast Episode

The Evolution of Chambers with Carlos Phillips

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Below is an auto-generated transcription of my conversation with Carlos Phillips. 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.

Introduction

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.

And now your host. He wonders if chambers in the future will use NFT’s for membership. He’s my dad Brandon Burton.

Hello Chamber Champions. Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your host Brandon Burton, where it is 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 Tony Felker, President and CEO of the Frisco Chamber to learn how the Holman Brothers have provided value for him.

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Brandon Burton  1:07  

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Guest Introduction

Our guest for this episode is Carlos Phillips, Carlos began serving as president and CEO of the Greenville Chamber in South Carolina on March 29 2016. Much has been achieved during Carlos his time with the Greenville chamber including the implementation of strategic plans for the organization and accelerate the Chamber’s private sector fueled economic development campaign, selling its office 40 years and moving downtown to Greenville central business district, leading a statewide effort for legislation to expand the number of non violent offenses eligible for removal from one’s criminal record, partnering with Columbia, Charleston, Myrtle Beach and Charlotte chambers to form the South Carolina Metro chambers coalition and partnering with the United Way of Greenville County and the Urban League of the upstate for the Greenville racial equality and economic mobility Commission. The Greenville chamber foundation secured a half million dollar grant to expand its minority business accelerator initiative to the Columbia and Charleston markets. The chamber has been awarded chamber the year by the Carolina’s association of Chamber of Commerce executives for its programmatic leadership and value to its members and earned its five star accreditation by the US Chamber of Commerce for its operational excellence. Carlos is an active leader in the community, and his profession serving as director for visit Greenville, South Carolina Urban League, the Upstate Community Foundation of Greenville and the United Way of the upstate. He chairs the United Negro College Fund upstate mares mass ball, which raise funds to help kids to and through college. He serves on the executive committee of the Association of Chamber of Commerce executives and chairs its metro cities Council. He’s also a member of the US Chamber of Commerce Committee of 100 and serves on its equality of opportunity Task Force. Originally from Owensboro, Kentucky Carlos received an undergraduate degree in communications from the University of Kentucky and a master’s degree in organizational communications from Western Kentucky University. He and his wife LaTonya have four children.

Carlos, I am excited to have you with me 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 we can all get to know you a little better.

Carlos Phillips 3:32
Well, Brandon, thanks for having me on the podcast and Hello, Chamber Champions. Glad to have the opportunity to share with you today.

Brandon Burton 3:43
Very good. So I know we were chatting just a little bit before we hopped on the recording. And you had mentioned you played some college football, which is I find to be interesting. I’m a big football fan. But uh, tell us a little bit about that. You know, obviously you’re Kentucky but what position did you play? What was your experience?

Carlos Phillips 4:05
Yeah, I played a couple of positions on the defensive side of the ball at the University of Kentucky inside and an outside linebacker. But that was back during the days of leather helmets. So that was back in the late in the late 80s. The game has changed a little bit since then. But what’s interesting is my oldest son played college football at Morehead State, which is a division two school in Kentucky. And my youngest son now plays quarterback at the University of Kentucky. So it’s clear that we we kind of like the game.

Brandon Burton 4:45
That’s right. It’s a great game. I love it too. Well tell us a little bit about the Greenville chamber. I know it’s probably been a couple years ago I had Liz Horton from Greenville chamber on the podcast as well. So it was regular listeners, you know They might go back in their memories and remember a little bit about what Liz shared about the Greenville chamber but just bring us up to speed and kind of size budget, you know, type of chamber you are that sort of thing just to give us that, you know, perspective.

About the Greenville Chamber

Carlos Phillips 5:12
You’ll, you’ll find that Liz was a much better guest than I will be. But I’ll try my best today. The Greenwood chamber, I like to call the Greenwood chamber a 133 year old startup. All right. We’ve been around for quite some time delivering value to to Greenville business community. Our legal name is the greater Greenville Chamber of Commerce. But for some reason, before I got here, we shortened it to the Greenville chamber. So but we are an organization that has members from throughout the upstate of South Carolina 1800 investors total. And we’re about a $4 million chamber coming you know, revenue coming from dues. Events sponsorships are economic development initiative accelerate that you mentioned that in my intro, that’s a private sector fuel initiative that focuses on growing our entrepreneurial ecosystem, expanding our talent, and workforce and only informing our community through through data. But the foundation of that accelerate work is on increasing educational attainment for working age, adults. So there are a lot of lot of moving parts in our in our organization, got a great team of about 20 folks who wake up every day, committed to delivering value to our business community and helping our economy grow.

Brandon Burton 7:01
Very good. Definitely helps us to kind of know where you’re coming from, but especially as we get into our topic for today, which is the evolution of chambers and I know through the pandemic and everything chambers have had to take a hard look internally and say okay, where’s our core values? What do we have to offer to our business community and the community in general. So I’m excited to get into that discussion with you and kind of learn how the Greenville chambers approached this and and maybe some things that you picked up on from other Chambers as well. But we’ll get into that discussion as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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All right, Carlos, we’re back. So as we get into our topic today, evolution of chambers, I wanted to circle back to something real quick that you had mentioned, when you were talking about the Greenville chamber and you mentioned being 133 year old startup. Can you expand on that? And why you look at your the chamber as a startup 133 years later?

Topic-Evolution of Chambers

Carlos Phillips 10:38
Yeah, I can. We were, we were formed back in 1889. And it’s, it’s amazing how the chamber has, has evolved in led the evolution of our community. But you know, we did that the status quo has never been, has never been acceptable. For our community or for our organization. We’ve always either changed when we needed to change, or we’ve led the change when necessary, as well. So you know, some of the worst things that you can say that a team member can say here to be with chamber is, well, that’s the way we’ve always done it. That because that doesn’t matter, it shouldn’t matter. To us. We’re also the type of organization we don’t, we tend not to wait until something’s broken, to fix it. Sometimes we’ll break it. Yeah. To, to make it better, to make it more to make it more effective, or to deliver greater value to our investors. But that’s the kind of shop that’s kind of shocked that we are, I talked about our team all the time, because I really do have a special team, it takes special, it takes special people to embrace, you know, continuous improvement. But we’ve got such a team here at the chamber. And I think our organization has been in a state of continuous improvement over the past 133 years of its existence.

Brandon Burton 12:29
That’s awesome. A couple things really stood out to me. And your response there is one is that sometimes you’re the ones that break, you know, you’ve got going on to be able to innovate and move forward and reminds me of Apple, right? I mean, they had the the iPod, which is incredibly successful product, probably arguably one of the most successful products that Apple would ever put out. And they essentially killed it when they came out with the iPhone. Right?

Carlos Phillips 12:52
They basically cannibalized the product,

Brandon Burton 12:55
right? Yeah, yeah. And, and is done very intentionally, and it’s worked out very well. But you’d also talked about how the status quo is never good enough, which I think is a good theme to follow through for our discussion today as we talk about the evolution of chambers. So what are some things just, I know, I mean, pandemic is top of mind for for everybody here. How does the chamber remain relevant? How do you provide value? What are some of those things internally there at the Greenville chamber that you guys looked at to make some of those changes and evolve as the times changed?

Carlos Phillips 13:30
Yeah, great question. Brandon. One of the first things that we did was, we revisited the Chamber’s vision and mission. When I first arrived, the chamber had vision and mission statements. But on my first my first staff meeting, when I asked the staff to, to recite the vision and the mission,

Brandon Burton 14:00
like stare, because

Carlos Phillips 14:02
they couldn’t do it. It was it was long. And well, both of those statements were long. And they clearly had not committed to it. It was as if they were, they were showing up to do a job. But they hadn’t committed to the vision and the mission. So we shortened both the vision and the mission statements. The vision, we changed that to being a globally competitive, upstate economy where businesses succeed, and people prosper. And the most important word in that vision statement is to and sometimes I’ll quiz sometimes I’ll quiz people, and I’ll say what’s the most important word in that vision statement? And they will, they will say everywhere except that and so, but we changed that we changed our mission statement, so that we could be very clear and concise on what our what we what we committed to delivering for our business community and that is to lead convenient mobilize the business community to drive regional economic growth. That’s, that’s how we are going to achieve that vision that I stated earlier. Doing those things really helped us in a couple of ways. First of all, help our staff, our board, our stake or our stakeholders, have a clearer understanding of our of our Northstar. This is our goal. This is what we’re trying to pursue. And that’s from a vision perspective. But then it helped us focus on on how we get there. We, we were an organization that we we were uncomfortable saying no. Yeah. So if someone would call chambers fall into that, yeah, someone you know, someone will call and say, Hey, I need Can you can you? Can you help me build a birdbath? You know, can you? And that’s, that’s a little extreme. But we would say yes, to opt almost everything. But in in so while we, while we may have please people short term, long term we couldn’t deliver, we couldn’t deliver. So we actually ended up disappointing, folks, because we couldn’t deliver. Now, instead of disappointing people for that we can’t deliver. We disappoint people, because I’m sorry, that doesn’t fit into what we’re tasked with doing. But we’ll say but let me refer you to this organization or that organization who can better serve you that has provided a much clearer path for us to achieve the value that our business community expects from us. So we’ve learned how to say no. And through that, we’ve become much more valuable, much more effective for our business community, and quite frankly, for the community overall. Right.

Brandon Burton 17:12
And sometimes those referrals or other organizations, like you mentioned, and sometimes their businesses that are partners at the chamber. Yeah, that are investors.

Carlos Phillips 17:20
We’ve learned that sometimes the best, yes. Is a no. Yeah, yeah.

Brandon Burton 17:25
And you can make a mutually beneficial, you know, relationship out of that where everybody thrives to be better. Yeah, I often have friends throughout the country that they know, I do this podcast and me on my work involved with chambers, and their business owners, and they’ll say, Should I join our local chamber? Yeah. And it’s like, Man, what a loaded question. Like I wanted to say, yes, you know, no, good. But it’s like, well, I don’t know, you know, what is the mission of your local chamber? What is their vision? Can you get behind that? Does it resonate with what you want to do? Do you have similar goals to move your community forward? So I think, you know, like you guys did with condensing and you know, refocusing your mission and vision I think, is very effective to be able to tell your, your existing members and potential members investors, this is what we’re here for. This is our purpose. And if you want to jump on board on this best and write it with us and be alone, this is this is the group for you.

Carlos Phillips 18:28
Well, and Brandon, to that point, our our retention has improved. Because we’re now we’re now attracting and securing investors who a have a clear understanding of what the chamber said it’s going to deliver and they vote in its they’re not disappointed when when they expect one thing that is not, that’s not delivered. We have we have five focus areas at the chamber. And our goal is when we could have had 20 focus areas. Yeah. But for those five, we wanted to, we want to be the best in the marketplace, and delivering on those five. We, we pride ourselves in doing ordinary things extraordinarily well. Yeah. And it’s, it’s, I’m not the most, I’m not the smartest person in the world. I keep things really simple. That’s for me, that’s for our team. And that’s for those who engaged with us keep things really, really simple. But if we do those simple things, if we do those ordinary things, if we execute them extraordinarily Well, you have very satisfied, very satisfied investors in members. And I think we’re improving on that. Daily.

Brandon Burton 20:12
Yeah. So I think, yeah, going back to the, what we’ve titled this episode, the evolution of chambers. You know, it went, I believe, from a lot of chambers that their founding had a very clear purpose, very clear vision. And then those waters got muddied over time. Because you get different organizations, different people, different business owners saying, hey, the chamber would be good for this. So got to be where you could go to any community, you know, most of the communities throughout the country, and ask the random business owner, what is your local chamber of commerce do? Yeah. And they would have no answer for it, you know, they do some networking, they, you know, like, it would be really hard for them to come up with an answer. Right. So I think refocusing is going to help give a clear definition to those businesses, what the chamber does why you exist,

Carlos Phillips 21:03
Brandon, to that point, I was on a zoom call. It was a strategic planning call for an organization here in town a couple of weeks ago, and someone on the call, they were in the performing arts sector. And they wanted to include as a part of the strategic plan, the chamber to build a performing arts venue, for smaller, non for profit, performing arts organizations in the area. And I chuckled because someone sent me a text on the calendar like, Hey, did you hear what you hear what you’re asked to do? And I replied back? Yeah, I heard that. No, it’s a bit of a mission creep. For us, yeah. You know, and it’s not, it’s not far fetched to think that at some point, it’s at some time. We may have tried to pull that off. Yeah. Yeah. But but based on our current, based on our current mission, just it just didn’t align.

Brandon Burton 22:15
Yeah. But I think among that confusion of what a chamber does it in, you touched on this earlier, where those expectations of what the members have when they join, you leave them not satisfied, because you’re not delivering on what they thought the expectation was. So going back to just being clear on that,

Carlos Phillips 22:35
well, and you know, if we’re going to disappoint you, we’d rather disappoint you up front.

Brandon Burton 22:42
You have a little more control there to you know, if you’re disappointing up front, you’re able to control that you’re able to direct them or redirect them the right way. So for sure, I think there’s a lot of value to that. Are there things that you’ve noticed other chambers doing that you think is maybe innovative, you know, as this evolution process that maybe you guys haven’t adopted, but you think you know, that it’s something good to explore? Put me on the spot? Here.

Carlos Phillips 23:07
You are, but you are, but you know, in our industry, we tend to be an industry that’s heavy in r&d. Right, and not not research and development. Rip off and duplication. Yeah. And so I’m a part of a group, you mentioned that I chair, our metro, metro cities Council. And that’s about 75. Chamber CEOs from the largest markets in, in the country, and we meet monthly. During the pandemic, we’ve been meeting via zoom. Yeah, and I’ll tell you, that was a, that’s been a great. It’s always been a great resource, but during the pandemic, there was some great ideas sharing. We probably, you know, drank a few virtual beers, you know, as we were trying to figure out how to lead organizations in our communities through through the pandemic. But there are a lot of great ideas from from those organizations. If you, there’s a oh, there’s a saying in our industry that if you see one chamber, you’ve seen one chamber? Yeah. There are no, there are no two chambers that are identical. But what we tend to do is, we’ll see we’ll hear an idea or an initiative from from one chamber in one community, and then we’ll, we may take it, season it to our taste, you know, how can it fit with our organization and our community and we have you and we, we repackage it, and we’ll implement it and there’s a lot of that, that there’s a lot of that that goes on For the folks on listening to the podcast, I would strongly encourage them. And I’m heavily involved in ACC, the Association of Chamber of Commerce executives. But I would encourage them to join a peer group. And engage in those meetings, whether they’re virtual, or they’re in person, there’s a lot of great idea sharing, and you never know what you’re going to learn. It’s a great, it’s a great network, great professional development, it’s probably where I received, my greatest professional development is through the metro cities Council through ACC. And it keeps you up, again, to talk about the status quo and how that’s not acceptable in our organization. Well, one way to one way to avoid that is to, to listen to others, listen to other people who are trying to figure it out, as well, you may have an idea for them. And I guarantee it, you’ll take some ideas from them as well.

Brandon Burton 26:08
And that’s actually the whole basis of why I started this podcast over three years ago is the idea of I initially trying to reach some of those smaller chambers, maybe they’ve got one staff person, maybe it’s a volunteer, maybe it’s part time person. Because I would see some of these smaller chambers, it just really struggled, where other chambers are hitting on all cylinders, everything’s great everything communities, well respect some and it’s like, what can we do to help these small chambers that are underfunded, they can’t take the time to be a way to be in these peer groups, they all these things. And it’s like, so here’s a resource, but that is a great tip is to for everybody to get involved with the peer group.

Carlos Phillips 26:49
I’ll say this, Brandon. All chambers have their challenges. Because matters, not matters, not your revenue level, your number of investors, how many? How many staff, me folks you have on staff, all chambers have challenges and opportunities. So when we talk big versus small, it’s a scaling. It’s a scale factor. But everyone’s all chambers have to have challenges and opportunities. Even for the small chambers, if you’re a one person shop, professional development is still important, for sure. And you have to carve out, you have to carve out time for that. And maybe it’s an hour a month, maybe it’s an hour a month, but that hour a month could help you figure out how to overcome some of your challenges. Yeah, it could help you, it could help you better understand how to deliver enhanced value for your, for your members. So I mean, yeah, I’ve not worked for a small, a small chamber, I started off with greater Louisville Inc, which was a pretty large shop. I moved from greater Louisville, Inc, to the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce, another, you know, fairly large shop, went back to greater Louisville Inc. and then came to Greenville. So I don’t have a full understanding of, of being the only person in the office. So I want to be careful that my, my comments, I want to be careful that they’re not insensitive to that. But if professional development is a need and a priority, then no matter what, no matter the size of your chamber, you got to figure out how to carve out time for that. And that’s, again, that’s one of the values of those peer groups through ACC is that is an opportunity for leaders to carve out time for their development, which is great not only for them, but for their organizations and further their communities. Right.

Brandon Burton 29:14
And it reminded me of the quote, and I’m terrible given attributions, but you can’t get from where you are to where you want to get where you want to be by doing the same thing. So by hearing how other people are doing things by not being, you know, okay with the status quo, continually evolving, I think is key to that transition.

Carlos Phillips 29:35
Yeah. You know, you made me think of something to Brandon, a book that I read, that is referenced continuously. It’s called What Got You Here Won’t Get You There. Yeah. And it was a good book for me personally. But it was also a good book for the Greenville chamber organizationally, as well. What what got us here over the 133 years won’t get us through the next 133 years. Right? And we have to be intentional in that in that mindset.

Brandon Burton 30:08
Yeah, that’s good. Well, as we start wrapping up here, I wanted to ask you, and you’ve given some great tips. But I’d like to formally ask if there’s any tip or action item that you would suggest for a listener to help take their organization up to the next level.

Action Item/Tip for Chamber Champions

Carlos Phillips 30:25
Well, random Far be it for me to, to give tips or formal advice to folks because we’re still trying to figure things out here at the Greenwood chamber, but I will say this, recognize that you’re still trying to figure things out, recognize that you’re not quite where you need to be. Recognize that your your business community and your community as a whole, they’re always going to need you to be more, more effective. And the pressure on chamber CEOs and leadership is to continue to seek opportunities to deliver better value. So if your chamber is primarily engaged in networking events, then how do you make those networking events more valuable for the folks who, for the folks who attend? You know, interestingly, our business community 10 years ago, they charged the chamber with being a thought and programmatic leadership in diversity, equity, and inclusion. Not a traditional space for Chamber of Commerce.

Brandon Burton 31:53
Yeah, he said 10 years ago, 10 years ago, 10 years ago.

Carlos Phillips 31:59
And what we realized is and what these leaders what our board realized a decade ago, was there’s a business case, for insuring for trying to include more people in in the economy, for sure, yeah. So how do you include not just more more black owned businesses in your economy, but more women owned businesses, Hispanic owned businesses, veteran owned businesses, there’s a business case. There’s a business case for that. Our board leadership embraced that business case. And for the past decade. We’ve been that thought and programmatic leader in our in our community. You mentioned the partnership with United Way and Urban League on the racial equity and economic mobility commission. Yeah. It’s it, there’s a business case for ensuring that that there are minorities and blacks have better health outcomes, better education attainment, better jobs, and that our justice system works, you know, more fair than it is than it is today. And so, again, my only advice is, you know, yesterday’s. Yesterday’s homeruns won’t win today’s ballgame. Right? What what you did yesterday, what you did 133 years ago. It’s really inconsequential. You got to figure out how am I going to hit singles, doubles, triples, home runs today? And how is my organization going to be best positioned to hit those singles, doubles, triples, and home runs? Tomorrow? And that’s, that’s, that’s my goal, as the CEO of the Greenwich chamber, and I would encourage others to, to proceed accordingly.

Brandon Burton 34:06
I love that. So many thoughts as you’re given that response. Maybe a try to condense it down to one response for myself is it reminds me as I read Dave Atkinson’s book. Yeah, of course, she’s, I love that. But it really paints a picture very clearly about the purpose of the chamber is to advance your community to build a stronger community. And as you talk about the diversity, equity and inclusion front, I think that’s a there is a huge business case for that it from a chamber if your goal is to advance your community and make it a better place for everybody. Where’s the most room for growth where who who has been underserved who has not had the opportunity to be able to advance and develop and do these things? And if you can put some some focus on those areas As the whole community is going to advance so much further. So I love that. And I

Carlos Phillips 35:05
want to give a shout out to Dave Backus and he’s the person that introduced me to this industry. Okay, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And so he introduced me to the industry. And after working in Google in for five years, I got a chance to join his team and work for him for five years. And you may have seen me referenced in that book that you Yeah, that you that you spoke up? He is. He is He has that book is I consider that book kind of the Bible. Yes. For Chamber Leadership. And it certainly has influenced how I lead this organization and community.

Brandon Burton 35:43
Absolutely. Well deserved shout out for Dave Atkinson. I like to ask everyone this question as we look to the future of chambers. And that’s kind of what we’ve been discussing this whole conversation, but how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Future of Chambers

Carlos Phillips 35:59
That’s a good question. Brandon. I think I’ve answered that question. Throughout today’s throughout today’s interview, again, I think it’s just embracing you know, continuous improvement. Think investor or member first. You know, we we tend to, we tend to communicate in chamber speak.

For which are the businesses in our community really don’t care much about chamber speak.

And so but but be in a mode of, of continuous improvement. And, and I think you’ll position chambers will be positioned for success. In yours in the years to come, I think, again, and I think we’re a testament to that, again, 133 years. Yeah. Yeah.

Brandon Burton 37:02
I appreciate that. I’d like to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for anyone listening who would like to dive in a little deeper about how you guys are doing things, they’re in Greenville, what would be the best way for someone to reach out and connect with you?

Connect with Carlos Phillips

Carlos Phillips 37:15
Well, you can email me at cphillips@greenvillechamber.org and or go to our website, greenvillechamber.org. And while I enjoyed my opportunity to speak with you today, I’ve got a team that’s much more knowledgeable on this stuff. They forgotten more about this than than I’m ever going to learn. But go on our website, you can find my contact information there. And you can also find the rockstars who are helping us not only develop our plan of work, but are effectively executing each day.

Brandon Burton 37:55
I love that advice because you’re right you do have Rockstar team and it doesn’t all have to come to you. Yeah, they’ll filter him out to the people with those you know programs are looking to learn more about that Carlos. I really do appreciate you spending time with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast. Thank you, you delivered a lot of value and and some you know thoughts to provoke. You know what the evolution of chambers can continue to look like at the local level for those listening,

Carlos Phillips 38:24
My pleasure.

Brandon Burton 38:26
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Breaking Down Barriers with Ralph Staffins

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Below is an auto-generated transcription of my conversation with Ralph Staffins. 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.

Introduction

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.

Voiceover Talent 0:14
And now your host. He believes with a little creativity there’s always a way, he’s my dad, Brandon Burton.

Brandon Burton 0:22
Welcome, Chamber Champions. Thank you for tuning into chamber tap podcast. I’m your host Brandon Burton, and it is my goal 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 Matt Morrow President and CEO of the Springfield Area Chamber in Missouri to learn how the Holman Brothers provided value to his chamber.

Matt Morrow 

Holman Brothers provide a great training for our sales team in terms of just outstanding sales techniques. But maybe even more importantly than that, they were able to provide us with a system a process that was repeatable and in that we’re able to see very clearly from one month to the next how the how the pipeline is doing, what prospects are in it, what kind of progress we’re making and what we can do to coach people to success.

Brandon Burton

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Guest Introduction

Our guest for this episode is Ralph Staffins. Ralph is the president and CEO of the Brunswick Golden-Isles Chamber in Georgia. But before that in 2018, under his leadership, the Covington Newton County Chamber of Commerce was awarded the four star accreditation by the US Chamber of Commerce. And prior to serving in Covington. Ralph served as the executive director for forward McDuffie in Thompson, Georgia as the economic development director. Ralph was named president and CEO of the Brunswick golden Isles chamber in June of 2019. And he currently serves on the coastal pines technology book College Board. Georgia economic developers Association Board of Directors is twice served as chair of the Georgia Association of Chamber of Commerce executives and serves on the Board of Governors for the Georgia Chamber. During his time in the golden isles, Ralph proudly led the Brunswick golden Isles chamber to earning its five star accreditation with the US Chamber of Commerce. In 2021, Ralph was recognized by Georgia Trend magazine as one of the top 40 under 40 in the state of Georgia. Ralph graduated from the Georgia College and State University in 2006 with a bachelor’s degree in political science, and earned a master’s degree in public administration in 2008. Ralph is designated by the International Economic Development Council as a certified economic development professional, and he makes a great impact in any community which he serves. He’s married to his lovely wife, Rachel and has four beautiful children. Ralph, I’m excited to have you with me today here on Chamber Chat Podcast if you will 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 better.

Ralph Staffins 3:42
Yeah, Brandon, thanks for having me today. I’m excited to be here with other chamber professionals listening, as always like to learn from others as well. I guess the most interesting thing about me as far as a chamber professional golfers, I’ve had the opportunity to live all over the great state of Georgia, and I’ve never done anything other than economic development in my career. As a young professional, I’m still learning balancing work and, and life and you said I had four kids. And that certainly keeps me busy on top of leading such a great organization down here at the beach in Georgia.

Brandon Burton 4:16
That’s right, I’ve got four kids myself, and it keeps you running all different directions. You know, every day after work, it’s seeing who’s got basketball or volleyball or you know, all these different activities. Well, it take a moment to tell us a little bit about the Brunswick vowel chamber just to kind of give us some perspective before we get into our conversation, maybe the size budget staff, that sort of thing.

About the Brunswick-Golden Isles Chamber

Ralph Staffins 4:39
Yeah, so we represent Brunswick-Golden Isles and many other communities. It on the coast. So our community is the economic hub in Southeast Georgia. And so we have a lot of members outside of our immediate community. But if the brothers would go now this chamber was actually a result of The merger between the St. Simons Island chamber and the Brunswick chamber about 20 years ago. And so we represent roughly about 1200 Members, we have a budget of almost a million dollars a year and we have six employees as well.

Brandon Burton 5:16
All right, well, that definitely helps to kind of set the stage for your resources that you’re coming from and and I think that’s important so as other chambers listening, they’re bigger or smaller can see kind of take a pulse as to what you’re able to do with with the Chamber your size and kind of adapted to their chamber and where they’re at at the time. So our topic for our discussion today where we’ve titled this breaking down barriers and it’s really much more than that and I’m excited to to hear Ralph from from you as to the the perspective and background there the golden isles, the Brunswick golden Isles chamber as to how you guys are being more intentional around this topic, and we’ll get into this discussion as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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Topic-Breaking Down Barriers

All right, Ralph, we are back. As I mentioned before the break you guys there at the Brunswick-Golden Iles Chamber being very intentional with how you’re going about, you know, some some things that have been kind of contentious and you know, a lot of tension throughout the country, especially as it comes to race relations. But if you would tell us a little bit of the background in your community why this is a topic that we’re talking about today. And how you guys addressed it?

Ralph Staffins 8:49
Absolutely. Well, and I’m sure the listeners know, they would probably be living under a rock if they didn’t know about the mod Aubrey murder in our community. As COVID was going on, all across the country, our country faced riots in issues from Portland all the way to Atlanta. And we actually had a incident in our community where a young man was shot in one of our neighborhoods, young, young African American gentlemen. And so it was just like the perfect storm with George Floyd and all these other things going on. And I tell people sometimes, you know, we were fortunate that COVID was happening because it slowed the news down and slowed everything down a little bit for our community to be able to to catch up, but I am so proud of our community. Right And last week, actually the hate crimes trial wrapped up. And so we are completely through the judicial process of this tragic incident happened in our community. And so we’re thankful for that. But we’re very proud that we came through this entire process peaceful. We didn’t have rioting or looting both, but that was because our community came together. And I’ll tell you, it was the business community, the Chamber business leaders in the African American faith leaders who have such strong existing relationships as to why that was able to take place in our community that they always say silence is deafening, right, you’ve heard that saying, the silence of our local elected leadership, it was deafening. And there was no reaction whatsoever. And so we came together as a business community and a faith community and started meeting and having conversations. And while we as business leaders and the face side of the house, too, we couldn’t guarantee an outcome. But we knew something was going wrong with this process. And we did come together and promise our community that we would ensure that it was done aboveboard. And that’s really all they wish they could ask for. And so we welcome people to our community to protest and to be heard, we asked him to do it peacefully. And when you add brothers and sisters locking arms, because of the relationships we already had, it allowed us to keep it peaceful in our community.

Brandon Burton 11:27
Yeah. And I think communities across the country and in I imagined in some other countries as well, they’ve all been much more hyper aware even of these challenges in communities with with race in regards to race relations. And I think everybody’s trying to be more intentional with how they go about being inclusive. And, you know, whether it’s just a general membership or board selection, things like that. I think there’s definitely a balance of being inclusive. And also making sure that, you know, people are not being put in positions or businesses aren’t being highlighted strictly because of the race background. Yeah, there’s so much more that you want to highlight what the good things are they’re doing. And it’s not just because it’s an African American based business or anything like that. How have you guys gone about intentionally being aware that drawing the proper attention in your community?

Ralph Staffins 12:38
Absolutely. I tell people all the time, this was a tragic incident that happened. There’s no way of getting around that. But it is changed our community, including our chamber. Moving forward, right, the tragedy would be to have something like this happen, and just go back to the way you’re doing. Yes. And so I told you this all kind of transpired and unraveled. During the height of COVID pandemic and lockdowns in our community, unlike most in the country, was very fortunate our economy had a hard hit, because we’re a tourism based economy, but we had a immediate rebound from that little dip. And so our community was wide open. There was no doubt about that. But but people were still being costs. Our workforce wasn’t 100% back even though we had record numbers of tourists in our community. And you couldn’t go into certain businesses because of the the restrictions and the Coronavirus. And so what we did is we decided we were going to start a new part of our organization, we started a 501 C three Foundation. And that foundation focuses on three main things. It’s leadership development, workforce development, and diversity, equity and inclusion. And I say it all the time, leadership development and workforce development go hand in hand, and the D comes in to support those right? We want to make sure our programs as we’re developing the leaders of tomorrow, and the future workforce of our community looks like our community. We want to make sure people of black and brown skin have the same opportunities to advance their careers and become part of our workforces. Anybody else. And so that’s that’s kind of what we did. It’s a reaction to it. And I can give you an example, a lot of chambers, I would venture to say most chambers have leadership programs, leadership, whatever your county is, right? Yeah. And our leadership program historically, did not have much diversity in it. And so through our foundation, we set a realistic goal of having 33% of our leadership class, which is almost the makeup of our community to right, as far as diversity goes. And we even took that one step further. We said, doesn’t matter if you’re white, African American, Hispanic, it didn’t matter. We do not want cost to be a barrier to you being able to better yourself and workforce and leadership development. So we raise scholarships and our leadership program cost $1,200 A year to go through. And a lot of small business employers can’t afford that kind of investment. And so we want to make sure that cost could be a barrier. So we, I literally made two phone calls and hesitant scholarships, I needed. This community rallied around not only redefining our leadership program, but ensuring that there was access to that program. And we went from having we take 30 people a year into the program, and we went from having 32 applications, maybe they haven’t 52 applications this year, and the second year going through this, this process.

Brandon Burton 15:45
So how did you go about communicating that, as far as you know, trying to attract the diversity to the leadership group, as well as the scholarship opportunities?

Ralph Staffins 15:54
Absolutely. Well, we invited folks to the table. Okay, so I need to say this, I understand these kinds of conversations are uncomfortable, right? Nobody likes to have these conversations. It doesn’t matter. Your ethnicity or socio economic class. They’re not comfortable conversations. And we are that we invited all of our minority businesses to the table. And we had conversations, we invited that African American faith community I talked about earlier, to the table. And we identified 75 young leaders in those communities. And we just invited them to apply.

Brandon Burton 16:37
And what kind of feedback of the 75 young leaders he identified? He said, total was about over 50 applications. But obviously, they weren’t all, you know, from the That’s right, those he identified, did you get other feedback? I guess the purpose, what I’m asking is, as far as, you know, a starting point for building relationships. Even if they didn’t apply, did you get positive feedback from those who you’d reached out to and invited and identified?

Ralph Staffins 17:10
We absolutely, we absolutely did. And not everybody can make that kind of time commitment from their job to be away from their job to be a part of progress. So that that did cause the application number to be lower. But we have so many people out of that first 75 or so young people we identified as part of our our chamber in different ways. Now, they didn’t have to go ship, Glenn is what we leadership, Langley County. But now they’re in committees. They’re part of our young professionals, they’re part of our ambassador program. One of that 75 is already on our board, went through the leadership program, and immediately showed so much potential, and his employer encouraged us to add him to, to our board. So it’s the last thing any community will want to do. And I think anybody listening would agree with me is to look over your shoulder and be worried about the next set of leaders coming up. Right. And we don’t want that. So we’re going to make sure our leadership program is state of the art but more than that, we’re going to make sure it looks like our community. So we’re empowering leaders in every neighborhood and every type of business, whether it’s small or big in our community.

Brandon Burton 18:25
But there’s you know, the the quotes out there have never let a good crisis go to waste, and not to make light at all of robberies, death, but it definitely came in a time of crisis. It came at a time where you know, emotions were very sensitive, were raw, and to be able to not let his death go unnoticed. And to have a mean something by be able to be able to, to reach out and and involve others and like you said, having them more involved with the Chamber now where they weren’t before. And it’s it was a matter of bringing that to the focus to the attention and being able to say we want you to be more active in our community. At least that’s how I see it is kind of taking that approach of we want to include you we want people of every walk of life to be part of our community to make it

Ralph Staffins 19:25
great. Absolutely. It changed our chamber down to our DNA. And that’s, that’s just me being honest, we, we do things differently. We have conversations we weren’t having before. And we are better as a business community and as a chamber because of it. And that just many of your listeners might not know my area, but we’re diverse in many different ways. It’s not just religion and race. We socio economically we have the richest zip code and one of the poorest zip codes in the state. of Georgia, all here in the same place, we actually have a four mile causeway that separates those two zip codes. And so that’s why I told you we were positive emerge chamber, there were two chambers for a reason, right? We had a diversity does is passed, color of skin or your religion, it’s Island and mainland. Yeah, Richard for and so we we want to make sure that we are doing the best we can and developing the workforce a for employers but b we also want to help in generational poverty, that’s something that we at least in the south face a lot is this generational poverty, and we are certainly part of a task force that’s helping to, to erase that from our community.

Brandon Burton 20:45
I love that. And that you do have some obstacles a lot of other chambers don’t have with the mainland, and the island is a real divide, you know, geographical divide between the two. But you know, working to bring them together as one. And I can imagine by having this new group of leaders being brought up, it’s going to bring a whole new perspective going forward at the chamber to insights and feedback that you wouldn’t have received otherwise. So I see this as being a really long term play of really seeing that the growth and development of the chamber there.

Ralph Staffins 21:27
It really is. And truthfully, we also have a youth leadership class. And so we’re also talking about high school, right, we changed the way we did that program to it’s not exactly like our adult leadership class, but it’s, it’s diverse, and now you’re having to apply for and it’s not just a counselor, telling us who we’re going to get. We’re getting private school kids and in inner city kids, and we’re putting together because those relationships in the future are going to be important for them.

Brandon Burton 21:53
For sure. So with the schools, how are you? How are you working with them to get that set up? Do you? Are you working through the counselors through administrators? How do you How are you initially setting up that relationship?

Ralph Staffins 22:05
Well, yeah, you know, like all things, it always flows down from the top right. So I would encourage anybody listening to this, your superintendent needs to be your best friend, that school board needs to know you just as well as the city or county commission does, right? It’s, we’re facing as a country, a workforce crisis. That’s the result of this pandemic, let’s be really honest. We’re not in a depression. We’re not in a recession, we are facing a workforce crisis like our country has never seen before. We are a microcosm of that here in the golden isles, we’ve got a 2.4% unemployment, right? In 1800 open jobs so that I can point people to right now, those numbers just don’t add up. No, not at all. And while we are increasing our population, being tourism community being a place where people like to come and retire, right, we’re not attracting workforce aged people as fast as we’d like to. And so we recognize that that 1200 to 1500 kids, we graduate every year out of our K 12 program. That’s our pipeline, until we figure out how to attract new, new young people to our community. And so we’ve got to make sure those kids are understanding what the workforce of the future is going to look like in our community specifically. And so we work really well with our school system for a lot of workforce type things, and we marry him with our Technical College. And we actually have a four year school here in our community as well. And so there’s a seamless transition for our kids, no matter what, whether they want to go to a technical school, or a four year education. And we at the chamber in the business community, we just want to make sure that they’re aware of all of their options, and where the jobs are. And so we actually just got done with a new program we installed called our teacher externship. And so we sent a bunch of teachers from I mean, even kindergarten, we even had kindergarten teachers, Brandon going into industry to understand that it’s not smokestacks and Miss indigenous anymore. It’s it’s high paying jobs and no debt out of the technical college, for the for the young people. And so it’s it’s relationships, everything is, you know, comes down to relationships. And so if I could give any word of advice to the listeners, it’d be to make that superintendent your best friend, because it’s whether it’s a leader, Youth Leadership class, or workforce pipeline, it all comes down from him or her and their willingness to partner with the business community.

Brandon Burton 24:36
Absolutely. And, and I think just having discussions too, I mean, just recently, I had a discussion with my oldest child, he just turned 16. And we’ve talked about his future and say, Okay, do you see yourself living in our community in the future? Yeah, 10 years from now, are you going to be here? Are you going to be living somewhere else? It’s like, Well, geez, yeah, I haven’t really thought of that. But I know a lot A lot of youth as they’re growing up, they can’t wait to get out of mom and dad’s house and, you know, go to college and start a career. And I don’t know, maybe it’s just an assumption, but it seems that a lot of youth seem to look outside of their community for their future. So what can we do to develop that future vision within our own community to keep our youth there and for them to see a future there in your community? I

Ralph Staffins 25:23
think it’s all important. So, absolutely. Is them understanding the careers. And it’s not just them, let’s be real honest, as parents, too, right? We got to make sure the parents and the students, I understand that there are incredible jobs in our community, and

Brandon Burton 25:40
we live at the beach, right? We have

Ralph Staffins 25:42
quality of life. Let’s show them where the jobs are, and show them that it’s you can play with computers and technology and make a lot of money in our community. And then maybe they’ll go to college, and maybe maybe they’ll go to technical school, but hopefully they come back. It’s that brain drain that our community has got to continue to work on slowing down.

Brandon Burton 26:04
Yeah, I think that’s absolutely right. And, and you see chambers all over doing this now, as you know, showing those opportunities to the upcoming generation in showing that you can have a great career here. This is a great place to live. You’re familiar with it, you got family here, you’re showing all those highlights as to why it’s great to stay

Ralph Staffins 26:25
in your community. And I will I want to add one more thing. Yeah. I will say it’s, it’s more than just putting programming in your own community. I’ll give you an example. We want to build a new technical college building in our community $38 million. Once it’s all said and done. Our chamber spent the last two years working on that at the state legislature. In fact, we pulled all of our partners in this community together, and we all we could the chamber convinced them, we’re going to say our number one priority for our entire community is this new building. And I was actually there, the first four days of this weekend Atlanta, doing work in lobbying to get that financial commitment from from the state of Georgia. And so, you know, I see a lot of chamber professionals that I’m friends with good folks. And they’re good at events, or they’re good at workforce development, or they’re good and Governmental Affairs, but those things all just bleed together. Opinion. So even if you’re, you’re you’re not, it’s not your strong suit to do one of those things. Get out there and do it. Ask somebody how to do it if you don’t know and make sure those things are seamless, because because if they’re not, and we keep doing great workforce programming, but the kids don’t have a technical college to go to here. They won’t be back, right? Example.

Brandon Burton 27:42
Yeah, that’s a great example. So as we start to wrap things up here, I wanted to ask what might be one tip or action item that you would suggest for a listener that they could do at their own chamber to help take them up to the next level.

Action Item/Tip for Chamber Champions

Ralph Staffins 27:59
And I’ll say this, I think we were fortunate to get it done while we had to be stuck in our office. But it’s a 501 C three, I think every chamber should have a foundation. So that a they can get tax deductible gifts, I promise you those Chamber Champions, and those past board members, all those folks. They sit in December and try to figure out where they’re going to give their money to give them an opportunity. They spent all that time being on your board and becoming your chairman, I promise you we’ll see more funding. And the second thing is your have access to grants that the C six designation won’t let you get to, in fact, we sat in a meeting this morning, they all did a site visit for a huge grant to help us with the workforce development process, new program. And so it’s not that hard. Get your attorney that works. Work does work for your chamber already. And I’ll tell you something else, I think that’s I didn’t realize was going to be a huge benefit of starting a foundation. But it’s allowed me to get my former chairman, plugged back into the chamber. I know that everybody hears it, it’s I just need a break from the chamber. But after a year or two, they fell out of the loop. And in so this allows them an opportunity to stay plugged into the chamber and those past chairmen are always the ones who are connected to the money in the community.

Brandon Burton 29:24
Yeah. So for anybody who’s read Dave Atkinson’s book, horses versus chess, he dives deep into this the importance of having a foundation and for all those things, Ralph is just talking about to be able to have it as another source of income, but also a source of work and being able to provide maybe it’s scholarships in your community or different things to be able to help further develop and advance your community. So great point.

Ralph Staffins 29:53
And I’m a big believer that chambers should not be event planners. And I know that a lot of my rule rather Don’t have to play in Christmas parades and things for their their cities. But I don’t think that’s our role. Our role is to advance business. And my motto is we’re not doing if it doesn’t advance our mission, or make us money advance our mission. And so this foundation allows you to meet your mission through new grants and new fundraisers that you weren’t tapping into before. And if not, you’re going to ask your chamber champion for more money again.

Brandon Burton 30:26
Absolutely. So I like to ask everybody that I have on the podcast this question, as we look to the future of chambers of commerce, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Future of Chambers

Ralph Staffins 30:40
So I truly think that we, as chambers, and chamber professionals have got to get back to our roots. We were designed, we were formed to be the voice of business. Because when I go to Atlanta, or I go to DC, and I tell him 1200 members and 45,000 employees feel this way, that’s a whole lot more powerful than the chamber feels that way. And so and I also think that we’re going to have to be more regional, we got to be at least in Georgia, we’re very territorial, right, we have 159 counties in this little state. And each one of them has a chamber, that that’s, that’s not going to work, we’re wasting resources duplicating efforts. And I really feel like and I’m already seeing it, chambers and are going to have to become more regional. If there’s a big city and a couple of small counties around and make one change, figure out how to combine efforts. And we’ve done that here in southeast Georgia, we we do a huge legislative event every December and this year was we decided to make it a regional event. So we had legislators from all over the region come and talk and we invited their chamber to come back community because we had the big facilities, we ended up with five 600 people instead of the 400 we normally have. And so and those smaller chambers, members got to hear what was going on where they generally don’t have that kind of and so start off with events, make events regional. And ultimately, I think we’re going to have some combination of chambers in the southeast George’s Regional Chamber, for instance. Right? Well, from that here, but I do think that’s that’s the future, you’re more powerful when you have a bigger voice. And you certainly don’t duplicate efforts and resources and waste resources.

Brandon Burton 32:29
Yeah, I think for advocacy, especially to be able to make things more regional and and there definitely is power in numbers, like you were saying, I see the value and having a, you know, the local identity with having the the county chambers to be able to say, hey, we were late with the local businesses and local issues. But as far as you know, advocacy and being able to get the attention of elected officials, you know, for sure, combine, combine your resources and make a louder noise. So, great advice. Well, I wanted to give you an opportunity to put out any contact information for listeners that might want to connect and learn more about how you’re doing things. They’re at the Brunswick gold Niles chamber, what would be the best way for someone to reach out and connect with you.

Connect with Ralph Staffins

Ralph Staffins 33:17
BrunswickGoldenIslesChamber.com. You can you can also follow us on Facebook, we really believe in marketing here at our chamber. And so we we do get a lot of stuff out. And so you can check out our website. But our our Facebook pages is up to date constantly, as well as our website, but our, our Facebook pages as scrolling accomplishments. And I think that’s a good way. But please, you know, if you’ve got a question about something we’ve talked about today, I want you to call me, I’m happy to help any way I can. Our office number here is 912-265-0620. As for me, I’m happy to help as the chair of our state association and is on the Georgia Chamber board. I think it’s my duty to help others especially in the state of Georgia, but I’m happy to to help this process any way I can. One of the best things I did during COVID is we started a support group can during COVID. And we I was able to mentor chamber presidents from all over the country. And it was just an amazing, amazing process and I still try to stay connected with those folks as much as I possibly can.

Brandon Burton 34:26
I love that I love hearing chambers supporting each other. That’s awesome. But I’ll get your contact information in our show notes for this episode. So in case anybody’s driving or out walking the dog while they’re listening, they can access it at chamberchatpodcast.com/episode167. But Ralph it’s been a pleasure visiting with you and I appreciate the examples you shared about how you guys are doing things there at the Brunswick gold Niles chamber and you know, hopefully provided a lot of value for people listening as well. So thank you.

Ralph Staffins 34:59
Thank you for having me. You need to.

Brandon Burton 35:01
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Relevant & Personalized Communication with Sara Ray

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Below is an auto-generated transcription of my conversation with Sara Ray. 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.

Introduction

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.

Voiceover Talent  0:14 

And now, your host…He encourages chambers to collect quality data so they can better segment their lists.

He’s my dad Brandon Burton.

Brandon Burton  0:23 

Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your host Brandon Burton, where it is my goal 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 0:50

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 and 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 1:31
You can learn more about Holman Brothers Membership Sales Solutions by visiting HolmanBros.com.

Doug & Bill Holman know how to diagnose and solve
member recruiting issues faster and better than anyone else, and they want to put
that knowledge to work for you and your chamber. Learn more at HolmanBros.com.

Guest Introduction

Our guest for this episode is Sara Ray. Sara became the president and CEO of the Douglas County Chamber in April 2018. Sara has more than 15 years of chamber corporate and nonprofit leadership experience including UPS Yancey bros as Strayer University, the Cultural Arts Council of Douglas, and four positions at the Douglas County Chamber. Sara serves on the Regional Business coalition executive committee is Vice Chair for the WellStar Douglas hospital regional board, and as a founding partner in Elevate Douglas economic partnership, a public private partnership created in 2021. She also serves on the board of the Georgia Association of Chamber of Commerce executives Georgia Academy of economic development, Cobb and Douglas public health steering committee and founding member of keep Douglas County beautiful. Sara received her Georgia certified chamber executive designation in 2021, making her one of only 22 in the history of the organization. She is a graduate of the US Chamber institutes of organizational management in 2015, the US Chamber business leads fellowship Regional Leadership Institute, Georgia forward young game changer, leadership Douglas and is it active in these alumni associations. In 2019, Sara was named by Georgia Secretary of State as outstanding Georgia citizen. She was also named as the West Georgia livings 40 under 40 in 2019, and a top 10 Young Professional in Douglas in 2015 and 2017. Her service to the community does not go unnoticed. She was recognized as Volunteer of the Year for the Georgia Ovarian Cancer Alliance in 2010 and 2012 Spirit Award by the city of Douglasville, Sara received her bachelor’s from the University of North Carolina Wilmington. When she isn’t working to support businesses and Douglas in the metro Atlanta region. Sara spends her time traveling and being outdoors with their children, Anna and Avery. Sarah, I’m excited to have you with me today on Chamber Chat Podcast, we will take a moment to say hello to all the Chamber Champions and share something interesting about yourself so we can get to know you a little bit better.

Sara Ray  3:53 

Yeah, well, thank you for having me today. I have thought long and hard about this question. But I think something interesting about me is while I was born and raised in Georgia, my parents are both from overseas. So I’m a first generation American. And my dad is from England and my mom is from South Africa. So a lot of times when people meet me they see you know, cute little you know, southern girl and they don’t realize you know that my summers were spent in Africa and in the wild so so it’s it’s people always kind of that’s kind of throws them off.

Brandon Burton  4:31 

So you get together with your family to get a variety of accents going on.

Sara Ray  4:34 

Yes, yes. My mom always joke that like when I was in preschool, I came home and the first time I said y’all, she just cried because I had a British accent until I went to school because that was all I ever heard. So

Brandon Burton  4:48 

yeah, it’s funny. I can just see that British accent you know, saying Yo she’s like, where did my baby go? Well tell us about the Douglas County Chamber just to give us some perspective, maybe size budget staff, that sort of thing

About the Douglas County Chamber

Sara Ray  5:06 

before we get us. Yes. So our chamber is 77 years old. We have about 650 members that are investors in our organization. And we are located in west, west, just west of Atlanta, we’re about 20 miles west. So we are considered the Metro Atlanta region, but still kind of close enough. We always say, you know, close enough to the city to be able to catch a baseball game with our, you know, world champion, Atlanta Braves. But also, we still have plenty of green space and amenities where we can explore and enjoy the outdoors. So yes, so our team we are, we have and we have an interesting kind of space, we are in the process of integrating staff with our economic development organization elevate Douglas, so we share staff, but our full team is about 12 Strong between both organizations. But as far as chamber employees, we have about eight, so I think it was there anything I missed?

Brandon Burton  6:02 

No, I think that that pretty much covers it. And so it sounds like you’ve said that before. Yeah. how close you are to Atlanta. And notice you you mentioned Braves and the Falcons but that that’s okay.

Sara Ray  6:17 

We got we got UGA we’ve been

Brandon Burton  6:20 

you gotta get your highlights, right. Yeah.

Sara Ray  6:22 

Falcons fan. I know. I still have like, you know, wounds from five ish years ago. But yeah, yeah. Yeah. We’ll definitely talk about the Braves all day long.

Brandon Burton  6:32 

That’s right. That’s right. So as we get into our topic for discussion, today, we’re gonna focus our conversation around creating relevant and personalized communication, which I think is going to be something relevant for listeners as we try to figure out the best ways to communicate with not only our members but people in the community and really, you know, be in that that voice for business community. So I’m excited to get into this discussion with you as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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Topic-Relevant & Personalized Communication

All right, Sara, we’re back. As I mentioned before the break, we’re talking about communication, creating relevant and personalized communication. I’d love to hear what you guys are doing there at the Douglas County Chamber to do this. Yeah, you know, what, what spurred the thought for this to be the focus of our discussion.

Sara Ray  9:36 

Yeah, so I think it’s probably best to start up I’m gonna say the beginning. You know, I’ve been at the chamber as, as you mentioned, for just around 12 years and took over SEO about four years ago. So I felt like I’ve seen a lot of different things and you know, experience different trends and marketing and communications. That was actually the role I started out in being at the chamber so then seeing it grow and evolve. But I would say the beginning of our journey to where we’re at now and how we have moved into a space of having more customized personal communications was like a lot of people during the pandemic. So, you know, as a, an organization that was primarily in person with our events, that leaned into that space we were very accustomed to, like, I would assume a lot of chambers are is casting a net at, you know, at all your businesses, you know, the more people the merrier in a room, you know, that that equated to a successful event. And that was very, very true with myself in spaces, but also with my team. So when we had to go into an environment where we couldn’t do face to face, or, you know, we were just trying to still cast that net, but not being able to have those one on one conversations, we knew we had to do something different. So I remember specifically, we had brought back, and it was probably like late 2021 of our after hours events, it was outside, you know, open air. And I remember, in our, in our after hours, events typically have about 75 to 125 people, this one, there were about 27 or 28 people, and my team was coming up to me, this is a failure, this is not great. This is you know, we’ve lost our you know, our our mojo, this is awful. And I just remember being like, you guys are missing the big picture, look around the room and see what is happening, I said people are able to not come into a space where they don’t know anybody, you know, or they feel uncomfortable or overwhelmed, because of the number of people that are there. I said, people are able to come in and have a conversation, they aren’t worried about working the room. And and you know, getting as many business cards out as, as they can, they’re able to sit and have actual conversations. And I was a perfect example of that. I mean, as, as our viewers probably know, chamber execs you’re out work in the room, making sure that everybody feels welcome and included. And I remember sitting down with one of our youth leadership students, high school junior, and having like a 10 minute conversation on their career path and their trajectory, and all of these different you know, like just actually getting to know them. And, and that was a conversation I had with my team. And I was I was like you guys are missing the big picture, like people are having more authentic intentional interactions with one another. And that fosters a relationship and a depth of depth to a relationship that we can’t touch. Like we can’t, we can’t touch that in an email or communication, not the way we’re set up right now. So we ended up working with an organization to do again. So we kind of looked at, we started shifting some our events, instead of being a catch all for everyone. And during the business after hours, we had targeted industries that we were networking with, we had, you know, different themes. So we started a minority business group, we started a women in business group. So we started out with our events, but then what we realized quickly was, how are we getting the information out to everyone in a way that they can, that it that it resonates with them, and that they find value in that. So we went through the process of doing a marketing communications analysis and looked at all of the different things that we were doing email, social website, how we were how people were getting the information, and that was members, and it was non members. So we were polling and surveying our business community at large. And one of the things that kind of came back to all of it was that people don’t like getting the emails that are that are sent to the droves, you know, email was definitely their number one choice for how they wanted to be communicated with and this is in my community could look different. But even with the way that you interact with people on social media, like it’s great that we were posting, you know, we had a content calendar, and we were posting something on wherever, every other day, and we had a process behind that. But people wanted the engagement, they wanted to see themselves they wanted, you know, they wanted to know the stories about people so so we’ve gone through the process of customizing how we communicate with our businesses looking at we’ve created like a preference center. So you know, what Brandon might want contact information on it might be leadership and events and I might want information on policy and economic development. So we’ve created a you know, an infrastructure in our in our communications and how we do our events, that it’s customized and catered to the individuals just so that’s kind of the high level, how we got there. So

Brandon Burton  14:30 

I love this. I just in fact, it was a week or two ago, I actually wrote and shared out a blog post about this very thing. Well, when you’re talking about these mixers, it was about that very thing. It’s like you know, so many people show up at a mixer. They’re new to the chamber, right? They show up, got a pocket full of business cards, or they’re gonna get their drink and they stand there totally awkward. Yeah, they don’t know anybody. And then you know, 10 minutes later they leave because Yeah, nothing happens that they’re super uncomfortable and That’s one of the huge value propositions, you know, for joining the chambers and networking. Yeah. Well, if it doesn’t resonate for them, they have a bad experience at first time, how likely are they to come back. So being able to have these personalized, you know, relevant events for them to attend, and really make sure that they resonate with not only the topic, but the other people that are there. So it makes sense to communicate with them.

Sara Ray  15:24 

Yeah. And it’s not just about like getting them to the event, it’s the before and after to like, we’ve incorporated pieces into the process where, when they register, it’s, Hey, thanks for registering. And it’s all automated through chambermaster. You know, and it just says, Thanks for registering before you get here, check out our speakers, and we have links to the bios, and then two days before they get an email that’s like, you know, get excited, these are things that we’re going to have here, if we have kind of upcoming announcements or things you need to know before you get there. And then on the backside, we have follow up emails that are thanks for joining, here’s the pictures, here’s the links to whomever was speaking, you know, share your experience, and we put in there literally a copy and paste of post this on so on your LinkedIn, and they just have to drop it in there. So it gives them a good way to engage with us outside of just the event. And we you know, we’ll put in there register for our next event. So it’s all about creating, we call it an engagement pathway. So it’s all about creating that it’s not ever a start to finish. It’s always the what’s next behind things. So

Brandon Burton  16:27 

so how do you go about in your, in your database to segment your lists? You’d mentioned you know, what their interests are I, the way I’ve envisioned it is you have a conversation of sorts, and in some of these, you probably have to guess if they’ve been a member forever, and maybe they’re not super high, you need to make some guesses. But as you onboard a new member to be able to have a discussion of what’s your expectation from the chain? What are you joining for? Is that how you guys go about it? Or what does that look like to be able to Yes,

Sara Ray  16:59 

I’m going to call I’m going to call it bite sized pieces, I’m getting an email about like this long, you know, like, four pages long, is very inundating and overwhelming for someone. So we’ve actually shifted to I would call it like a drip campaign. So when they get their first email, it’s, you know, Hey, welcome to the chamber, we’re so excited to have you, here’s your login, be on the lookout, we have this next thing coming up, your next email will be about XYZ and then the next email that they get is, hey, we want to learn more about you. Right, so talk to us about the things that interested you in joining the chamber. And we capture some of that through our member application. But then it’s getting more into the space of what did they as the primary contact one, the next email is, hey, tell us about your team, let’s make sure and add in anybody that you have that as a part of your team that we need to include in our conversations, because, again, Sara raise preferences, and Julia in my office, it might be different. And the things that they find value in as a member would be different. So we’ve shifted instead of it just being this one dump of information into small videos and and kind of little snippets, that cycle out, I would say at least once a week for the first month, and then we kind of lag it out a little bit. But that way, it gives them the information kind of on a consistent basis without overwhelming them. Because that was another thing people don’t want to read through, like I said, five pages of information. So we’ve we’ve just shifted to that kind of little bite sized piece of information. And then there’s some other things, we mail them some stuff too. So they’re getting that attention, we send we have somebody that does a phone call. So we have a whole process in place. But yeah, identifying their specific needs and interests, we do that some through the main contact through when they apply. But then it’s part of the process. And we just capture that through our CRM. And then we actually connect it into the campaign system that we use for email marketing. So and then you can go into if we’re getting super granular, like the tags and segments within your email marketing system. So then you can go through and kind of pick and choose and say, hey, I want to send this piece of information to people who are tagged that they like information about women in leadership, or it could be about policy. So we kind of lean on those different tools to to segment it out, because there is information you want everybody to get and know about your big signature event or your upcoming event or training that you have. But then some of the information, you know, might not be relevant to you know, a solopreneur that’s never that doesn’t need to hire anybody doesn’t necessarily need to have all the information on how to post a job on our on our job site. So yeah, it’s just trying to try to funnel down and fine tune that information to where it’s what they find this value in. And then you can track it all on the back end through analytics and see again, and we drive almost all of our activity, I would say all of it to our website so that we can track the analytics and know where people are going, what information that they’re actually likely looking at and learning from.

Brandon Burton  19:54 

I love that and I think this is going to be one of those episodes that people go back and listen to or at least You know those last few minutes? Like, okay, take notes, and how did you do this step to the next day? So, simple question, what, what email platform do you guys use?

Sara Ray  20:11 

Yes. So, we have tried a few, we use Constant Contact for a long, long time. I know as chamber people, we get it for free, which is great, but I and I mean, contact is wonderful. But there are other paid platforms that can give you more. So we actually investigated using Campaign Monitor, but then ended up going with MailChimp. So it integrates with chambermaster, which is our CRM that we use. So and has a lot of capabilities and even the visibility, the open rates are better with MailChimp than some of the others just because they don’t automatically pop into your junk folder and things like that. So we have some great partners that we work with, that are investors with the chamber that helped us kind of work through all that process, it wasn’t, you know, I don’t have a crystal ball. And I will say to that doesn’t mean what works for us will work for everyone. And Constant Contact has does have some great tools that are associated with it, if you’re on a little bit of a tighter budget, but that was we ended up moving forward with MailChimp was what we ended up going with.

Brandon Burton  21:11 

So and I wanted to highlight that just so listeners when they talk about when they hear you talk about segmenting tags, and all these things like, Well, my software doesn’t do that, or where do you find that? So it’s within MailChimp that you’re doing those things. Yeah. So I love the way that you go about with that kind of introductory email, you know, here’s some things to look forward to. And then the follow up as to, you know, what kind of things are of interest to you? Where do you do you see, as people, you know, have a longer time with the chamber with their membership or investment where they learn about new offerings that the Chamber has and to be able to add that to their interest. So they’re getting those those pieces of information? How do you add that in along their membership journey,

Sara Ray  21:59 

oh, you’re gonna laugh at this one, we have a nickname for how we do that in my office. So um, you know, we’ve used MailChimp for a lot of our you know, we use that for our I would say standard, we do a top five email that goes out on Mondays, you know, we have social that we post we did videos, those kind of things. If we are in a space, and we want again, because a lot of people just see chamber emails, and they’re like, Oh, I’m just gonna keep clicking through. So what we learned, and I honestly don’t remember how we got into the space. My team calls them, Hey, friend emails. And it’s literally me, emailing our entire database through chambermaster. And I write them just like it’s coming from, I mean, it is coming from me, but I read it just like I’m emailing you directly. And the tone and the language behind it is just as if I was writing to any, you know, any of my businesses that are members. And it’s, Hey, how are you very generic entry. Hey, there, and it’s, you know, I always try and make some kind of interesting subject line, like, got a second or one quick thing for you. And then I go into, hey, hope you’re doing great. Getting ready for the weekend, or whatever, you know, whatever, just some kind of little intro, but like, I just wanted to make sure, I don’t know if you saw the emails, but I want to make sure you knew about XYZ event or training or whatever that we’re doing. That’s coming up, I think it might be great for you. You know, we’d love to hear your thoughts on that. And we’d love to see, see your face at it. If it was an event or whatever. If there’s anything that you need from me, you know, I’m always here, have a great day. And I literally, that’s basically what are our response rate? And people like people have no idea? Well, some of them start picking up on it, they have no idea that it’s sent to 1000s of people. So I get responses from people. They’re like, Oh, my gosh, it’s been so long since we talked hope you’re doing well, thanks for checking on me, you know, so we call it Hey, friend emails in my office. And that’s a great way because then we’re able to go back. And if I get an email from someone, like I said, that I haven’t heard from in a long time or haven’t seen an event, and they’re responding to an event that we’re talking about, you know, going to our cap the state capitol, then I know that that’s piqued their interest in some space, if they’re choosing to respond to me, Hey, I hope I can make it please keep sending me the this this way, you know, would love to have this in a virtual format like we get we I get honestly I get better open rates on those than any other email platform that I do. And again, nobody knows what I mean. A few again, a few now know the secret, but for the most part, but that’s the bottom comes in. I have to be so let my team is there. There’ll be like, can you send a hey, for an email? I was like, I’ve already sent one this week. Like we’ve got to limit or they lose their hour. But yeah, so yeah, so Hey, friend, emails work really well. I actually had one of our state our congressional senators offices call me she’s like, I need to set up a meeting with you. She goes are those emails like really to everyone? Or is it just to me, because she said she forwards them out to her team every time and it’s like This is how we need to communicate with our business, you know, with our constituents, and it started as a random thing, but that’s kind of our, our secret sauce that you know, we have our templated emails. But if we need to pull a friend one out, then it works almost every time.

Brandon Burton  25:16 

And I imagine that those Hey, friend emails are also going to help with your open rates and deliverability of the emails going out through MailChimp to see that those are getting delivered and opened and responded to, they’re gonna deliver more of those inboxes. Exactly. That’s, that’s awesome. But then, so you’re taking those manually those responses and saying this members interested in this and then updating their profile

Sara Ray  25:39 

that, yeah, I have somebody on my team that I’ll just forward them to. And it’s also a great way to make sure we have bad emails that are coming through or bounces or changes in role, you know, because there’s lovely member info updates that we all try and send are only so successful before we have to get on the phone. So this is a good kind of consistent way to kind of work through that process. Yeah.

Brandon Burton  25:59 

So one of the other things he had mentioned, I want to make sure that I understood it, right. It sounds like one of those follow up emails and member first joins is saying who else in your organization would be interested in XYZ. So you’re, you’re getting other contact information for each business, but then also able to further the segmentation to that person’s over HR versus, you know, over, you know, the CEO, as the company, they’re going to be, you have different interests, so you’re able to touch them on different levels at the same

Sara Ray  26:31 

business. And I was trying to add something, we always add some language like, if this isn’t for you, please feel free to share with share it with somebody, you know, and make sure a lot of people and I know that you’ve heard this before, but they think that they’re the only person that’s a member of their chamber. I’ve had several conversations with our school district. I’m like, every teacher, every educator is a member of the chamber. So you know, like, use that leverage that leverage that bandwidth. Oh, yeah.

Brandon Burton  26:57 

Yeah, no, I think that’s key. Yeah. They think whoever was the one that signed up to chat. Yeah, right. Yeah. Oh, crazy. Yeah. Or just the owner. But yeah, it can. And obviously, every chamber is a little different. But most chambers that I’m aware of is opened it. Yeah, buddy within their business. So good point. I think this topic is so important. I’ve mentioned this a few times. And I think it’s worth mentioning again, just with the topic is my background is in chamber publishing says I would go out and meet with different Chamber members. And they find out that I’m not actually with the chamber, but they open up to me. Yeah. It’s like, I’m a bartender, and they just start telling me, you know, this is this last experience, this last event was awesome. Or I get way too many emails from the chamber. You know, I’ll ask them, Did

Sara Ray  27:46 

you get to see my, like, little chamber therapist?

Brandon Burton  27:48 

Exactly. They’re like, I get so many emails from the chamber. I probably got it. But you know, yeah, I deleted or I just opened it moved on. So yeah, being able to segment make it highly personable, I think it’s so important. And that’s, that’s the age we’re in today. Anyway, I mean, if you’re just doing a blanket email, there’s, there’s a purpose for it, you know, at times, but if that’s your only communications, a blanket email, you’re missing the boat, and you’re missing opportunities to connect with members. So yeah,

Sara Ray  28:17 

and our ultimate goal is to, for people to have value in what we do, right? Like the end game is for someone to say that they got what they were looking for out of their membership. And if you have simple tools in place to be able to pinpoint that so a year in you can say, Hey, you said you wanted information on policy, or you wanted us to go to bat for you, as the voice of business in our community, you can go back on that and say, You, this was what you you know, this is what you said you find value in here. Here is how we took that, like, let’s talk about that. So being heard is so important for businesses.

Brandon Burton  28:52 

How do you use the information that you get? I’m calling it segmenting, just for maybe lack of a better term? How do you use that information to create content or plan future events? Do you ever look into it to weigh that into what you’re doing?

Sara Ray  29:08 

Oh, absolutely. Yes. I mean, so think of Okay, so we’ve had events, okay. Our breakfast series is a great example. So we used to have a, you know, you know, just a networking breakfast. It was just putting people in a room together. And that was it. Like there was no agenda. I mean, we will get up give door prizes, you know, that normal kind of, Hey, everyone, thanks for coming. And we shifted that and based off of feedback from people saying, you know, what are you doing for minority owned businesses? Why can we have women’s programming we’ve done you know, we did surveys and focus groups talked with our board, of course, and then we’re able to create those events and then solicit feedback on Did you like this, what did you think? And then just continue to craft our programming to meet the needs of our members? You know, we’re a member driven organization as all chambers should be, and so meeting the needs of what our business is our and that looks very different than two years ago, it looks very different than 10 years ago. So just continuing, you know, I am, I am always a proponent of new and different, and sometimes I think exhausts my team. But at the same time, the things that were relevant, you know, three or four years ago are very different. Now, we were never in a space where we thought we’d be relying on Zoom to do, you know, a majority of our work for six or eight months, so. So I think just being open minded and nimble listening to your members, and then and then being okay with adapting and changing, you don’t have to go and completely rebrand your whole organization, you can do it in small spaces, do a beta test of something, try it out, see if people like it, get their feedback. And then you can look at expanding that. So we do a lot in that space of trying things with small groups of people before we pull it into a larger space.

Brandon Burton  30:49 

Yeah. And I think as you gather that information on what their expectations are, as they join the chamber, you’re able to then speak their language. And then when it comes time to renew memberships, it’s very hard for them to say, you know, the Chamber didn’t do anything for me, I didn’t see any value out of the chair, if you’re sending them those direct communications and talking to them in exactly what they’re looking for. So yeah, I hope everyone’s taking notes. Yeah, and

Sara Ray  31:15 

I think you one more thing, because you asked me about like sharing information, articles and things that you’re what we’ve what we do is we do a lot of alcohol, like inbound marketing. So sharing resources, I’ve always been a firm believer, we don’t have to be the doer of all things, or the creator of all things. So we have a huge focus on building partnerships with other organizations. So we have a great partnership with the Georgia Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, right? We have, I’m going to call it a language barrier with dealing with our Hispanic business community, they are successful at that. So why would we sit and recreate the wheel in bringing that into the mix. So we have a lot of content that we gather from our members, subject matter experts, we partner with our colleges and universities, you know, they’ve great economists that work at colleges and universities, why not lean on them to do our economic development reports and things of that nature. So I think that that’s very important. Even with trainings and professional development opportunities for businesses, you don’t have to create things. It’s it’s even thought more highly of if you partner with others, so we have gone that direction. Our new our new tagline is where partnerships and businesses thrive, because that’s the environment that we try to create. So it’s a lot easier to than trying to recreate the wheel on things.

Brandon Burton  32:27 

That’s right. I love that. So as we start to wrap up here, I wanted to ask you what might be one tip or action item for chamber champion listening that they could do at their chamber to help take them up to the next level?

Action Item/Tip for Chamber Champions

Sara Ray  32:40 

Yes, um, so I would say, and this is a super simple Hey, friend, email that basically anybody can send out is send an email out, I did this, I tried to do it about once a year. But send out an email to your membership and from from your executive, or whomever you deem that you think would have the baby could even be your board chair, and ask them how you what, you know, kind of three questions What what are you getting from us that you love? What are some things that you need from us? And what can we do differently? You know, and just get that feedback from them. It doesn’t have to be this highly calculated survey. And again, if you go with that personal approach of how can I best support you? I guarantee I remember the first time I did, I got like, 300 emails back and I was inundated, but took the time to respond. And because it was coming from me, it wasn’t again, this, it doesn’t have to be this robust, well thought out process, just zap out an email, ask them how they’re doing how you can best support is there anything I can do to support your business? And you’ll be amazed at the results that you get, it’s super simple, but I promise you, like people find value in that kind of thing.

Brandon Burton  33:47 

Absolutely. lets them be heard. Yeah, yes, that’s awesome. Then you

Sara Ray  33:51 

can just make a list. And then you know, and you have your marching orders for the things that you can look at adapting and changing. So yeah, and listen and listen to them. And share that information back with your members is also important. Don’t just take it all and keep it in a dropbox folder somewhere, share out with people what, what, you know what your membership is saying. So,

Brandon Burton  34:09 

for sure. So as we look to the future, how do you see the future chambers and their purpose going forward?

Future of Chambers

Sara Ray  34:18 

Oh, um, you know, I’m sure you’ve chatted with my buddy Casey Steinbacher. Before. She is a great friend of mine. And, you know, she preaches a lot about going from being relevant to being essential. And I think that and I have others that have kind of lived in that space. And I feel like that’s the environment. The things that we have done in the past, as far as chambers go, you know, think 30 years ago, chambers used to be the place that did parades and you know, they might have done ribbon cuttings every now and then. And now we have chambers that are moving the needle in Washington DC advocating on behalf of businesses and helping businesses stay afloat, you know, during the pandemic. So I think I think where I see it going is just continuing to move into that space of being essential. And that looks different for every community. And for every business. You know, during the pandemic, I had a business that was it, they it’s like a kind of like a farm of like a petting zoo farm. And she needed to feed the alpacas on her farm. And the only way she raised revenue to do that was by having visitors and she couldn’t. So helping her figure out what was essential to her helped her us be essential to her. Does that make sense? So. So I think that where we’re headed is into a space of, I mean, it sounds silly, but it’s a space of humanity, it’s listening to people, it’s talking to them. It’s providing a space where they can have those open, honest, intentional conversations, whether that’s about diversity, or whether that’s about you know, growing a company, I think it’s just giving people that personalized attention, where they feel that there is not another option than to be a part of the chamber. I think that that’s kind of the direction that we’re headed in. And that looks different for every business, and it looks different for every community. Yeah, it’s been open to that, too, is important.

Brandon Burton  36:07 

I love that you brought up Casey, and in her book, you know, relevant to essential. And if anybody hasn’t read it, it’s a it’s an e book. So look it up on Amazon. terrific book, but I mean, she talks about being relevant to your members becoming essential to your community, which really changes perspective, as you read through the book and read, you know, see the ideas that she shares in there. Yeah, changes perspective. So thank you for that. What would be the best way for a listener to reach out and connect with you if they have any questions about, you know, how you’re doing things their communication wise, or they couldn’t keep up with what’s the best way to reach out,

Connect with Sara Ray

Sara Ray  36:48 

I get excited, and I talk fast. So I would say the easiest way is on LinkedIn. And it’s just my LinkedIn profile, you can search at Sara Ray. You can also get to us through our very snazzy new chamber website. It’s DouglasCountyGeorgia.com. Or I’m happy to share my information with you. It’s ray@douglascountygeorgia.com is my email where you can look you can look me up anywhere.

Brandon Burton  37:14 

That’s right. And we’ll get all your contact information in the show notes for this episode, which will be at ChamberChatPodcast.com/episode166. But Sarah, thank you so much for joining me today and talking to all the Chamber Champions about this great work that you’re doing and really moving your your chamber forward with your communication channels, and really being more essential to the businesses in your community. I appreciate that.

Sara Ray  37:40 

Absolutely. Thank you for having me.

Brandon Burton  37:43 

Brandon Burton  33:56 
If you are a chamber professional, please subscribe to Chamber Chat Podcast in Apple podcast, Google podcasts or Spotify. When you subscribe to Chamber Chat Podcast new episodes will show up in your podcast app each week as they are released. If you’re finding value in this podcast, please leave us a rating and a review in iTunes. But most importantly, please share Chamber Chat Podcast with your colleagues that are in the industry.

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Disaster & Economic Recovery with Natalie English

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Below is an auto-generated transcription of my conversation with Natalie English. 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.

Introduction

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.

Voiceover Talent  0:14 

And now your host he believes having an emergency preparedness plan is crucial is my dad Brandon Burton.

Brandon Burton  0:20 

Hello Chamber Champions. Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your host Brandon Burton, where it is my goal 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 Jason mock president and CEO of the San Marcos Area Chamber to learn how the Holman Brothers have provided value for his chamber.

Jason Mock  0:44 

Two years ago, we brought in Holman Brothers to help our organization go to that next level. And in those two years, our team has transformed the way that we think about sponsorships and non dues revenue. And I would really encourage you if you’re looking to take your chamber to the next level to bring on the Holman Brothers.

Brandon Burton 1:01
You can learn more about Holman Brothers Membership Sales Solutions by visiting HolmanBros.com.

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Guest Introduction

Our guest for this episode is Natalie English. Natalie currently serves as the president and CEO of the Wilmington Chamber of Commerce in North Carolina. She’s served for almost 25 years in a chamber of commerce leadership role and over 30 years advocating on behalf of business. Natalie believes it’s her calling to work with business government and elected leaders to make her community attractive for business growth and investment. Natalie has almost 30 years of experience monitoring legislative and regulatory issues locally statewide and at the federal level. She has had a strong track record of success and has been responsible for building community support for many investments in infrastructure that have been key to economic development in the communities in which she has worked. She’s had leadership experience and background in effecting policy that impacts the cost and ease of doing business quality of life and workforce. Natalie found herself faced with the opportunity to advocate on behalf of her community Wilmington, following Hurricane Florence. Natalie has taken many of the lessons learned during that natural disaster to lead her community through the economic crisis associated with the pandemic, which we’ll cover in this episode in more detail. In her spare time, Natalie enjoys spending time with her son Rick on the sidelines of many sports activities, playing golf, reading and writing.

Natalie, I’m excited to have you with me today on Chamber Chat Podcast, if you would just 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 better.

Natalie English  2:43 

So hi, Chamber Champions at some, it’s great to be able to be with you this way. I have admire so many of you across the country, and appreciate inputs and things that I’ve learned from all of you. So I hope that I can share something helpful for you. So I guess something interesting about me. I love to sing. And while I’m not trained to do so I have a decent voice and so have enjoyed over the years in a couple of churches that I’ve been a member of to be able to sing with the band. So we’re not talking about just Tim books, which I do, but rock and roll. And so you never know I may when I retire from this go try to replace Mick Jagger, you know, as old as he is, but, but I’m not that good. But I do love to do it. So

Brandon Burton  3:33 

what’s one of your favorite songs to sing?

Natalie English  3:36 

Oh, gosh. Wow. I mean, there’s there’s so many my favorite artists, Christian contemporary artists is Natalie grant. Interestingly, she has the same name that I do, but we have had a bandleader tell me that our voices are similar. Now she’s way better than I am and much better trained than I am. But I can I can sing her songs really well, because we’re the same range. So I love her. And I’ve just love the I love worshipping through music. And so I just yeah, it’s what I like to do.

Brandon Burton  4:05 

That’s awesome. I love these little facts I get to learn about people to do the podcasts. Thank you for sharing. Sure. Tell us a little bit about your chamber about the Wilmington chamber kind of size staff budget location just to kind of get us off perspective as we get into our discussion.

About the Wilmington Chamber

Natalie English  4:21 

Sure. And there’s a little bit of a little bit of history perspective that needs to go along with that when I joined the Wilmington Chamber in March of 2017. We were a total of five staff. Our roles said we had around 900 members and our budget was in the 800 to $900,000 range. We have been through a major hurricane, a minor hurricane and a pandemic. And I’m really pleased to say that we finished 2021 with a $1.2 billion revenue and and expenses. million million sorry, well, I want to be doing sorry, 1.2 million, I’ve been talking about building bridges. And that’s always starts with a B, so sorry, 1.2 million. And we just added our eight staff person last month. So it’s continuing to grow finding the ways we do that, and doing that in the midst of and post disasters. So I’m really proud of my team.

Brandon Burton  5:27 

That is great. Oh, it says a lot about the work you’re doing to still provide that value and which is going to be evident in our discussion today, but to see that return on investments and, and to see that growth continue, even through the pandemic. So our topic for discussion, so I’ve kind of hinted towards it as I read through your bio, and in just now but we’ll be focusing our discussion on disaster and economic recovery. And I’m excited to get into this discussion with you you’ve had some I hesitate to say great experience, because I’m sure it wasn’t great experience going through it. But some valuable lessons that have come out of that. So we’ll get into that discussion as soon as I get back from this quick break.

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Topic-Disaster & Economic Recovery

All right, Natalie, we are back. So disaster and economic recovery. I’d mentioned before with Hurricane Florence that ripped through Wilmington and cause destruction, you had another minor hurricane as well. What kind of lessons did you learn through these natural disasters that would lead you to help your community be prepared and to be able to bounce back and recover afterwards.

Natalie English  8:45 

It’s funny, you know, to be to think about being fortunate for a disaster, but and it was it was a great experience because it has equipped me, I think, to to help to lead my community through the pandemic. So in September of 2018, Hurricane Florence was expected to be a Category five storm and so I left town with my young son at the time and our our dog and we camped out in a basement at a friend’s house in Charlotte. And instead of being a Category Five, she downgraded but she sat here for days just dumping rain on our community in our region. And because I still had internet service and phone in Charlotte, I started calling colleagues around the country and so shout out to folks at chambers of commerce in the Houston area in the New Orleans area, who had been through major hurricanes who who provided advice and counsel to me. And so from that basement in Charlotte, one of the biggest pieces of advice that I’ve received from from our colleagues in the Houston area was to make sure that the community gets connected Some of the some of the scariest things that can happen, or that people get left behind in recovery. And the way to prevent that is to make sure that we’re talking as we’re responding to do the the immediate needs in the community. And so I called my friend, the CEO of the United Way of the Cape Fear area, and said, I think we need to get the not for profit response agencies together with the business community, because I had been getting calls, right? So from from the response agencies asking me if I had a business that could provide this or that, and then the requests started sounding the same. And so I had that fear that we were falling into this trap of having multiple responses to one family, and no responses to another family and so called in church leaders from across the community, and found that we did have some less connected communities, less affluent communities, communities of color, who were not receiving the same responses as others, and it was unintentional, and yet it still was happening. And so that was the biggest lesson I learned is that immediately after some sort of disaster, making sure that you’ve your community is well connected, putting aside competition and putting aside potentially partisan differences. And, and I’m so proud of this community for doing just that. And being able to develop not only the response, the immediate response, but then to continue working together, literally, even through the pandemic. We’ve been working together to identify grant dollars that could help us become a more resilient community when the next storm hits. So infrastructure, specifically water, sewer and electricity infrastructure that will withstand the next major storm that might come through with continued to stay together. Because response can sometimes takes years to complete. When there’s damage done to homes, then the second major lesson I learned is that there is a lot of opportunity to help individuals and families recover from storms. But there was nothing for business unless you wanted to take out a loan, we’ve we invited the SBA into the chamber building after that hurricane and said Come help our businesses. But when when a business is impacted, so detrimentally, they don’t have the capacity for a loan. And so so that’s so I started then advocating in this community and at the state level, to say, look, the next time a major storm comes to any, any place in our community, in our in our state, we need to be ready to respond. Because those businesses represent jobs. Sometimes it’s two jobs, sometimes it’s 20. Sometimes it’s 500. But whatever the number is, something has to be available not just for an individual to save their home, but for their employer or to save their job. That was a broken record.

Brandon Burton  13:04 

That’s so important. Yeah. And I think that gets overlooked and curious, what kind of traction Have you seen as he started to advocate for businesses to be able to recover after disaster?

Natalie English  13:14 

Well, and I can’t take credit for it happening at the federal level. And because I’m not sure my voice has been that loud. But I but I think that coupled with colleagues around the country who’ve been through this and had said the same thing, when when we hit the lockdown for COVID, the amount of investment that our federal government, our state government, and then our local government were willing to make in businesses that that were forced to shut down as a result of the pandemic, that that did. That doesn’t happen. You’re right. We so even though government doesn’t force a shutdown, post disaster, natural disaster, the shutdown still happens. But this time, because government forced the shutdown, they also saw themselves as a as a as a resource for recovery from that shutdown. And so we here at the Chamber advocated locally for our city and county to use some of the dollars that were allocated from the federal government to invest in the recovery and reopening of our business community. And they responded, four and a half million dollars that we were able to, to distribute in our community. And then because we were so successful and advocating for it, they turned around and said, Okay, can you manage the program? And of course, we said, yes, yeah, as wide open, what have we done, but that also brought in some revenue for us because they were willing to pay us to administer the program and then to help them get the money out more quickly. And while I’m looking around the state, other communities who still haven’t done You’re down how they’re going to spend their American Recovery Plan funds. We’ve already gotten ours out the door, because our local governments worked quickly.

Brandon Burton  15:08 

Yeah. And the time is so key to that, right. I mean, it really just sits there. And you know, it’s not getting out to the businesses not doing the purpose that it’s supposed to be. Right. So I’m curious as he reached out to, through the the hurricane situations, he reached out to other chambers, he had mentioned the Houston area, did you happen to chance to chance to speak to Diane probes at Rockport Fulton. Now?

Natalie English  15:34 

I don’t remember. I actually, yeah, spoke to so many.

Brandon Burton  15:39 

I had her on the podcast way back in episode 12, over 150 episodes ago, when she was talking about, you know, the hurricanes that have hit them, you know, on the Texas coast. Yeah, and what they’ve did to, you know, prepare the infrastructure and everything going forward. But then it was interesting, because I had recorded that, and it was just a few months later that, you know, the pandemic hit. And I actually had several recordings for the podcast ready to go. But that week, when everything shut down, I was like, you know, what, we’re going to push these back a little bit, I’m going to replay that episode from Diane probes, oh, there are so many key lessons in there from a natural disaster that can be applied to economic recovery, and just, you know, a pandemic, you know, I guess at the time, we didn’t realize it is necessarily going to become a pandemic, right. But key lessons to be learned. So, share with us what some of these things are that you took from the natural disaster experience, experiences, and being able to roll those over into, you know, pandemic response and relief and recovery from that situation is that I see that being a lot more applicable to chambers across the country.

Natalie English  16:52 

Yeah, absolutely. I think, um, I think that you sometimes Chamber members, they write their check, and maybe they come to an event or two, that maybe they they don’t really think they hear from their chamber, right for the year, and then the renewal notice comes up. See, so we are all struggle, we all struggle with making sure that our investors see the relevance even if they don’t participate in the programming, right? And and what’s the best communications tool to do that? I will tell you if Chamber of Commerce does not take full advantage of any disaster that strikes, but being that trusted source of information about the resources, where the pandemic was concerned about new regulations and new guidelines, I mean, the guidelines were changing and still are, right, it feels like by the hour, and and so we post hurricane, and at the beginning of the pandemic, we implemented daily and then for not for long, but for a few weeks daily, people wanted to hear from us every day about what was new, and what do we need to do? And where do we where are we going to find help and, and so we did daily emails probably for about six weeks into the pandemic. And then we waned back to about twice a week, and did that well into the fall of 2020. We’re now back to our once a week official news related email that we send to our members, but it showed them that we were on top of what was going on and that we could connect them, it improved our relationship with many of them who didn’t hear from us. And it also opened up a line of two way communication, so that they could tell us the issues they were facing, we may not know about ahead, manufacturers at the very beginning stages. So but we are essential services, right? So different types of businesses wanting to make the case to our elected leaders that they were essential to the to to to our country, to our community. And so it opened up to a communication with some companies we had been getting checked for, from for years that hadn’t really heard from and so never wasted disaster as a Chamber of Commerce’s what I would suggest.

Brandon Burton  19:19 

Yeah, I’ve heard a quote about that, you know, never let a good disaster go to waste, right? So when you talk about two way communication is that they would respond back to the email or they would get that input from you from those weekly or daily emails, and then pick up the phone and call or how was that two way communication established?

Natalie English  19:41 

So some of it would happen in response to the email. And then you know, when I when I moved here in 2017, I reluctantly put my cell phone number on my business card. But in hindsight, I’m glad because we all got sent home right and, and yes, I could My voicemail or I could forward my voicemail from officer, but they are members, those who wanted to reach out to me, and who were able to get their hands on my cell phone number, I believe that they felt like they had a more immediate connection. So a lot of it really did come through my cell phone number. But also, in response to the email to my staff team, I’ve surrounded myself with people who are well connected in different parts of our community than I am. And so they got direct phone calls from our members. And it just we were we were responsive that we were available. And we were responsive, even though we were not sitting in the chamber building. We were each sitting in our individual home offices, but but we were available for them.

Brandon Burton  20:48 

Yeah. So I think you’d also touched on the idea of being the trusted resource for information. And we hear that being said a lot these days in reference to chambers of commerce. But just to stress that point a little bit more. We see in communities all over that the what was the traditional trusted news outlets, you know, local TV, newspapers, things like that are, you know, if they haven’t closed or shut down their resources, or much less to cover those important stories to, to establish that information base, where it creates a void in communities, where Chambers of Commerce really are very well suited to fill that void. And to get out that information. And you don’t need to cover you know, all the high school, you know, sports events and all that. But, you know, the things that are important to get information out in your community. What communication methods you met, you mentioned email, what communication methods do you guys use to help establish, you know, that trusted credibility in your community? Yeah,

Natalie English  21:55 

yeah, I don’t, it’s not unique. I mean, we do we, we, under normal circumstances, let’s call them we send a weekly email and it includes a president’s report, we call it so it’s something some topic for me that’s current and maybe in in the works that we inform our members about. We then we also have gotten much better over the last few years at incorporating social media and connecting with our, our business community through our social media outlets, and we haven’t yet dived into Tik Tok, but we’re on every other channel there is out there. And so Tik Tok. Next, they keep my staff keeps telling me, they want me to start doing videos. So we’ll see how that goes. But um, and then, and then I would say, again, because we just celebrated last week, our 150/5 consecutive annual meeting. So this Chamber of Commerce is more than 155 years old. And many chambers right across the country, or many communities across the country have had Chambers of Commerce in their community for that long. And so I think, I think we need to be I think it’s incumbent upon us to keep being that trusted source because they I think that I really believe that we don’t fall into the same category as as same members of Congress, right? People say Congress is that I don’t trust Congress or I don’t trust the legislature, I don’t trust that’s the only because because the the, the the perception that they’re all about politics, and they’re still doing really good work on our behalf. But for us Chambers of Commerce were seen as the place to go for information about tourism, for information about starting a business. And so it’s not political at the start. And so just taking advantage of that reputation that we’ve had for over 100 years in most of our communities, I think is how to do it and then using every channel possible, because different people are communicated with differently. And then finally, I would say that you can’t only communicate with everybody with the same voice, right? So me as a white woman, chamber CEO, I’m probably isn’t the right person to communicate with our young professionals in this community. I’m probably a little older than they’d like to see. Or you we have some great leaders of two councils that we’ve created an African American Business Council and a Latin American Business Council. And so we make sure that whenever we have critical messaging that needs to get out to the entire business community, that we we engage with them to help us get that word out, and whether it has to be in a different language, or through different channels. Because everybody’s not going to listen to the white female chamber CEO and US got to accept that and and use those other vehicles and show that willingness to build those bridges between communities.

Brandon Burton  25:08 

Right? I think a point that you touched on that, yeah, turn on the light bulb, in my mind is when you talked about, you know, 155 years for the woman can chamber. Talk about credibility, you know, you guys aren’t going anywhere, you’ve been around a long time, you’ve been representing business in your community for a long time. And being able to get that messaging out to the community and say, Look, we are here for you, we’re here to help make Wilmington or whoever’s listening, you know, your own community, a strong place, you know, a great place to live, and work and to do business. It builds that credibility. And, you know, I wanted to circle back and I apologize, this kind of goes back to when you’re talking about the disaster recovery, from the storms, that you had mentioned, how you reached out to church leaders, which I thought that’s genius. I mean, they have a close following right there in good. Typically, they’re going to be in close communication with members of their congregations. Granted, not everybody in the community attends a church or, you know, regularly to have that relationship, but you’re getting certain segments of the population that, like you’ve mentioned, are being missed. I wanted to kind of piggyback on that maybe, and even add in homeowners associations. So that would be another way to reach some of those in communities that normally your email blasts with necessarily reach. But in times of a disaster or emergencies, they can be a great resource to help you connect with the greater community.

Natalie English  26:42 

Absolutely. And, and I would also say, other membership associations, right. So locally, we have strong partnership with our Home Builders Association, and our Realtors Association. And, and then other Chambers of Commerce in our region. So and in some of those cases, they have significantly fewer staff than we do. And so I considered it extreme flattery, when I would have a chamber exec from another county in the region, or another partner, you know, text call, email me and asked me if they could cut and paste our information. And I said, Absolutely, this is not this, I don’t own it, I got it from other places, to please just do whatever you need to do, you can board it as is or you can paste it in your own template and take credit for it, I don’t care because at that time in our region, it was it was about getting the word out about the resources available. And, and so I think it’s also incumbent upon us to be those partners and not see ourselves as competitors. With those organizations, we all have the same goals, we all want our economies to grow, and economies don’t stop at county lines or city lines.

Brandon Burton  27:56 

That’s right. Now, I love that idea of especially if you can establish those relationships and just know, hey, going forward, we’re gonna put out a lot of information, we want to be that trusted source for information in our community. And if there’s anything that resonates with people in your group, whatever your organization is, please take it and share it and anything to support our community. So absolutely, that’s very key. Well, I wanted to ask you, if there might be one tip or action item for listeners that they could do to maybe lift their chamber up to the next level.

Action Item/Tip for Chamber Champions

Natalie English  28:33 

So I was I had to fill out a survey a questionnaire yesterday about something in our community. And I was asked what the best piece of advice I ever received. And, and it was about staffing, right about building a team. And so this one mentor of mine once said, surround yourself with people who think differently, and you have different skills and gifts. And I know we’ve all heard this Yeah. And and some of us do it really well. And, and some of us and even me at times, have fallen into that trap of of having people around me who think like me, and I’m I don’t know that unnecessarily horribly failed at those moments in my career. But I can tell you that in the moments of my career, when I have surrounded myself with people who have different perspectives, who think differently for me, who have different backgrounds, and different skills, we’ve been so much more successful. And so as I have rebuilt this Wilmington chamber team since 2017, it’s been the focus for me is to ensure that when I’m creating a position and then trying to fill it that I look at a broad array of talents and skills that I don’t necessarily bring because I am I am not the beyond the wall and I need people around me who can backfill my weaknesses, so that I can soar with my strengths and that would be the thing that I would say to get to the next level, it really is about building a team around you whether and for you small chamber staff leaders, I get it, it’s like, how can I do that I only have one other position, well then bring in volunteers who think differently. So whatever your team has to look like, just make sure that there are people who bring different skill sets to that table and different ways of thinking,

Brandon Burton  30:21 

and what a great feeling neurologically, you know, when your mind is open to a new perspective, I don’t know if it’s a flood of serotonin, or dopamine, or whatever it is, it’s like, whoa, you know, that’s how some people see the world. This is. Right, it really changes your perspective and changes you as a person for the absolute LinkedIn. So I know chambers all over the world are always thinking about the future and trying to remain relevant. So I always like to ask as we look to the future of chambers of commerce, how do you see their purpose going forward?

Future of Chambers

Natalie English  30:55 

Gosh, in certainly in the immediate future, it was before the pandemic. And but it’s just been exacerbated, I think we have to become the resource for Talent Development in our communities, we have to have our ear to our members in the business community about what they need in talent development, workforce development, if you will. And then we have to advocate with our education institutions. So that they while they are unbelievably smart, they don’t work in industry every day. And we have to help them as they’re creating the curricula and the programming that will develop our future workforce, that workforce that that our businesses need tomorrow and the workforce that they’re going to need 10 years from now.

Brandon Burton  31:43 

I love that. It reminded me I just recently had Doug Griffin’s on the on the podcast, the author of 13 ways to kill your community. And when I asked him this question, he had a slightly different spin on it. But is he talking about talent development, a lot of times we think of the schools and workforce and talent development, which is I think, right on, and he was looking at it as training for employees of your member businesses, and really the businesses throughout your community. And he said the number one thing would be to train employees and customer service. Right. So when you have people visiting from out of town or new to the community, if they can go into the local businesses and have a great experience? Absolutely. Again, chambers perfect to help train the development in their communities. So just under that umbrella.

Natalie English  32:36 

Absolutely. We talk about that all the time on our tourism development authority. Yeah, yeah,

Brandon Burton  32:42 

that’s a great tip. Well, as we start wrapping up here, I like to give you an opportunity for any Chamber Champions listening that might want to reach out and connect with you and, you know, maybe expand on anything that you’ve shared with us today, what would be the best way for them to reach out and connect with you?

Connect with Natalie English

Natalie English  32:59 

So the best way is probably through email simply because I check it sometimes 24/7 It’s English, my last name english@wilmingtonchamber.org. And I do try to get back to everybody, at least within 24 or so hours, and we’d love to help I think that’s the best thing and I don’t know who coined the R&D phrase as rip off and duplicate but I do it proudly and unashamedly and I, I encourage people to rip off and duplicate for me anytime it helps.

Brandon Burton  33:31 

Perfect. Well, we will get that in our show notes for this episode, which will be found at chamberchatpodcast.com/episode165. That Natalie, thank you so much for joining us today on Chamber Chat Podcasts. I love hearing from your experiences and things that you’ve learned and, and ways to help the Chamber Champions that are listening. Thank you so much.

Natalie English  33:53 

Thank you, it’s a great opportunity.

Brandon Burton  33:56 
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13 Ways to Kill Your Community with Doug Griffiths

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Below is an auto-generated transcription of my conversation with Doug Griffiths. 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.

Introduction

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.

And now, your host she believes that there are a couple favorite ways to call community. Here’s my dad Brandon Burton.

Hello, Chamber Champions. Thank you for joining us today on 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.

Our title sponsor is Holman Brothers Membership Sales Solutions. Let’s hear from Diann Rogers, President and CEO of the Rancho Cordova Area Chamber to learn how the Holman Brothers has provided value for her.

Diann Rogers 0:47
As a medium sized chamber, we recognize that it’s absolutely critical to have a well qualified and well trained membership development person, home and brothers trained that person recruited that person then they even trained me on how to manage that person. We’re grateful for the support we got.

Brandon Burton 1:01
You can learn more about Holman Brothers Membership Sales Solutions by visiting HolmanBros.com.

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Guest Introduction

Our guest for this episode is Doug Griffiths. Doug, you may recognize as being the author of 13 Ways to Kill Your Community. Doug grew up on a ranch outside of a small community, where that contributed to practical education for him giving a strong work ethic and critical thinking skills. Education, whether he’s learning or teaching has always been an important aspect of his life. After teaching and ranching for several years, Doug successfully served as an elected member of the Legislative Assembly in the province of Alberta for four consecutive terms. In that time, he served in two senior cabinet portfolios as Minister of Municipal Affairs, and Minister of service Alberta, as well as three junior positions in agriculture, finance and Solicitor General. Doug retired from politics in January 2015. to actively pursue his passion of helping communities, organizations and businesses grow stronger in his best selling book 13 Ways to Kill Your Community. Doug identifies challenges and opportunities that all our communities face. The lessons that come from those stories are applicable to all types of communities, whether they’re towns, organizations or businesses. His talents include seeing through the lies, we tell ourselves, overcoming bad attitudes, targeting and focusing tactical planning, communicating with those who are afraid to change and building enduring prosperity for communities. His passion lies and building strong communities. Because within strong communities, leadership can succeed, businesses can prosper and families can find great quality of life.

Doug, I am super excited to have you with me 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 share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little bit better.

Doug Griffiths 3:05
Oh, Brandon, thank you, I am really excited to be on the Chamber Chat Podcast. And I appreciate the invitation. Especially when I get the chance to talk about how valuable and important the role the chambers are going to play in, in moving communities through the past, into the present, and then into the future, it’s going to be so critically instrumental in ensuring the success of communities and I fundamentally believe that building communities is single most important job on earth because as soon as communities are, are successful and prosperous, then families will be able to take care of each other and take care of themselves. So I’m really excited to be here. Something interesting about me, I I don’t know if there’s anything that you haven’t said already, except I will add one thing I was in provincial politics for 13 years for four terms, I resigned on purpose to go back to community building, which is is how I wound up in politics. I tell everybody, if you want in politics, just just keep talking. And if you want out of politics, just just keep talking, talking. Yeah. But you know what, I have been through rehab, I am fully recovered. So I’m I’m good. I’m pretty, pretty blunt and pretty focused on community building. So I’m glad to be here.

Brandon Burton 4:22
Well, I have a 16 year old son who would love to get into politics, I’m going to have to share that advice with him because he just keeps talking all the time. It’s like it’s going to get you in trouble or it’s going to get you somewhere one or the other. Or both or both. Yeah. So I shared a little bit in your bio, but tell us what you do with 13 Ways what kind of services you offer as a company and organization what what is your mission and goal that you hereafter?

About 13 Ways

Doug Griffiths 4:49
Yeah, it’s um, it’s kind of funny because it’s expanded. I mean, when I resigned from politics and the second edition I had finished just after That and released it. And it’s a national bestseller in the US and in Canada. Granted, we need about a 10th of the number of sales to be a best seller here. But it’s people ask me to come and speak and to do the 13 Ways presentation. And so I’ve been all over North America Speaking and then people would call me up after and say, so help us what, what do we do now. And so I would offer up some advice on you know, what I think strategic planning should look like, focusing more on strategy than on operations, because so many strategic plans are generic and watered down, and they’re about operations and there’s no strategy whatsoever in them. So we, we, I brought along a couple of people and our team has grown to five and we have specialists in economic development and chamber issues and communication in modernizing main streets with with designs and socialization in website design, and, and social media and traditional marketing strategies. And we’ve just grown into a pretty exceptional team. And so we, we tend to go into communities and, and assess what their real strengths are, they often think that, you know, what they think are their strengths sometimes aren’t and what they think are their weaknesses can actually become strengths. And then we, we engage people in the community, you know, a lot of public engagement people, you know, gather opinions, but you know, people are busy with their day to day lives. And oftentimes, it’s the the tyranny of the urgent the issue right in front of them they want addressed, and that’s not about what’s what you need to do to be successful 10 years from now. So we plant seeds with people to with new ideas, then we do a strategic plan. And then we do the marketing and communication strategy focused on, on helping people in the community get excited about their potential and, and crafting a real marketing strategy. So they don’t get lost in all the noise and new design websites. And so we sort of do the gamut from, we need help all the way through to we’re, we’re ready to take that first step and actually bring people in.

Brandon Burton 7:00
Awesome. And I think there’s so much value to bring in that perspective from somebody outside of your community, to be able to say, here’s your strengths and weaknesses, and I relate it back to some of the greatest athletes, you know, the Michael Jordan’s and Tiger Woods of the world. They all had coaches, right. I mean, they were the best of the best, but they had they still had coaches who could bring a different perspective and help them see those blind spots are the weaknesses and strengths to help exploit. So I think that’s so key.

Doug Griffiths 7:29
We often get called Community coaches or community therapists, because most consultants come in and they write a report and they leave and for our clients, we tell them once you’ve hired us, we never go away. We’re relentlessly going to advise you and, and give you strategies to make you successful. Because, you know, we we don’t just do this to make money. We do this because we believe in the cause we’ve we’ve adopted.

Brandon Burton 7:54
Yeah, for sure. Well, we’re going to talk more today about the 13 Ways to Kill Your Community. I know a lot of Chamber Champions are familiar with the book, but we’ll have some some more maybe deep dive conversation on that as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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Topic-13 Ways to Kill Your Community

All right, we are back. And as I mentioned before the break well, we’re talking about 13 Ways to Kill Your Community, your book. And recently, I was invited to join a 13 Ways to Kill Your Community for chambers Facebook page. And that’s how we got connected and kind of one thing led to another and now we’re here talking on the podcast. But um, and I’ll link to that Facebook group too. So if anybody wants to join in and and add their contributions to the discussions, it’s a great place. But what stood out to me as I started reading your book, is you start off with a story or I guess, I mean, it’s a real deal where where you address high school students, and have them kind of project themselves into the future. But you have kind of a unique twist on it. Do you want to share kind of that, that mindset and kind of set the stage for the discussion?

Doug Griffiths 11:22
Yeah, sure. I, we’ve actually had people say that one of the most valuable stories, because the 13 Ways to Kill Your Community, they say then isn’t about community building, it’s about the way we govern and manage our lives. And that’s, that’s where it was born from. So I was a, I was a junior high teacher, before its subs, I made enough money to subsidize my ranching habits, so I could buy more horses and cows. And I would go talk to high school students about how to be successful. And it was, it was a pretty straight up presentation, you know, so, you know, study hard, don’t do drugs, marry someone nice. It’s it’s pretty easy formula, and that the high school students would look at me go, I know, my parents told me that. And everybody’s told me that for for my entire life, I know how to do that. And so when I was done, they’d walk out and say, Thanks, that was wonderful. But nothing really changed. And then I walked into this classroom and had an epiphany right before I was going to do the presentation, instead of talking about how to be successful. I asked them to describe what it would look like, if they ruined their lives. If you failed, that they look down the road, they’re 40 years old, and they have absolutely ruin their lives. Describe it to me. And so their high school students, they would say things like, well, I’d, I’d be a drug addict, I’d write that on the board, I’d wind up in jail, I’d write that on the board, I would fail out of school. So I couldn’t take care of my family, I’d write that on the board, whatever they came up with, I put it on the board. And when they finished with compiling a really robust list, I’d say great, let’s pretend you want to do this. Any one of these things you want to ruin your life. How would you start today? So let’s say you want to be a drug addict? What would you do today to get down start on that path? And I mean, they’re high school students. So they’d hum and haw, and nobody would say anything until one person put up their hand and say, Well, if I wanted to become a drug addict, I’d, I’d smoke a joint after school, and two kids would turn red, because that’s what they did yesterday. And that, you know, they’d also debate well, but alcohol is worse than the marijuana and regardless, they, they started to realize what they were doing that day that would lead them down that path, because I guarantee you, not a single person has ever said, I want to become a drug addict, if you if you meet a drug addict, none of them say hey, this was my lifelong ambition. But somehow, we we get there, we wind up in jail, we wind up marrying somebody we’re not happy with, we wind up doing all sorts of things that ruin our lives. And and it’s because we don’t pay attention to what we’re doing. Now. We wind up trading away what we want most 20 years from now in our lives, for what we want. Now that’s pleasurable, easy and convenient. And it just, I tell that story, because then it struck me that I was working with communities and talking about how to be successful. And they’ll say, Yeah, we know. But they were doing things that were the opposite of what they needed to do to be successful.

Brandon Burton 14:10
Yeah, so that it really helps to apply that same kind of exercise to communities and say, if your goal is to kill your community, where do you start? And then you’ve got these 13 ways. So why don’t we run down real quick, what the 13 ways are, and I’m sure we’ll circle back to certain ones in our discussion, but that way, just to kind of set the table for the discussion what, what are the 13 ways how communities kill or how people kill their communities?

Doug Griffiths 14:39
Well, the number one is, is forget the water. I mean, water is so critical and fundamental to our success. And I’ve I have a lot of I mean, Alberta’s an oil and gas sort of jurisdiction and, and a lot of my former colleagues and I talk and they say, Oh, the economy runs on on oil, and the next World War will be fought over oil. It’s so funny. fundamental to our economy. And I always point out to them, the last World War will be fought over water, because whoever controls water controls everything. I mean, you know, my grandpa always reminded me, you, you can go for three minutes without air three days without water and three weeks without food. And then you die, you can do without just about everything else. But these are so fundamental. And yet we, we sometimes take for granted that we have clean water, or and we get upset when we don’t. And nobody shows up for you know, a ribbon cutting on a new sewer line or a new water line. everyone shows up for the new ribbon cutting on the football arena or, you know, but we don’t show up for those things that are so fundamentally important. And I hear people complain about paying for water, and the prices that they pay. But most people I know pay more than that for cable TV. So it’s, we we forget how fundamentally important it is. So water is the first one attracting business is the second one. The third one is don’t engage youth. And it has the quintessential story about how we do the opposite of what we mean to every strategic plan I’ve seen in a community says engage more youth. Every presentation I do someone says how do we get more young people here? How do we get them to stay here, but but off line, I hear them talking about how there’s no hope and no future in the community and all the young people need to move to the city because there’s no business opportunities and no jobs. And then they sit there and wonder why they leave when all of their conversations chased them away and forced them out of town. deceive yourself is number four. We get into shop elsewhere which I know is popular which is of commerce. It’s chapter five, Chapter Six is don’t paint followed by don’t cooperate in the past. And that’s one of my favorite chapters talking about the the NIMBYs the nopes the bananas, the cave people and the fears all acronyms for different perspectives that that sabotage our our thinking about the future. Nine is seniors that shut them out 10 is reject every new idea 11 out ignore outsiders. 12 is grow complacent. And that’s that’s particularly for communities that are doing well and assume they will always do well, which is not the case. And the last one this chapter 13 Don’t take responsibility. It’s a great way to ensure your community fails is just to turn around and blame other people for

Brandon Burton 17:14
Absolutely, yeah. Excuse me, those, those 13 ways really should be eye openers, I think when you put it in that perspective of here’s how you kill your community. I mean, if you went after it from the perspective of do these things, and you’ll be prosperous and do well, it gets ignored. So

Doug Griffiths 17:33
it does and everyone goes, Yeah, we’re doing that. Exactly. You’re also doing the opposite. And that’s most of us can find success if we just stopped doing the things that sabotage that success.

Brandon Burton 17:44
Exactly. So on this 13 Ways to Kill Your Community Facebook group, for chambers. I posed the question out there. This is the first time I’ve done this for a podcast episode, I actually asked people what questions they would like to have you answer. And I got some some good questions. So we didn’t go any you know, we didn’t do any prep. You and I on this. So I’m just going to ask you some of these questions, have you feel them and circle back to stories out of the book, as you see applicable? But the first one is, what is the biggest thing that chambers get wrong about community development? And their role in it? What what might be that blind spot for for Chambers of Commerce?

Doug Griffiths 18:30
That’s a, that’s a great question. And I may, it’s a big category, because there’s quite a few things that that chambers get wrong, there’s things that all of us get wrong. So I don’t want anyone to think I’m being hypercritical chambers. But so if we’re going to focus on chambers, there are multiple things one, chambers often think that they’re the BL and and all business, and that their role is simply to advocate or lobby for businesses. And and then you get the money sets where you get the perspective that hey, we need to lower taxes to make businesses more profitable and get rid of the regulations. And that becomes the the core the the fundamental issue that chambers deal with. And yet, that might have worked back in the 80s, when when businesses did locate just were that you have the lowest taxes and you had the least number of regulations. But that’s not the way the world works anymore. In fact, back in the 80s, my parents used to move to where the jobs were on parents generation. But now the jobs move to where people want to live. And so economic development is community building successful businesses is community building. Community Building is economic development there there there that you can’t separate them anymore. And so Chambers of Commerce need to also advocate for reasonable taxes and reasonable regulations to make sure that you can create the kind of community that’s called To attract people who want to live there, and then businesses will attract it because you now have a workforce. But I, you know, I see so many chambers just saying oh, are the highest tax jurisdiction and most of the time, that’s a lie. But the impression, I have yet to go to a community where people don’t say, Oh, we’re the highest tax jurisdiction in the entire state of the entire province, everyone believes that, but that can’t be true for everyone. And most cases, it’s not so chambers could help with that. And the other big issue that I think chambers, miss, and again, this isn’t every chamber, but a lot of chambers get so buried in what they think they’re supposed to be doing. They forgot what’s what’s important. So we’ve seen many chambers that charge membership dues to businesses to raise funds, so they can hire someone to put on a big event, so that they can raise enough money to keep paying someone to collect dues, so they can put on a big event and around and around we go. Yeah, and yet, I mean, a lot of businesses, chambers should be helping with some professional development for businesses about about how to make their business more successful, but how to how to ensure that they have quality brick and mortar locations, but also have an online presence so they can grow, showing them how to how to reach out beyond the community with their business practices, but also to fully engage the community so that people want to shop local, that whole mantra, shop local is a is a guilt ridden mantra, that doesn’t work anymore, you’ve got to give people a reason to want to shop local. So those would be a few of the big things that I think chambers miss.

Brandon Burton 21:37
Absolutely. What just struck a chord with me was the, you know, helping the businesses be able to sell brick and mortar but online as well. And reminds me of the chapter shop elsewhere. Right? If you’re not helping your members be able to sell their products online, essentially, people are shopping elsewhere. And that’s going to have effects down the road.

Doug Griffiths 21:59
Yet one of the challenges businesses we hear from businesses, which I mean chambers can help with this is that I don’t have time, I don’t have time to have an online presence. I don’t have time to wash the windows and put up a window display that will attract people in or to beautify the business or to change the aroma or to I don’t have time, except, except it falls right into that old mantra of why does everyone not have time to do it right, but they have time to do it again. If you don’t take time to do it, now you might not be in business, and then you’ll have nothing but time, but it’ll be too late.

Brandon Burton 22:33
That’s right, I’d seen a quote and I wish I could give proper attribution to it. But it is along the lines of if you had the importance of having systems and if you’re too busy to have systems, you’ll always be too busy. So you need to be able to set aside the time to do things right. So one of the the next questions that I wanted to pose to you, as we had mentioned, chambers being having a key role in economic development, community development. So if that’s the role of a chamber is to help develop and help their community progress. How does a chamber get others particularly government entities to take them seriously.

Doug Griffiths 23:19
If we we’ve seen a lot of communities where the the chamber is trying to be progressive that trying to help with beautification downtown and create more advanced to draw businesses downtown. And it falls on deaf ears with the the larger Economic Development Authority or Alliance, so the town or the city or the county or the and my I have the same advice for everyone. Around this. Most of the time, we see our role and we see our job. And we expect other organizations to realize how important we are. Or, or if they don’t we do a presentation to explain why our role is important and how important we are. So it’s like, it’s like we’re lobbying constantly to get attention. And if you want to be successful, stop lobbying, and start building relationships. Because then you can find common ground and you can find common understanding. So I say all the time we see Chambers of Commerce show up with a PowerPoint presentation to explain why businesses are important. Everyone knows businesses are important. We see Chambers of Commerce do a presentation to explain why the Chamber of Commerce is important. Of course they are. But instead find common ground between you in the town. I mean, they’re important to if you want to talk to somebody and build a relationship, you don’t show up and say I’m amazing and I’m important to you because I do this. You the art of conversation is to find common ground to find out what motivates them to find out what interests them, and then define how you can link your common motivations and your common understanding and your common purpose together and build an alliance well that’s that’s what chambers should be doing is So while my advice is always stop thinking you need to show up at Town Council with a presentation. And start with beer and burgers, like honestly start with building relationship in a common understanding. So you know each other’s first names, if you know the names of their kids, and they know the names of your kids, it’s really hard for you to argue, because you start to, to appreciate your human beings. And then when you’ve got common goals about growing the downtown core with new housing and beautification to make the businesses profitable, which increases the tax base as a generates new businesses and new employment. And now you have a common understanding. And you can talk about how you’re going to achieve it together. Instead of saying, Look, I’m important, and you need to do this for me in order for me to be successful, but every organization has 50 people showing up and saying that it starts to fall on deaf ears, because it gets tiring build relationships to distinguish yourself. Right?

Brandon Burton 25:52
I love that advice. As we, in different communities, there may be different initiatives that come up, and a chamber may get behind the idea of you know, a beautification project, or maybe it’s something legislative, that they’re trying to get behind. That’s pro business. And in the book, you talked about the different factions, you know, and you come up to voting, and in you mentioned, specifically the fourth faction, which is the largest, which is those that in the community that are just disengaged, they don’t show up to vote, they don’t pay attention to what’s going on in the community, necessarily. So this next question would be kind of around that, how do we rally the troops to get them engaged? Or how do we get that community buy in? Especially in a world where we see more decline with volunteers and youth joining civic organizations? And how do we reach out to them and make make it a priority for them to be engaged?

Doug Griffiths 26:53
That’s such a big question. There’s so much to unpack. And you’re right, those those. There’s always those factions, those in support of something that was opposed to something and the 95% of people that have no idea what’s going on and don’t care because they’re so busy with the day to day lives, we we’ve lost the art of real communication. I don’t know that it’s it’s a recent loss. It’s it’s been going on for a while, I mean, a lot of communication is got drilled down to press releases, and newsletters and announcements and not a lot of real conversation. And with social media that’s just amped up. Now. Now, you you put out a press release, and 500 other organizations have the same idea and that gets lost in the noise. So my advice always is to go back to the original social network, the word of mouth communication. You want to move people, the majority of people to start to be excited about the future and where you’re going and what you’re doing. You got to have the conversation with them. Again, it’s the same sort of argument with the with the town and chambers build some of those relationships, you’ve got to listen a lot to what what people’s issues are, and and then inspire them about what the potential for the future is so that they know what you’re doing and why. I mean, I can’t I can’t tell you how many communities I’ve seen that decide we’re going to undertake a downtown beautification project. Now they they understand the twinkle lights in the front edge, redoing the front’s and more social activities brings people downtown which makes businesses more profitable. It increases the social center and makes it a hub. And it’s a way to revitalize our downtown’s. And then you hear everyone in the community say, Well, this is this is just fluff. Why are we doing this? Because they don’t understand why there’s good. There’s good research, good, good evidence show that it’s valuable. But we don’t talk to people about it and explain why and then we wonder why they’re opposed. And then that that other faction that’s typically not engaged is easily swayed by the NIMBYs the nopes, the bananas, the cave, people in the fears, those negative people that are constantly critics and and afraid of what everyone’s doing. And and so even when they’re not very inspired still to participate, they’ll sign the petition, they’ll drop in a form letter, email, and suddenly this is wave of opposition. And it’s because we haven’t properly communicated. And so my advice is always reinvigorate the original social network, the face to face communication, you can’t do it once you can’t do it twice, you got to do it a million times, you got to do it forever. And if you ever stop, then the relationship stops. And then you know some of those some of those that can help with the buy in and the excitement and then volunteers understand why instead of just well, I need you to do this. They understand why they’re doing it. They’re connecting it every every good business, every good company has had a vision for the company and every single employee from from the janitor to the CEO, understands what they’re trying to achieve in the vision they have and then they understand their role in helping make that a reality and they want it to be successful. We should be doing that with our communities. That’s why we changed our, we have a different approach for strategic planning. And then we also with the even when we get more volunteers when people buy in, because they really get why we’re doing it. And it’s exciting. And they want to be part of an authentic community, which is only accentuated more since this pandemic, we also have to understand how people volunteer. So I hear way too many people say, Oh, these young people don’t care about their community, and they don’t want to volunteer that’s complete garbage. That is such garbage these, the younger generation, and millennials and the generation Zed Z, are are actually very staunch community builders, they’re very concerned about their communities and where they live. The challenge we have is that they don’t want to volunteer the way older generations did. There’s there’s there’s not one of them that wants to join the elks and show up for a meeting the third Thursday of every month to drink a bunch of beer and go, Yeah, let’s volunteer. They don’t want that commitment. But you give them a project, a gig to work on. And they will volunteer on that project, you know, you’ve got to an environmental cause you got to clean up a park, you’ve got to do something like that, they’ll come, they just don’t want to have to show up the third Thursday of every month at a meeting. And it’s part of the way societies evolve. We live in the gig culture now. And that’s the way they respond. So we got to stop complaining that they don’t want to volunteer and start creating opportunities for them to volunteer in the way they want to volunteer instead of lamenting the fact that don’t do what we’ve done for 40 years. Sorry, I know that was really long.

Brandon Burton 31:27
No, that’s good. I’d like that point that being in a gig culture, and that’s how we engage the youth now is it’s one one gig at a time, right? We got a cleanup project or whatever. And, yeah,

Doug Griffiths 31:39
it’s one of my favorite things. Sorry. Yeah.

Brandon Burton 31:43
I get so excited. This Yeah. If you’re asking for that long term commitment, they kind of glaze over. So I think that’s a great point. Go ahead.

Doug Griffiths 31:51
Oh, to start, because I get so excited about this stuff. I love doing these presentations. But one of my favorite stories was from it was a young man in a community of about 3000 people in the US. And he wanted to clean up one of the local parks, and it was him that wanted to do it. So we went to the town to say, Hey, I’m going to do this, can I do this? Well, the response was, Well, we should get you some garbage bags. And actually, we need to double check and make sure our insurance covers it. Because if you fall and break your leg or crack your head open, we might be insured. Oh, and by the way, maybe we should put a budget to get those garbage bags for you. And then we should actually create a a notice so that other people can come and join. And they had all sorts of issues to deal with. And they said come back in six months, and what will we be approved by them? Well, he looked at them and said, Forget you, I don’t think he used that F word. But when he went to the park with a bunch of his friends, and they cleaned up the park, they took pictures of it before and it wasn’t bad. They just wanted to brighten it up. And they took pictures of it after he got into trouble from the town because he didn’t get permission. But he posted the pictures on Instagram. And 1000s of other young people did the same thing in their community. They said this is a great idea. I think the hashtag was clean like community or clean up my community or clean up my park, something like that 1000s and 1000s of young people from Canada in the United States went into their community and cleaned it up. There was a massive movement. And and yet, not one municipality was responsible for it or instigated, and it just demonstrates that, that these younger generations don’t need permission. They’re not waiting for authority, they don’t give a damn what your title is. They’re used to working in a gig economy in a flat environment. And when they see a cause they want, they’re going to go take care of it. So that makes them some of the most ardent community volunteers we’ve ever seen. And we need to embrace that and find opportunities for them to succeed. Absolutely. I’m

Brandon Burton 33:41
sure there wasn’t one lawsuit either somebody tripping in the park while they’re cleaning up.

Doug Griffiths 33:46
Not one, not one. It was amazing.

Brandon Burton 33:49
Yeah. So if I understand the right word of mouth, Trump’s press releases for those that are disengaged, right. Yeah, imagine Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So the next question that we had is, is the chamber model that we currently have? Is it missing something? Or is it not providing the true needs of the businesses in our community? Yeah,

Doug Griffiths 34:15
definitely. I mean, there’s some modern chambers that are doing some pretty interesting things. But like I said before, this traditional chamber model seems to be collect some funds in membership dues to hire someone to put on an event to raise enough funds to keep that person hired to collect membership dues, and put on an event and round around we go. And yet they’re one of the biggest things I think that’s missing the chamber should be doing is some professional development for their businesses, showing them you know, how to enhance the bricks and mortar, having classes for them to you know, there’s still so many consults going around and you spent $10,000 to get a website designed and if you’re, you got the wrong person, if that’s what it’s costing to design. You should there’s so many Easy Ways to set one up very easily. I’m doing a little training about social media. I mean, there’s there’s a, there’s a business in Williston, North Dakota that was so impressed with Grayson plan you they started off with a, the main street was redesigned and beautified. And then this business opened up and it was very chic. It was very nice. But you can imagine and Willesden, they had smaller client base. But as they continued to sell product, they moved on to Instagram and, and they started posting pictures of their clothes, and clients would then post pictures of them wearing their clothes and built this sort of culture, this unique culture that they owned, and now they get orders from all over the United States and Canada, for the close, they do more of their business on Instagram than they do on Main Street. But they need both. And they would like both, we could use a little professional development for businesses like that. And I think chambers of the organization that can take the lead. And, and so they’ve got to sort of get over the mindset that the businesses are going to tell the chambers to lobby the town and start to think you’re a collective resource to help us grow the business community and make each of us more profitable, and then focus on on some of that professional development too.

Brandon Burton 36:13
I think it’s a great response. Good good fodder for for chambers to listen to and, and figure out how can they continue to stay relevant and and kind of adjust their their business models? This next question that I have is one that I was thinking of as I was reading through the book, and he touched on it some in the book, but I wanted to hear just straight perspective from you in today’s world. What is the importance of community?

Doug Griffiths 36:47
Oh, wow. All right. So we got an hour or so left? Yeah, that’s. Yeah, you know, so we do this, because I think community building is the single most important job on Earth. And I’ve thought that way since since I, when I entered politics back in 2002. And if anything, it’s more true today than it’s ever been. Now, I know being in political circles. A lot of people say families the most important thing. But I’m kind of hesitant about governments or programs to serve families, because families are so different. It’s so diverse. I actually believe if we focus on building communities, then leadership is successful. Businesses are profitable, and families can take care of themselves and each other. So I always encouraged all three levels of government to focus on community building. And that has been everything I had, had lobbied for and argued about for last 20 plus years, has has been proved important through and post pandemic. And it’s because we, we we discovered that if if we were homebound because we were sick that Amazon didn’t send us a note to say hey, are you okay? They sent a note and said, hey, it’s Friday, it’s a good time to shop. That’s it. But I heard, I’ve heard countless stories of now business saying well, you know, they come in every three days, and I haven’t seen them all week. And they’ll call and say, Hey, is everything okay? And they’re there to support each other and help each other. And we’ve we’ve actually seen, we saw the trend before the pandemic. And I’ve argued about this, I’ve I’ve presented the evidence about this people moving from Los Angeles and San Francisco and New York into places like Boise, Idaho, and Des Moines, Iowa and Lancaster, Pennsylvania and Zionsville, Indiana. And so they’re they’re moving to, to communities that are offering a quality of life. And it’s post pandemic or command of this pandemic. Even during the pandemic, people were fleeing to their parents place in small towns or to the cottage country like to get out of the city. And, and this pandemic has made us all aware that we can now work from home, we can do a lot of stuff from home, and that we really want to be in a community that we can where we can go down to the yoga studio, we can go to the brew pub, we can go to the the locally owned coffee shop, we can socialize and talk to each other on Main Street again, recreating that desperately after being locked up for two years. And so it’s demonstrated just how important community is. And it’s also demonstrated that this notion that rural communities, small towns are dying, is no longer true. That’s where people want to be and if we are ready to be to modernize and to provide the quality of life you want. We’re we’re the ones that don’t aren’t stuck with a lot of infrastructure and and sunk costs like the cities are so we can’t rejuvenate as quickly. We can do it very quickly, and they’re looking for us. We just need to make the changes necessary and attract them out there. So, I mean, everything to me has demonstrated, especially in the last few years, just how vital communities are to the human psychology. And I think this is a ripe opportunity. In fact, the next book I’m working on is 13. pathways forward for communities, it’s, you know, it’s about the mindsets and the things that we could do to capitalize on, on what’s coming.

Brandon Burton 40:17
I like that. So I guess the basis for that question about the importance of community in today’s environment is so much is done online. And you’d mentioned Amazon and I just I wanted to give a plug for the the Alberta chambers, I mean, right there in your region, is doing some pretty interesting things with taking things digitally, putting their, you know, the business members online and, and helping set up ecommerce sites and, and doing some of these innovative things. That is building their community. So people can shop online, but still support Alberta and the chambers in that region. So I think there’s a lot of significance still to community, even in the world of technology and, and internet and so forth. In your book, you had mentioned that you’re always looking and observing other ways that people go about community killing their communities. Is there a couple examples that you’ve learned since writing the book that that you’d be ready to share that you’ve learned, of, of way, new ways that you’ve found and are discovered? Yeah, I

Doug Griffiths 41:34
actually, I have a list in a folder on my desk. 13 More Ways to Kill Your Community. Yeah, it’s a long list. It’s it’s amazing how how often people find new ways to sabotage your own success, it’s. So if I was to write another 13 Ways to Kill Your Community, the first chapter would be don’t have conductivity and broadband service. Here in Canada, it’s been declared an essential service that the funding isn’t quite there yet to start to back it up. And we still haven’t even addressed all of our water issues, especially to our First Nations and indigenous communities yet, but I’m confident that we’re going to address that, but but everything the way the world is changing, especially again, post pandemic we can do education is important to the future of our communities and opens all those doors up to attract new people, that it’s as important as water is, and you will die without it. So that would be one of the top ones. The another new one that’s I’ve added to the list since through the pandemic, or over the last few years, is let politics divide you. We’ve seen and it’s it’s across, I think it’s around the whole world. Actually, we’ve seen this notion that, you know, the right is always right, and the left is always wrong, or vice versa. This this polarizing politics, we have got to prevent from infiltrating our community building. Because community is about having people with different opinions and different walks of life and diversity all being together. That’s what makes a community. If if we all agreed, if we all had the exact same mindset, then I mean, it’s not healthy. In fact, there’s been research done on on corporations and boards of directors that all have, this is my quote. But if you have a board of directors that that are all, quote, unquote, qualified, now that you’ve got 10 People who are all the most qualified to run a business, historically, they were 50 year old white males with MBAs. But if you put 1050 year old white males with MBAs in the room, you get one opinion, because they all have the same background, the same experience the same education, you need diversity, to be successful. And it’s the same with communities but, but we’ve got this notion that we we all need to think alike be alike, and anyone who isn’t exactly like us is now the enemy. And that is tearing our communities apart, for the sake of ideology and ideology, I have never found to be right ideas are what are important to help our communities move forward. And so I would, I would say, you know, the chapter two of the next book would be lead ideology where people park rip your community apart.

Brandon Burton 44:22
Yeah, that is powerful. That’s a very real example that we’ve been seeing lately.

Doug Griffiths 44:28
Yeah, and it’s been all over the world. I’m it’s not anyone. It’s not in any particular jurisdiction. But it’s it’s a dangerous precedent. And it’s built on anger. And I anger. You know, I don’t have it in the book, but I say during the presentations. The second most evil of all human traits is envy because it sabotages our own success when we’re envious of others. We need people in the community to be successful. But the most evil of all human traits is anger. And I use the phrase your anger is a liar. It’s a self propagating hatred machine. And he experienced it, you, you go to work hitting potholes and then the front of your car doesn’t, you know, it swears a little bit and you’re angry and you didn’t get the promotion at work and you come home and, and the kids didn’t take the garbage out, you’re like God told you to take the garbage out. And it just continues to feed until it becomes a rage. If you’re in a happy mood, and you come home and you see the kids didn’t take the garbage out, you’re like, come on, I asked you to try and remember, the angry you are, the more angry you look to become. And our anger is ripping our communities apart. And it’s being fed by politics, and we’ve got to get around it. Or we’re gonna sabotage your own success.

Brandon Burton 45:40
Yeah. Well, I hope you do come out with that book. It’s 13 More ways, your community. As we start wrapping things up here, I wanted to ask if you’ve been very generous with time and, and knowledge and insight, but what might be one tip or action item that you would suggest for Chamber Champion to do to help lift their community to the next level?

Action Item/Tip for Chamber Champions

Doug Griffiths 46:04
Well, I mean, start the conversation about what the future can be and make sure the conversation is positive. Now we can we can always cite, you know, what’s wrong, oh, our main streets are ugly, or our, our town doesn’t work with us or taxes are too high, start with with something positive, and help educate people. And so my advice, the very first bit of advice I always give to chambers of commerce, is have a session on customer service. Because I’ve been to lots of small towns that go into the businesses and they look at me like, who are you? And what are you doing here? Yay, for customer service, me, every single person you connect within a community is a reflection of that community. So all it takes is the very first person to be unfriendly or look grumpy, or look like they’re there. They’re not You’re not welcome. And man, the impression of the is that the whole town is like that. It’s so customer service, whether you’re going into the town office, or going into a business, it doesn’t take a lot to smile and say, Hey, welcome. This is great. And then, you know, there’s so many ways to improve that customer service. And it’s funny, the mean, evidence, psychological research shows that if we smile, even when we don’t feel like smiling, we eventually feel like smiling, it put it changes our mood, if you walk around with a scowl, you get angry, or if you walk around with a smile, even if you don’t mean it, eventually it becomes a real smile. So just just realizing and helping the businesses realize that when a new person from out of town shows up on Main Street, that first impression is everything. Because it changes the tone changes, the brand changes a story into something positive instead of in something negative. And so my advice is, is that talk about how you can, you can sell your community with a smile.

Brandon Burton 47:59
I love that tip. And in fact, in today’s world, where we’ve have become more digital and chambers have been used to doing, you know, hybrid events and doing things over zoom, and they’ve dove in to the digital part of things, I would maybe take it a step further and do this educational series or, or training or whatever you want to call it on customer service that recorded and you have created a library of things like this. So your employers in your community, as they onboard new employees, five years down the road, 10 years down the road, they can access these trainings on customer service, because some of those things are, you know, they’re always applicable. And it continues to show the relevance for the chamber. It puts a good face on your community, it creates a stronger business there, it’s just a win win all the way around. But I would encourage chambers to capture that and create a library that can be shared amongst the businesses in your community.

Doug Griffiths 49:00
Brilliant, because it’s a good reminder after a year or two to watch, even if you’ve watched it once already a good reminder that customer service. No, that’s brilliant. Absolutely.

Brandon Burton 49:08
So I like asking everybody I have on the show this question. As we look to the future of chambers of commerce, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Future of Chambers

Doug Griffiths 49:21
Well, I think changing that that old world story, that same pattern of behavior, same pattern of operations is is what needs to change. And but anyone who thinks that chambers are defunct and that they’re going to fade away, doesn’t understand the value of chambers. What’s going to go away is the old way of operating and chambers that are going to be successful that are going to provide value for that that membership do that are going to provide value for the council that needs the advice on what businesses are looking for not just the lowest taxes on these regulations, but actually Bringing socialization downtown and Beautification and helping ensure that their prospers, that’s the future and chambers are going to have no problem being successful. If they’re prepared to adapt, just like every other organization, and every other business, adapt or die.

Brandon Burton 50:17
That’s right. And go back and read this book. And if you want to kill your chamber, there’s a course out here for you to do. There’s a bat for you to follow. Madang I have really enjoyed our conversation and having you here with me on Chamber Chat Podcast today, I want to give you an opportunity to share any contact information or ways for people to connect, if they have any questions about what we talked about today. Or if they wanted to connect with you about their community and the services you offer, what would be the best way for them to reach out and connect with you.

Connect with Doug Griffiths

Doug Griffiths 50:51
So my email is Doug@13ways.ca or.com. We have both now. And that’s 13ways.ca or.com. And there’s my cell number two, I always advise people and you’ll hear if you call me. I say please don’t leave a message, you’re better to text me and say, Hey, here’s my name. Here’s where I’m from, quit schedule a time to chat, and then I can text you back. And otherwise you leave a voicemail. And then I have to stop what I’m doing and call in and write it down on a piece of paper and I’ll put it away in my pants and then watch them and I’ll forget you’ll think I’m a jerk because in callback, so text on my cell 587-335-0013. And of course, you can always look up 13 Ways on on Instagram On Facebook, check out our website 13ways.ca or.com where we have a lot of we have free master classes on strategic planning on marketing and communications. And and so check it all out. We also have a a community leaders camp coming up in the beautiful rocky mountains at the end of April. And we have a few spots left. It’s going to be intimate, there’s only going to be about 50 people with some amazing keynote speakers. Obviously, you can check out that information. And if you can’t find what you’re looking for, then just reach out because odds are if you need it, and we haven’t created it yet to help. There’s 1000 Other people needed to and so we’ll get to work on it. So I reached out.

Brandon Burton 52:21
Absolutely, I’ll get all that contact information in our show notes for this episode, which will be found at chamberchatpodcast.com/episode164. But Doug, this has been a real treat to have you on the podcast. And I really appreciate you sharing your time with us today and sharing these key insights as well. Thanks a lot.

Doug Griffiths 52:42
Thanks, Brandon. I really appreciate the work you’re doing to with helping Chambers was so critical of an element to building communities. I just can’t thank you enough. Keep up the great work.

Brandon Burton 52:52
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Stop the Non-Profit Board Blame Game with Hardy Smith

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Below is an auto-generated transcription of my conversation with Hardy Smith. 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.

Introduction

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.

Voiceover Talent 0:14
Now your host he tries to meditate, meditate daily. He’s my dad, Brandon Burton.

Brandon Burton 0:19
Hello Chamber Champions. You’re joining us on Chamber Chat Podcast where I’m your host, Brandon Burton, and it is my goal to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community.

Our title sponsor is home and brothers membership sales solutions. Let’s hear from Tony Felker, President and CEO of The Frisco Chamber to learn how the Holman Brothers have provided value for him.

Tony Felker 0:45
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Brandon Burton 1:07
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Guest Introduction

Our guest for this episode is Hardy Smith. Hardy is a consultant and speaker who works with leaders who want to stop frustration with their volunteer boards. Through board retreats workshops, keynotes, and planning sessions Hardy provides solutions to board engagement challenges. Hardy’s extensive experience with diverse organizations provides the basis for his comprehensive book stop the nonprofit board blame game. His result oriented approach and ability to solve complex problems were developed during his longtime career in the high performance world of NASCAR racing. That experience included strategic planning for some of the country’s largest sports and entertainment facilities and spectator events. Hardy has also had more than a decade of senior leadership experience with local government which further refined his skills in improving organizational performance. Hardy has a wide range of personal and professional involvement with nonprofits, associations, chambers of commerce, and community groups nationwide. He has held numerous local, state and national volunteer leadership positions that have further contributed to his in depth understanding of nonprofit needs. Hart is a member of the National Speakers Association, Association of Fundraising Professionals BoardSource, Florida Society of Association Executives, ASAP and ACC. Hardy is also a faculty member of the US Chamber of Commerce Institute for organization management. Hardy, I feel blessed to have you with me today on Chamber Chat Podcast, I’d love for you to take a moment to say hello to all the Chamber Champions that are listening and share something else interesting about yourself so you can get to know you a little better.

Hardy Smith 2:58
Brandon, thank you so very much for having me on the chamber podcast today. And in the opportunity to visit with your Chamber Champions and really like chamber Tammy, what a label to assign just a tremendous group of people that all all too often are highly stressed, overworked, undervalued, and it kind of a bless their heart kind of a world. And hopefully we’ll have some, some help today to help alleviate some of those challenges.

Brandon Burton 3:37
That’s right. I believe we will, I mean, as I had the opportunity to read through so I’ll introduce may be a little premature, but we’re going to focus our topic today on Hardy’s new book, Stop the Nonprofit Board Blame Game. And I really do think after having the opportunity to read through the book, this is a great resource it’s going to help alleviate some of those sources of frustration. So we’ll get into that in just a minute. But Hardy Why don’t you take a little bit of time to tell us a little bit more about your your efforts especially in working with Chambers as it comes to you know, consulting and board retreats and things like that just so I think everybody in chamber world is familiar with your name at least I mean, they they see on social media, whatnot. But just give us a little snapshot of what you offer for chambers, your consultant work.

About Hardy Smith

Hardy Smith 4:30
Well thank you, Brandon, in in my production and of course, understanding Lear is a longtime personal and professional background and relationships and engagements with chamber groups all across the country. And I really, really appreciate those opportunities. When you know after a while and you know when you’re in this in this working with chambers, again, it’s very evident that the There’s a tremendous challenge their challenge. And it’s it’s the the frustration associated with working with boards who are either not engaged enough or perhaps in too many cases engaged too much, right? Well, my career in NASCAR racing was the head of a problem solver. My task was to identify problems really, before they existed and come up with the solutions to make sure the problems didn’t happen. Or if a problem did happen, make darn well sure I came up with a solution, it was gonna get the fix. So as I work with, with chambers across the country, and seeing the situation with with boards, the disengagement over engagement, seeing the the impact, emotional, physical, mental impact that it’s having on chamber professionals, and also the impact of the lack of productivity of chambers being able to meet the true potential that they have in their given community. And so that’s, for me, that’s a problem that needs a solution. And I see, you know, in the sector, there’s a whole lot of advice. There’s a whole lot of training sessions, and there’s a whole lot of consultants, and there’s a whole lot of speakers, and a whole lot of books and articles and blogs and podcasts that talk about this topic. But what’s happening, the problem still there. So in my kind of NASCAR mentality of, you know, taking the car apart at the end of a race, not by not bolt by bolt, and then putting it all back together again, to try to figure out why in the world did the car do what it did on that particular event? That was that was my mindset, and to look for solution, so to to get solutions that are going to be implementable and workable. Um, what I did differently, to help the sector and our nonprofit, and chamber professionals, Brandon is I reached out to board members. So not from a staff perspective, the book represents the board member perspective of, wow, why don’t you do what you’re supposed to do? And the answers they shared with me are extremely revealing. And those answers and responses lead to solutions that matched up and of course, the how tos for implementing the solutions matched up with these Org members themselves shared with me of why the good members become disengaged, why members don’t do what they’re supposed to do. And also very revealing as far as Wow, chamber professionals, have you considered you might be contributing to the problems that you’re having with board members. Problem contributor. So the book gets into that.

Brandon Burton 8:19
That’s absolutely right. And I look forward to diving a little deeper into your book as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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Topic-Stop the Non-Profit Board Blame Game

All right, Hardy, we’re back. And as you were, you’d mentioned right before our break about how you had reached out to nonprofit board members and got their perspective. And I love that you went out and did that, because it really does. It brings a different perspective to the whole approach. And as I was reading through the book, and preparing for this discussion with you, the thought occurred to me that and I would love to do a poll myself amongst chamber executives, to see how many chamber executives had experience working with the board before they started working the chamber. And if you look at that, and I’m going to guess there’s going to be some that had some experience, maybe they served on a board, you know, with another organization, but as far as being the executive director, and in that role, I think your book, really, it becomes kind of a manual to say, here’s how you manage a board, here’s the things you need to look for. But I like the you you went to these board members with a survey? I’m curious to hear from your perspective, what are some of the more revealing responses that you got as a result of that survey that?

Hardy Smith 11:56
Well, one of the one of the key things and anyone who’s involved in a long time relationship with another individual, it could be personal, like it’d be business understands that the number one key is effective communication. And so underlying, use bold red, and for the word effective. So it’s not just communication. So what the board members in the survey shared with me that communication related issues, poor communication, communication, that’s not timely, in a way that they’re left surprised by a particular issue. In some cases, communication doesn’t happen at all. So a whole lot of issues surrounding communication, is the number one contributor to board disengagement. Or, again, in a way, that’s not appropriate. And to go a little bit deeper there, if you’d like, you know, when does, when does effective communication begin? Well, it begins in the recruitment process. And so why the occasion is being shared with a prospective board member of what the expectations are, and what’s the most impart of effective communication? Is being a good listener? Yeah. So when you’re having the conversation with your board prospects prospect? Are you listening to see if they’re understanding the expectations? And are you listening not for what you want to hear, but for what you need to hear? And that’s their acceptance of fulfilling the expectations at hand. So that’s, that’s one issue. Another issue is simply that, you know, for our Chamber Champions on the podcast today, I just asked you to visualize your boardroom and look at all the faces around the board table. And for every single individual person, you’ve got every single individual represents a different communication style, a different communication preference. Every single individual has a personal preference for how they want to receive information, and also how they digest it or process that so let me explain real quickly. You’re here for the board meetings. I’m i It’s unfortunate that so many board excuse me, chamber execs. I’ve shared with me, Brandon about just oh my gosh, I’ve got a board meeting next week and I’m already in a panic. I’m losing sleep on this like a week ahead. And is it they’re the same, they’re just in a hot mess a week after. So it’s like two weeks a time, they will last out of a four week month. They’re just mentally and emotionally destroyed because of preparing for the board meetings. So not a great room, get the chambers and they’re not going to be read, but they still have to, they feel obligated to prepare the reports. So instead of going through this upside down exercise of preparing information that no one is going to pay attention to, how about maybe asking your individual board members how they prefer to receive the information. And they have multiple communication platforms, some may want a full on written report with all kinds of data and pictures and charts. And okay, some may want an executive summary, some may just want a tweet, you know, is an exaggeration, but you’ve got to understand the individual communication preferences, timing, you know, if you want someone to really read your your reports, you know, having it at the board seat for the board meeting, not in advance, so a busy board member has a chance to actually review it in advance, you know, you’re just you’re just shooting yourself in the foot. So communication issues are huge, huge. As far as creating dysfunctional relationships,

Brandon Burton 16:32
um, from what I can tell, you know, through the the communication, that the how and when of communication to make it effective, it’s also critical to be able to help set expectations. So when you’re talking about the chamber executive prepares the report, they have an expectation of, I’m preparing this, I would like for my board to read it, or at least look at it and give it to pay some attention. So through the communication is the opportunity to, to put forth some of those expectations as well. But I know the expectations go both ways, right, as we read in the book.

Hardy Smith 17:10
Absolutely. And, and so you, you know, and this is an very important part. You just can’t assume anything. And that’s where I think so many chamber professionals are champions, unfortunately get themselves into trouble. There’s a whole lot of assuming, and so far is as far as expectations go. Okay, well, let’s the chamber is the chamber board, and everyone just knows what’s expected? Well, you know, there’s, there’s your expectations as the chamber executive, and probably about 100% of the time, the individual board members individually and collectively have expectations. So is there any conversation happening at all, about merging the two sets of expectations or three sets? So yours? There’s individually and there’s as collectively? So that’s so critically important? You know, if, if, in again, in a relationship, are you asking, are you telling and I and I, I know from my 48 year marriage with de my wife, Debbie, and that that, you know, there’s a big difference between asking and telling, I’ve learned to finally ask me a while to get it. But I finally learned to ask so. So the point here is, is you can’t walk into a boardroom and say, here’s what I or the chamber needs for you to do. You’ve got to ask, here’s what we would like for you to consider. Are you willing to take on this task? And then even from even from a planning session, you know, you jumping ahead just a little bit, maybe, but in planning sessions, quite often, chambers and for a lot of reasons, decide not to bring in someone, perhaps, like URI is outside facilitators to facilitate a strategic plan. Development. Now, the Chamber executive, you know, gets their their favorite drink of choice, and spends a few hours writing up the plan presents the plan. If the board meeting the board, of course, passes the plan, no discussion, and there you go. And then the board executive is so frustrated, because no action is being taken on the plan. Well, why is that and it gets into expectations, and being having clarity around expectations, and again, the communication aspect. One of my great friends, who who I quoted a couple of times in the book is Dr. Jack Hawkins, who is the Chance to our toy University in Alabama. And he said Hardy, if they help bake the cake, they own the cake. So when you have a strategic planning session, you’ve got an opportunity where the board is actually involved, then they have a chance to evaluate our identify goals, objectives, the How to actions, expectations, their role and the expectations and implementing, you know, the activities at hand, and deciding what they’re going to do and what they’re not going to do. So the board role might be hands on personal engagement. They’re actually involved in implementation, or their role could be supporting the implementation of a strategic plan by staff. But you get clarity. And then so you’ve got a merging of bought and accept a sense of the direction of for expectations. Does that make sense?

Brandon Burton 21:09
It absolutely does, it makes a ton of sense. And as you started touching on the strategic planning and helping these board members to make the cake, as you say, it leads me to one of the other points I wanted to make sure that we could discuss it really stood out to me the chapter about creating a collaborative board. And there was a line specifically that talked about how the Board should be able to take ownership of a specific problem in their, their organization, their community, whatever it may be, and take ownership as they’re the ones who are tasked to solve that problem. You might speak in more to that and creating that collaborative environment.

Hardy Smith 21:51
Well, yes, what the one of the things that I’ve discovered just over time, is, is rather than really talk about strategic, okay, we’re going to have a strategic planning activity, you know, could be a process or couldn’t be an activity, there’s a little bit of a difference there. But I’ve started using the terminology, Brandon critical conversation. So the things that they need to talk about, everyone knows they should be talked about and addressed. And resolved is the important situation, rather than not addressing them at all, to be able to have a critical conversation. I use in the book, a fantastic lesson that I in case study I picked up from the book, creativity, Inc. Now, I know that one of your recent guests on the on the podcast was Pat Patrick. And he talked about how he and my friend Dave Kilby really are great readers and are always just dropping in these books. I’m just wanting to kind of help kind of support that. So creativity, Inc, by Ed Catmull. Now, creativity, Inc, is about the success of Pixar. And Ed Catmull was or still is, the leader of Pixar helped create Pixar. And he’s also now got a lead dual role with Disney Animation. Bottom line here is he says the secret sauce, I used to just think that Pixar was okay, they did Toy Story and a bunch of other cool movies that are that are great to watch and a lot of fun, right? But Pixar animation is way more than just that the the movies are just as kind of a side hustle. But what ad was able to do when he saw such dysfunction, because among the creative, so just substitute the word creatives for board members, his creatives, the producers, the writers, the Imagineers, the graphic artists, the cartoonist, all of those individuals, the technical people, you know, highly protective of turf, didn’t like change, couldn’t get a just couldn’t come together to agree on a price. So as a result, movies were just financial bust because they were spending millions and millions and millions of dollars way over budget taking way too much time to get done. So the fix was to create a collaborative culture. And so that everyone figure it out if they helped each other and solve each other’s problems. They can actually get something done. It’d be much more successful doing that. Now, what are some of the secret nuggets that that creativity by Ed Catmull shared? He said the secret to all that You have to have a safe place. So picture your board boardroom. Is your board room a safe place? Do new board members feel like? It’s okay to ask a question. Is it okay to challenge it? Do all board members feel safe and comfortable in challenging a concept? Maybe there’s a new program you want to offer? Maybe there’s a new expense to be considered. Maybe there’s a staff change? You know, whatever it is, do your board members feel comfortable in participating and actively and openly engaged meeting? Do your board meetings matter? And just let that sink in? Do your board meetings? Are they do they start at a time certain and ended a time certain? And to hack with any kind of robust conversation or engagement? Nope, it’s item 1-234-567-8910. And we’re done. See you next time. Are your board meetings, think about your who you own your board, typically, the most active and most engaged and most influential leaders in a community? Right? I mean, that’s kind of the the blueprint that I see that every single chamber wants?

Well, probably every single one of your board members has how many other activities they could have on their calendar, at the same time of your regular board meeting many probably blocks, right? Well, they’re making a choice, they’re making a choice? are they choosing to come prepared to your board meeting? Or are they looking forward to coming to your board meeting, because they know the board meeting itself is going to be stimulating the Listen, this is so critical. Chamber Champions, just just pay attention right now, go old school, get a pen and write this down on a piece of paper for having, say, chamber board members or volunteers, you’ve got to understand that volunteers get involved. Because they want to have an impact. They want to make a difference, it doesn’t matter if it’s a chamber board. Or if it’s a local nonprofit, dealing with a cause it’s special to them. Let me repeat that board members sign up, say yes to being recruited to serve on your board, because they feel like they’re gonna have a chance to make a difference and have an impact underscored that again. So if they’re coming to meetings, and they don’t think that’s gonna happen, you know, they have zero expectation for their fact is coming in, they’re wasting their time, and you want to get a disengaged board member, just show them that their time at a board meeting is wasted. That’s that I mean, that’s just like a circle with a big X right through the middle of it. You know, don’t waste time. So make your meetings matter we reorganize, reorganize your agenda. If you need to allow an extra extra few minutes to allow for discussion, allow for discussion. Don’t worry about meetings, wanting to hurry up and get back to work or excuse me, board members wanting to hurry up and get back to work. If the meeting is worth their time. If they feel like their opinion. They have a chance to share their opinion, get their questions answered. And it’s all their opinion is being considered. It might not be approved or agreed upon, but it’s being considered. They feel like and they feel like they’re having an impact. It will be worth time to stay. And you know what, it will be worth their time to come a little bit early. So they’re not just sliding in at the last minute. It 30 seconds before the start of the meeting. It might come a little early for Hey, how about an extra cup of coffee? And oh, by the way, what happens if board meetings, board members random are coming a little bit early, before meeting staying a little bit after a meeting is over? What important thing happens? What happens?

Brandon Burton 29:31
You build more of a team unity amongst the board?

Hardy Smith 29:35
Absolutely. There’s time for social interaction. And the board they may all know each other then they all do business with each other. Their their their kids all go to school they all play on the same team have the same teachers worship in the same place right. But in the board setting. They have so important they have a chance for socialization That Reince forces, okay, this is gonna be a safe place. I’m with people I have a positive relationship with, I enjoy being around, make meetings matter, and you will have a board that is fully engaged in a very positive way.

Brandon Burton 30:22
I love that great advice. There is another thing I wanted to have you touch on before we start to wrap up. And that is, you know, in the chamber world today, there’s a lot of focus on diversity, equity and inclusion. And a lot of times, chambers will look to their board and say we need to have people of a certain type represented on the board to show that we serve you know, all these different types of people and groups of people and, and whatnot. Sure, share with us your thoughts about going about to create diversity on the board, maybe some do’s and don’ts are things to be aware of. Before we start wrapping things up,

Hardy Smith 31:08
absolutely. Such an important question, such an important priority in today’s in today’s world. And let me let me share, I am not an expert on diversity. I’m a little bit better about inclusion. Big, big difference there. But you’ve got to have the D plus the I what I did and recognizing the problem that needs help. You know, here’s some important research, unfortunately. Well, fortunately, on the positive good news, bad news. So the good news his chambers included. But the good news is most nonprofits in this country do have a state positive statement about wanting to have increased diversity within their organization, specifically within their boards. That’s the good news. The bad news is the research shows very few organizations have actually made any progress taking any action at all, which is even worse. The reason why and not to not define blame here not to point fingers of fault. It’s because so many people have well intentioned individuals don’t know how. What I did was in the book, I relied on two highly qualified experts on diversity and inclusion. And Dr. Shirley Davis, world renowned expert, I interviewed and have some tremendous how to advice. And also Jim Taylor, who is the vice president for leadership development, with BoardSource. Now I will share with you both individuals are persons of color. And they are willing to share their personal experiences on being recruited strictly for board service, strictly because they’re persons of color. And that’s it, no consideration of qualifications of which they’re tremendously qualified. And that presents a huge mistake. So that’s an entire topic all in its own Brandon, I would highly recommend paying close attention to that particular I’ve devoted an entire chapter on how to achieve diversity and inclusion in the book. Thank you for asking about that.

Brandon Burton 33:36
Absolutely. I think it’s such an important topic. And before we all just, you know, go crazy and wild trying to recruit a variety of diversity on our boards. Let’s make sure we’re we’re doing it in a thoughtful way a meaningful way that’s really going to keep all of the board members engaged especially those you’re trying to bring on a maybe diverse backgrounds. But Hardy before we wrap up here I wanted to ask you what might be one tip or action items that a chamber champion could take to help elevate their organization up to the next level.

Action Item/Tip for Chamber Champions

Hardy Smith 34:11
Brandon this is this is probably probably one of my favorite tips. So Chamber Champions, here you go. Here’s the secret sauce. This is what you’ve been waiting for Pay Attention please be intentional about board relationships. And start that intentionality with recruiting board members with purpose and process established and we’ve talked about this establish clarity on expectations, yours and theirs and make sure your your Magic Cup and the matching up in the middle for the the sweet spot and that those are the expectations that are going to get there are going to happen. And don’t assume don’t assume that the direction of your board one year is the same is it’s going to be the next year or in future years. So be intentional about board relationships.

Brandon Burton 35:09
That is a great tip hopefully everybody if you didn’t have a chance to write it down hit the backup button on your your podcast player and listen again, it committed to memory. Hardy what would be? Well, I like to ask everyone I have on the podcast this question as we all like to look to the future and try to be prepared. How do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Future of Chambers

Hardy Smith 35:32
Wow, what a you know, that’s that you could just say what a loaded question but yeah, you know, being clairvoyant. Okay. All here. Here’s what I see. Chambers, like all organizations are challenged with staying relevant. Another book reference for you, a good speaker, colleague, consultant, colleague of mine is Mary bars, who wrote 10 years ago, race for relevance. She’s just done an update 10 year anniversary edition of rate relevance, and it’s about associations. Huge, huge reference throughout the book to chambers of commerce, and nonprofits as well. But chambers, again, like all over innovations, have got to be able to adapt to find new ways to implement the three key concept that chambers use, you know, a being that converter, catalyst and champion. So the way that you approached that concept 50 years ago, or 100 years ago, if you’ve paid attention to Chris meads, excellent book, Magicians of Mainstreet fabulous, fabulous book about about the history of chambers of Commerce’s across the United States, you’ll know that change and challenge has been a part of chamber world from the very beginning. So what we’re experiencing now what we’re likely to, or what we will experience going forward into the future. It’s no different. It’s just coming from a different place. So there’s always going to be change and challenge. And chambers have got to be able to adapt my solution, my How To, to be able to get the tool for adapting is benefit from a fully engaged board that’s used as a high value asset. And stop the nonprofit board blame game, we’ll show you how to do that.

Brandon Burton 37:48
I love that view. Your board is a high valuable asset that they really are. So don’t don’t take advantage of it. But Hardy I am so happy to have you on the podcast. Today I’d like to give you an opportunity to share any contact information with the with Chamber Champions listening, let them know where they can find the book. Anything you want to put out there as we wrap up.

Connect with Hardy Smith

Hardy Smith 38:11
Well, thank you so much, Brandon and Chamber Champions. Thank you for listening to this podcast. Thank you for listening to all of the Chamber Chat Podcast, you know what a great source of information that you have. And thank you for what you do in your communities across the country. I’m easy to find HardySmith.com is my website. Okay, find a book on the links to Amazon and Barnes and Noble and all those links are there in the website at Hardy smith.com I’d certainly welcome hearing from Chamber Champions who have maybe a particular issue they’d like to have some pop and advice on email me Hardy@HardySmith.com. I certainly welcome connecting on LinkedIn and Twitter as well. So that I look forward to continuing the conversation with chamber professionals. Thank you.

Brandon Burton 39:11
Absolutely. And I’ll I’ll get all the contact information with links to your social media and book links and everything in our show notes for this episode, which will be found at chamberchatpodcast.com/episode 163. But Hardy has been a pleasure having you with us today on Chamber Chat Podcast bringing a lot of value and really I’d love for everybody to pick up a copy of his book and read it because it really will save you a lot of frustration. And thanks a lot Hardy.

Hardy Smith 39:41
Thank you, Brandon. Thank you.

Brandon Burton 39:42
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Role of Chambers in Advocacy & Policy with Marc Cohen

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Below is an auto-generated transcription of my conversation with Marc Cohen. 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.

Introduction

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.

Voiceover Talent 0:14
And now your host. He is happy to see so many conferences going back to in person. He’s my dad Brandon Burton.

Brandon Burton 0:22
Hello Chamber Champions. Welcome to the Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your host Brandon Burton, where it is my goal to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your members and your community.

Our title sponsor is Holman Brothers Membership Sales Solutions. Let’s hear from Matt Morrow, President and CEO of the Springfield Area Chamber in Missouri to learn how the Holman Brothers provided value to his chamber.

Matt Morrow 0:47
Holman Brothers provide a great training for our sales team in terms of just outstanding sales techniques. But maybe even more importantly than that, they were able to provide us with a system a process that was repeatable, and in that we’re able to see very clearly from one month to the next how the how the pipeline is doing, what prospects are in it, what kind of progress we’re making and what we can do to coach people to success.

Brandon Burton 1:09
You can learn more about Holman Brothers Membership Sales Solutions by visiting HolmanBros.com.

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Guest Introduction

Our guest for this episode is Marc Cohen. Marc is the Chief of Staff at the Greater Rochester Chamber in New York. Marc became the chief of staff at the Greater Rochester chamber in December 2018. In his role, he directly oversees government relations, Legislative Affairs advocacy, and as the primary policy adviser to the Rochester chamber CEO Robert J. Duffy. Marc is charged with identifying process improvement opportunities, best practices cost saving measures, working with partners to promote and enhance regional workforce and economic development efforts. Serving as Mr. Duffy’s and the Rochester chambers representative at outside forums, and on community work groups and overseeing the daily operations of the chamber executive office. Marc serves on a variety of boards in his community. He also serves as an EMT with Brighton ambulance and as a 2021 Rochester Business Journal 40 under 40 recipient, Marc grew up in Amherst, New York, and graduated Summa Kumada from the University of Alberni. While at the University of Albany, Marc worked as a research fellow in the Office of the Provost, and co authored the book diversity at college real stories of students conquering bias and making higher education more inclusive. The book was named as a finalist for the 2020 foreword indies award, and was chosen as a silver winner of the 2021 distinguished favorites of the independent press awards. That Marc, I am happy to have you with me 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 we can all get to know you a little better.

Something Interesting About Marc

Marc Cohen 3:03
Well, Brandon, I want to thank you for this incredible podcast that you do. I’m a fan of yours. And I think that your efforts to connect chambers of commerce and staff in this way is really outstanding. You pretty much took all the wind out of my sails with that bio, there’s nothing else about myself. That’s it. I mean, I I’ll tell you, I sat behind Contestants Row at the prices right and I shouted out answers, you know, to the to the contestants, as they were guessing and for our show, the one that we were that we were at when it was recording. The person went all the way to the to the big prize and they won they won the whole show. So I guess in some way, that’s that’s an interesting fact about me.

Brandon Burton 3:39
Did they invite you on their vacation with you too, for helping them out?

Marc Cohen 3:43
You know, you know, they didn’t and they also want a boat and I haven’t gotten a trip on the boat yet, but that’s alright, I’m not too sour about it. There were only like 1000 Other people shouting things. Alright.

Brandon Burton 3:53
So fun fact on prices, right? Totally off topic, but it’s pretty cool. My wife’s uncle was on prices right in the late 80s. And he won the whole Showcase Showdown. You know, the car the whole that is so cool. Yeah, the whole thing, the whole shebang. And that Bob is just about four months ago, he was on it again. And did it again. He won the all Showcase Showdown for a second time. It was like 28 years later, some 30 years later. I don’t know what the exact timing was. But the whole thing was to cars and the trip and boat and everything the whole shot. So it was pretty cool. They were showing his footage from the 80s. And he was on it. And in the 80s I think when he spun the wheel, he got $1. Exactly. And then this second time I think he ended up with 90 cents but still, yeah, he’s got the special touch but that’s you got that.

Marc Cohen 4:49
He’s got that special quality. That’s a great I think I can’t think of a better way for you to start your show. Isn’t that

Brandon Burton 4:54
Yeah. Totally unrelated but it’s fun. So tell us A little bit about the Rochester chamber is the size location budget staff just to kind of give us an idea of kind of the perspective you’re coming from is when are discussions for today?

About the Greater Rochester Chamber

Marc Cohen 5:11
Sure. So Greater Rochester Chamber is a Metro Chamber of Commerce. So we represent the nine county Finger Lakes region in upstate New York. Your listeners probably know the Finger Lakes for its outstanding wine. And we are known for many, many other things as well. But we are larger Chamber of Commerce, we have 1300 members. We are located our headquarters, our physical building is in downtown Rochester, New York in the in the sort of urban core. And our staff is about 30 people. Something unique about our chamber is that we’ve got the chamber of commerce side. So we’ve got our membership office and the Communications Office and the policy office and you know, those folks, but we also have a staffing division, and a screening division. So a member calls us and says, Hey, I need 50 temporary employees, we hire them as our employees, and then we we sort of staff them out to the various folks who need them. So in that way, we’re sort of our for profit size as a staffing agency. So that’s known as RBA, staffing and screening. We also do background checks for, for employers for tenants for tenant screening. And we have found that it’s a great way to what to earn revenue so that the chamber can continue doing the great things that we do. But it’s also a really great service to to the community at large, especially at a time, and I’m sure we’ll talk about this a little later. But when, at least for us, the number one issue we hear from, from business leaders is access to talent. So we can say not only do we support workforce development and talent, strategy and theory and you know, by supporting various initiatives, we are literally doing it every single day, we’ve got placement specialists who are putting people in jobs, supporting our members, supporting businesses in the community, in the most direct way possible. So our chamber is a full service Chamber of Commerce. And you know, we are we’re really proud of our membership and our staff loves what, what they do. And I certainly love what I do.

Brandon Burton 7:12
I love that idea of of having the staffing agency there on hand to really give that support to your members. That’s a great idea. And hopefully one that other chambers can think hey, that’s that’s good idea. Let me explore that. Yeah. So is it all full time employment placement? Or do you do temp arrangements at all? Or how does that set up?

Marc Cohen 7:35
It’s great question we do. And by the way, you’re helping me out because our director of staffing services is going to love me for this for this free publicity that she’s getting in her team. But no, we do. We do temporary placements, and then a lot of temp to perm. We do direct placements to so for the higher level C suite officials, C suite officers or middle management level officers, we will place them directly. And it’s you know, it’s interesting, like I said, it’s our VA staffing and screening. And if you look at our website, see the jobs that are posted. I mean, we post for veterinarians and dieticians. And, you know, and then the day laborer, you know, sort of manufacturing jobs and everything in between. I mean, it’s crazy, the, you know, the scope of the folks who reached out to us, we do a lot of work with our healthcare systems, in helping them to place to place workers, which again, in the wake of COVID-19, has been crucial. And so it’s, it’s every level of employment every length of time of employment. And, and it’s it’s a really, really impressive operation that that our team leads and again, folks are finding that, especially now before it was great, and it was important, and we, you know, did a lot of good in the community. But especially now, when COVID-19 has, you know, wrought havoc on businesses in every way be able to sort of be a one stop shop to help them to recover and build back stronger. Is is outstanding.

Brandon Burton 9:05
That is a very unique offering that you guys have there. And we could we could spend the whole episode diving in deep on it and maybe we will in the future. I think that’s a great, great topic to dive into. But for our discussion today we’ll focus more on the role of chambers it as it comes to advocacy and policy. And we will jump into that discussion as soon as I get back from this quick break.

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Topic-Role of Chambers in Advocacy and Policy

Alright, Marc, we are back. So as we look at the role of chambers in advocacy and policy. I know some chambers are a little hesitant maybe to get their feet wet in this topic in this arena. But I’d love for you to kind of take from your perspective how you add this to the value proposition there in Rochester. And keeping in mind, you know, the chambers listening who maybe don’t have a formal role in advocacy, how things can apply to them and how they can get involved in in advocacy and policy in their communities?

Marc Cohen 12:18
It’s a great question. And it’s an excellent topic, and you’re going to probably have to cut me off 10 or 15 times because I can talk for hours about sort of the role of this, but I’ll do my best, you know, I know brevity is key. So the role of chambers in advocacy and in policy is is one that might not be immediately obvious, but but is really interesting. And it’s something that any chamber can do. So as a Metro Chamber, we have members who join and our membership team is second to none. And they’ll be asked why do you want to join? You know, what, what is interesting to you about the greater Rochester chamber and sometimes people say, You know what, I just I really want to do networking events. And I want you know, the spaghetti dinners in the, you know, the, you know, go out to a bar and get a drink ticket and just kind of chat with people. And that’s an amazing sort of role of a chamber of commerce, it’s not really what we do. So we have something like 30 to 40 local chambers within our footprint. And we have no problem. And you know, our membership team, like I said a second to none, but they’re also just remarkably ethical. They have no problem saying, You know what, that’s not really what we do, right? We don’t do those weekly mixers. And we do it every once in a while, but sort of what the what your mainstream chambers will do. So we will refer them to wherever town or city they’re in, will refer them to their chambers and say, Hey, we have great partnerships with these local chambers, definitely join them, because that’s sort of what you’re looking for. When people approach us and say, look, the reason I want to join is because I need a voice to help me advocate for a policy that would be very helpful for my business, or advocate against the policy that would be detrimental to my business. It’s sort of one of our wheel houses. And and I’ll talk a little bit about that, you know, when at the state, county, local, or other state county, you know, and local levels and federal levels, we are approached about a policy issue or about, you know, a particular statute or you know, sort of red tape bureaucracy that adversely impacts a business or that will support a business. We have the relationships to help right and, and legislation can be daunting legislation can can be difficult to read. legalese is not, you know, is not always the most reader friendly. But the spirit of the legislation is probably well known, and chambers of commerce are incredibly well positioned to advocate for or against a policy because of who they represent. They represent a constituency that would be impacted by that policy. And so, I’m going to end my rant on that first question here and just saying that, you know, while we are lucky to have a staff that can, you know, read through pick apart And then you know, establish advocacy plans based on individual pieces of legislation or based on legislation packages, any local chamber of commerce with even just an all volunteer staff, all volunteer board, one part time staff, they can come together with their businesses, and submit a letter to the legislature, to the governor, to the county executive to the mayor, and just say, hey, look, we know this legislation is out there, we don’t want to 100% know, every aspect of it, but I’m telling you that based on what we do know, it’s really harmful, or it’s really helpful. And we, you know, we want to use our voice to, you know, to speak in favor or against against that policy. So, I got all wound up there, Brandon, I’m sorry, no, it’s gone. The introduction to it is so

Brandon Burton 15:43
in a couple of different thoughts on this, so I had Brad Hicks on the podcast back in episode 143. From Oregon, and he was talking about advocacy and, and how important it is for chambers, really of any size to to advocate for pro business policies, pro business candidates, and, and I know it can be a sticky topic for some chambers. They don’t want to get into it because they don’t want to offend anybody. But being able to look at had a policy and say this is going to help business or this is going to hurt business based on those constituents that you’re representing, I think is so important and vital. Do there at being a Regional Chamber, do you guys work with some of the smaller local chambers to help gather support and input from their members to take to the state level or national level? In some cases?

Marc Cohen 16:40
We do. And you brought up a point, I’ll answer that question. And I want to go back to the point about sometimes it getting sticky, because it’s really important. And maybe some, you know, some tips of how to navigate that. But we do so we created the greater Rochester Chamber of Commerce created something called the Advocacy Coalition of Rochester area chambers. So it’s at crack, which is just the, you know, an acronym we sort of put together. And we started it as just a super informal gathering of local Chambers from actually the Finger Lakes region and the southern tier. And Rochester just being sort of a larger city in our region, we chose to include that in the name for for advocacy sake, and sort of to catch the eye of elected officials. But what started as a super loosely, sort of arranged group of people talking about policy turned into a real advocacy group. And so we will hear from, you know, one of our local chambers, and I don’t want to shout out names, because there are so many, they’re also grateful to hear from a local chamber, who said, hey, you know, what we’re hearing from a lot of members, that exe is a real problem. And then another local chamber will chime in, in the email and say, You know what, we’re hearing that too. So we’ve got five or six, and rather than a chamber with 87 members, or a chamber with 112, or chamber with, you know, 500, we can all come together and say, we represent collectively 1000s of businesses, we are opposed to this, we are supportive of this, this will hurt, this will help. If this will hurt, here’s how you can adjust it, here’s how you can tweak it, and we’ve made impactful change. I mean, legislators reach out and say, Hey, we saw your letter of support, we saw your letter of opposition, you know, what can we do to make this better what we do to help get this passed. And it just, it’s really cool that sort of that we were able to do that. And I say we not the greater Rochester chamber, but we the coalition of you know, of the, you know, 15 to 20 active chambers involved in the group. So that’s been a really great thing and a cool way, maybe for Metro chambers who are listening or State Chambers who are listening to engage the more sort of local grassroots, you know, organizations regarding the stickiness. Oh, go ahead.

Brandon Burton 18:52
No, I was just going to just mention that hopefully, most smaller chambers are part of some regional or state coalition, as far as advocacy goes, just to voice a opinion of their members. I hope that’s happening. But I wanted to put a little bit of attention on this, because I know, there’s been a lot of turnover in the Chamber Leadership in the last year or two. So if somebody is new to chamber work, and they need to get their feet wet, NAFTA See, that’s a good way to do it is to find out on a regional level or state level, is there, an organization that you can, you know, tag on with and be a part of to help represent the businesses in your community? So thank you for talking to that.

Marc Cohen 19:34
No, it is and you know, I’ll say we, as you know, a Metro Chamber are part of the Business Council of New York State, that’s our state chapter and my boss who we have a little bit of an advantage in terms of advocacy. My boss served as Mayor of the City of Rochester and then it Lieutenant Governor of the state of New York. And so the relationships that he’s been able to forge have been helpful for our members and, and for the region as a whole The various boards that he sits on help to shed light on issues that are critically important to the entire regional economy. So we are privileged in that way. You know, but But to your point, you know, he sits on the Business Council of New York State’s board, he sits on the council of 100, for the US Chamber of Commerce board. So, you know, we understand the importance of connecting to our larger associations, right, affiliating with our larger, you know, parent, if you will, parent organizations. And, and we agree that, you know, local chambers, should engage with Metro chambers, and there ought not be and I know, there are, but there ought not be turf wars in terms of who’s got the members and who’s collecting the revenue, but rather, recognize that we’re all in this for the same reason, the spirit is the same. Sometimes the capacity is just different because of the various, you know, financial or resource, you know, positions that folks find themselves in. But no, I agree with you wholeheartedly.

Brandon Burton 20:53
Yeah. So go ahead and touch on the point as far as it being a Sticky, sticky topic for some people to to wander into.

Marc Cohen 21:03
It’s such a good question. And it’s one, you know, with which we’ve grappled as well. So advocacy comes in many forms, right? So there is everything from you got a chamber that’s got 46 members, and, you know, their dues are $25 a year and their dues dollars go to, you know, one annual letter and maybe one dinner, great. And that’s, that’s a perfectly great way to set up a chamber of commerce. And they can advocate just like any other can, by doing something as is, you know, seemingly simple as writing a letter making a phone call meeting asking for their local town council member or county legislator supervisor, you know, for a meeting state legislator, to discuss an issue that’s important. And then obviously goes all the way up to having a political action committee. So the Chamber of Commerce has a political action committee, which is not part of the chamber, right. It’s a separate entity. But you know, so we don’t have, you know, a majority of our board members on it, it’s it’s sort of an independent body, our CEO is not on it, there’s no chamber staff representation on the committee, but it bears our name. And our members support it, and our members contribute to it. And our pack interviews and endorses candidates. And so that’s just political, you know, as it can get right where you’re interviewing. And we’re bipartisan, we endorse Democrats and Republicans proudly. And, you know, and interview based on issues versus based on party. And we’ve got really diverse and great representation on the pack, to ensure that the voice of large and small businesses, that’s the voice of diverse businesses and minority and women owned businesses and veteran owned businesses, that all of that is brought to the table. But it is still inherently a political process to political action committee. So. So you know, we’ve we’ve gotten, you know, from time to time, questions about how you maintain relationships, and it’s a, I say, simple answer. It’s by conducting interviews and conducting endorsements and an ethical, fair and honest way, which we always do. And it’s by ensuring that, you know, you maintain a degree of separation, where, you know, our staff is advocating for members based on the feedback that we get, we get an email from a member saying, Senate Bill x is going to be really, really helpful for us. And we’re hoping you can help us to find a state assembly sponsor, and that you can help to advocate to the Governor to sign the bill. That’s great. And then we put together memos of support. And the same thing is if it’s opposed, working with, you know, our federal representatives, and Senators Schumer, and Gillibrand, and congressmen rally, you know, who represent us on the federal level and letting them know where we stand on various issues, where our members stand on various issues. It’s not rocket science and legislation and government is so again, daunting, and it’s, you know, can be wrought with bureaucracy and red tape and confusion. But if you kind of push all of that aside, and realize, wait a minute, this is just an issue of, you know, another mandate on businesses, I don’t know. And I don’t know the history of it. I don’t know the future of it. I don’t know who’s in favor who’s opposed. I don’t want any of that. What I know is that I have 46 members, and that one of them, or four of them, or all of them don’t like this new mandate. It’s my job now to go out and call my legislator and just say, Hey, I don’t have a big operation. But I’m telling you that my membership is opposed to this. And, and the impact that something like that can have is so massive, and that’s not political at all. That’s not sticky at all. It’s not because a Democrat or Republican, you know, proposed it, it’s because it’s a helpful or a harmful policy, and you’re doing what your membership wants you to do.

Brandon Burton 24:39
That’s right. And if you can imagine, you know, a handful of chambers across the state calling their representatives saying this is good or bad for our business, that it gets the attention of those elected officials who are representing you. That’s right. That that’s really what it boils down to. I think we’re people tend to shy away from getting into the politics side, because they feel like they might lose certain sponsors, certain members, if they endorse, you know, one policy or another. And really, it just it comes down to what’s what’s going to be best for business is what it really boils down to.

Marc Cohen 25:19
It does. And if I just had one more piece of advice, I would I would offer this there is a school of thought that in order to successfully advocate, you have to hold a press conference, you have to pound your fist on a podium, and you have to yell at people and be angry, and, and, you know, call people liars. And, you know, you’re a liberal, you’re conservative, you’re terrible, you’re awful we Stanford’s, and you know what you might get some really good press out of that every outlet in your community or in the state might come and listen to you. And that’s fine. You know, my boss has a saying that politicians have a memory of about 30 to 40 years, you know, if you offend these elected officials, they’re not going to forget, you know, maybe in 40 years, they’ll forget, but they’re not going to forget, if you try to make something political, if you try to embarrass them, or force them into a corner, it’s not going to go well. But if you write a letter you’re being you can have a strong language as you want. You write a letter, you send it to them, you don’t then post that letter on Facebook or Instagram or, you know, other social media, but rather send them the letter, you know, ask them that you’d like a response, and have a conversation with them sort of behind the scenes behind closed doors, where you’re advocating in the best interest of your constituency, but you’re not doing it in a in a, you know, in a way to try and garner attention, you’re doing it in a way to be constructive and productive, you will be successful. And even if I say you’ll be successful, because even if you don’t get your way on that piece of legislation, that elected official or that, you know, leader in their, in their office, the staff member will appreciate that you didn’t try and embarrass them or try and force them, but rather just tried to have a dialogue and in the future, eventually, you will absolutely, you will absolutely, you know, get wins. And they’ll start to look to you for advice on policies so that you can get in at the ground level and be proactive versus reactive.

Brandon Burton 26:59
I love that. And I think by approaching it from behind the scenes behind the closed doors, it’s a way where even if that elected official has some kind of preconceived notion of what the chamber represents or what they do. It really takes it to more of a level ground, kind of that same center, where you’re not in there to play politics, where you’re saying this is what’s best for our organization for the members of our chamber. And it really takes the divisiveness out of out of politics. So I love that typically,

Marc Cohen 27:31
right? Yes, exactly. Right. And, you know, I don’t know how we’re looking on time. But I have one more I have one more suggestion if we have time

Brandon Burton 27:38
for Yes, please.

Marc Cohen 27:39
So there is a lower there is an attractiveness to meeting with the principal right to meeting with the governor and the lieutenant governor to meeting with the Congress member to meeting, you know, with whomever it is right, because you want to be in front of them. I worked in Albany, I worked for my boss when he was lieutenant governor, I worked for our now Governor Cathy Hoko, when she was lieutenant governor, I have seen how advocacy works firsthand. These elected officials, everybody from our state assembly members to state senators, to county legislators, they are taking meetings like crazy, they meet with so many people in a day, you get your 10 or 15 minutes. And I’m not saying they’re not listening to you because they are and I’m sure they care, and I’m sure they’re great. But in order to be effective, you don’t have to meet with the principal. In fact, I would say that when I advocate, I often get further by meeting with their staff, their chief of staff, their legislative director, or legislative assistant, you know, a constituent Relations Director, because these are the folks whose job is day in and day out to be behind the scenes to be the person behind the person to help them get things done. So whereas you’ve got the principal who absolutely takes time to meet with constituents, but also has to take time to vote on bills, and also has to take time to do media and do fundraisers and do all of the other sorts of things that they have to do. If you can get in the ear of a staff member, not only are they more likely to probably give it more attention again, not because the legislator or the elected official won’t, but because it’s the staff member sole job to do that. If you can get them on your side, if you can get them to see your way. You might get five or 10 minutes with them, you know, you might even get five or 10 minutes with the elected officials themselves. These staff members are what the elected officials 10 hours a day. So if you can get one of these staff members on your side and get them to support your position, they will hammer away at that elected official day in and day out until the official sees it the staff members way which is also your way. Right. So my piece of advice is ask for a member with a meeting with the member or the elected official. Do it absolutely. Because it’s great to get a picture and put it on social media and show your members what you’re doing. But don’t discount the importance of meeting with staff as well because oftentimes staff are the ones who can help you to get it done. And you’ll find a lot of success in doing that.

Brandon Burton 29:51
That’s right. And the thought that came to me with as far as meeting with the staff is if you can turn your advocacy efforts into creating an advocate You know, in the office there, the staff member that you win, you know, that’s awesome.

Marc Cohen 30:05
That is exactly where I’m gonna steal that now. So all of your listeners will know that I stole that from you. But that’s all right. But but others won’t that’s, that is a perfect way to put it. Yeah.

Brandon Burton 30:15
Well as we are kind of getting short on time, I do want to ask you what would be maybe one, I mean, you just gave a great tip, but I was asked for one tip or action item for listeners that they can do to, to help take their chambers up to the next level.

Action Item/Tip for Chamber Champions

Marc Cohen 30:31
I want any chamber listening who’s not already doing it, to go on Google type in who is my representative, whatever the first, you know, the first site that pops up is click on that type in your address or the address of your business or your chamber. Whoever it says is your elected leader or the various leaders, pick one of them, send them a note, tell them who you are, tell them that you’d love to show that you are a resource for them the community that you represent businesses that you care about, that you care about sort of the future of the economy of your region, your city, your state, and see what they say. And I will bet you I bet you a cup of coffee next time any of your listeners are in Rochester, New York, and any of them who can prove me wrong. I bet them a cup of coffee in Rochester wherever they want that or glass of wine, that they will get a response. And not only do they get a response, but they’ll have earned a friend because the legislator, elected official staff member who responds to them will appreciate that they took the time to reach out. Hey, my name is Marc Cohen, I’m with the greater Rochester chamber. I value advocacy and I value my role in advocating for constituency, I’d love to talk to you about the state of the the economy, the state of the business community in insert city. Have a great day, Marc Cohen. Every one of your listeners should do that. If they’re not already. And I bet you they’ll find really, really great success.

Brandon Burton 31:54
Absolutely. It sets the table for good common ground and to be able to vote to establish a good relationship. I love that. Rafi right? Yeah. So yeah. As we look to the future of chambers, how do you see the future chambers and their purpose going forward?

Future of Chambers

Marc Cohen 32:11
You know, you and I were talking about this a little bit, you know, pre show, I think we want people to understand the spirit and the value of chambers of commerce in the community, right? So not necessarily, you know, quantitatively what I get for this, I pay you $50? And do you send me a coupon for a cookie every year like, not, not like that, but understand that the value of chambers comes from who we are and what we do and how we represent businesses and nonprofits, and again, our members in the community. That’s what I would love. And I hope that you know, there are larger businesses who are headquartered in various cities who continue to appreciate that, you know, here, we’ve got paychecks, and Constellation Brands, and Wegmans and massive companies who very rarely need something from even a Metro Chamber of Commerce, but they believe in us in our mission and our spirit. So that is what I hope now, here’s the reality. I do believe not just because I’m biased, because it’s my portfolio. But I believe that the future of chambers especially now is in advocating for their constituents and advocating for nonprofits in the business community advocating for policies that will drive the economy. And the last thing, which you’ll have to have me back at some point, so we can talk about workforce development, but the role of chambers of commerce in talent strategy and helping businesses to find the employees they need, so that they can grow and expand and flourish within their community. So I think that sort of those things represent the the future of chambers and in a macro way. And by the way, I have to clarify the value of chambers in terms of networking, and, you know, a brand new business has just come to, you know, your state or your city or your county, they don’t know anybody, they’re looking to make connections, there is no better organization than a Chamber of Commerce to do that. Because they’ve got the credibility, they’ve got the relationships. So that is, it is always going to be, you know, for chambers to be a connector that will always be a role and responsibility. And we can never lose sight of

Brandon Burton 34:16
that. Absolutely. And I love that, you know, taking the role of advocacy and moving it forward in the future. And I think it’s for a lot of businesses just joining the chamber, they may not fully understand or appreciate that mission or vision that the Chamber has that greater mission. So you need some of those things and networking kind of things, some of those events, some of the things that draw people in initially until you can get them to see the bigger vision and and really see the the great work that a chamber can do. So I think that’s a great tip there. Marc, I wanted to give you an opportunity to put any contact information out there that you’d like for anyone listening that might want to reach out and connect with you and learn more about how you guys are doing things that are in Rochester what would be the best way for someone to reach out and connect?

Connect with Marc Cohen

Marc Cohen 35:06
So GreaterRochesterChamber.com is a great way I’m going to give you my my email address and really anybody listening who has any questions about this, if you’re looking for templates or sort of boilerplate emails or pass advocacy agendas that we’ve done, I would love to share so my email is Marc.Cohen@greaterrochesterchamber.com. And, and it’s not an empty offer. I was so honored that that you reached out to me to be part of your show, and to talk a little bit and I don’t take it for granted. So anybody listening should should feel free to reach out to me. And you should feel free to share my contact information if if folks

Brandon Burton 35:48
want it. So I will put it on our show notes for this episode, which is at chamberchatpodcast.com/episode 162 But Marc be ready for some emails from Chamber Champions they’ve we’ve got a very engaged group and people that want to learn and and further advance their communities. So I’m sure you will have people reaching out and asking for some of those templates and boiler plate boiler plates that they can use to further advance our communities that I would love to anytime. Well thank you for being with us today. You provided a lot of value, great perspective that I hope everybody can take and and help their communities move forward, strengthen their businesses and make sure that there’s pro business candidates and policies in place. So thanks a lot, Marc.

Marc Cohen 36:37
Hey, Brandon, thank you for doing this. Thank you for your advocacy and you wouldn’t be around for as long as you have been with as many episodes and incredible guests as you had if you weren’t great. So thank you for all you do and I look forward to keeping in touch.

Brandon Burton 36:50
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Member Development vs. Management with Richard Scully

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Below is an auto-generated transcription of my conversation with Richard Scully. 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.

Introduction

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.

Voiceover Talent 0:14
And now, your host he wonders what local chambers can do to help resolve the national supply chain issues.

He’s my dad Brandon Burton.

Brandon Burton 0:24
Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your host, Brandon Burton, and it is my goal 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 0:50
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 and 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 1:31
You can learn more about Holman Brothers Membership Sales Solutions by visiting HolmanBros.com.

Doug & Bill Holman know how to diagnose and solve
member recruiting issues faster and better than anyone else, and they want to put
that knowledge to work for you and your chamber. Learn more at HolmanBros.com.

Guest Introduction

Our guest for this episode is Richard Scully, Richard is CEO and founder of Chamber Nation. Richard has a rich and extensive background in Process automation with many years in corporate infrastructure design, automation, and community advertising networks. His vast experience prepared him to successfully build Chamber Nation from the ground up. Chamber Nation is a national organization with projects in 40 States and Europe. That company uses innovative technology to provide chambers of commerce, merchants, groups and other business organizations to automate their workflow and economic processes. Chamber nation has received two Business of the Year awards, and has had a significant impact on chambers of commerce across the country. Richard contributes his expertise and time by working with Chambers of Commerce executives to better serve their members while working to increase membership. That sounds a lot like my goal here on the podcast, which is why we align so well. But Richard, I’m glad to have you with me today on Chamber Chat Podcast. If you would 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 better. All right,

Something Interesting About Richard

Richard Scully 2:51
well, hello, everybody. And thank you for this opportunity. Brandon really appreciate it. It’s been a long a long hall building Chamber Nation. It started out where I was CEO, founder of a company called tricep hiring systems that was built at 5 million in sales in Silicon Valley. And during the internet craze, I had Porsches and Mercedes drive up to my office and saw these highfalutin people come in and say Hey, Mr. Skelly, you know like your company. We want to buy your company and I was going wow. And they’re telling me enough, give me a stock. You know, you’re going to be a multi gazillionaire and be able to walk on the beach, the rest of your life and all those kinds of things and, you know, not traditionally used to that kind of environment. I unfortunately fell for it for almost all stock shortly thereafter, within a year actually I lost everything and going from the top after 10 years of building a company that serves some major corporations like KLA 10 core into it. Symantec Eunice’s, it was basically all gone and stock was gone. And I got very little cash up front. So I was in a situation where I still had to work and the dreams are over. So I called my father up in Northern California, I was in Silicon Valley. So my house went to Northern California, and I put my tool belt back on and I was helping him finish up a spec house and he intended to do that kind of work now and it was a shocker. You know, you go from the car in the suit and you know, the business meetings to you know, out in the cold or out in the heat and building a house with a tool belt on is pretty pretty different. So I was I tried to keep my head up but honestly I was you know, inside it, it hurt a lot to lose everything. So I was working out there and somehow Kainoa HF radio it’s a small little Christian radio station. We had a blare on on the boombox. Imagine that and Ron Trumbo, the the person that hung the station was interviewing a guy by the name of Paul Macbeth. And he was the chief for the executive director of the Quincy, California Chamber of Commerce. And I was listening to him and, and he started talking about what they did on a $26,000 year budget. And I was always programmed to look for a business model that appear to need some help, and then build an infrastructure to help that industry. And then hopefully people like it enough to buy it. And then you can build a company. So I had he had offered his cell phone number at the end of the interview, I got out my contractor pencil, I wrote it on a board. And I called him and I literally had lunch the very next day with him it morning thunder and Quincy, I remember this. And he was the nicest guy, he was a former manager of a Safeway store, very successful in Safeway did a lot of different things. And he just a terrific guy. And he’s very supportive. He understood what I’ve gone through. And he just started digging really deep. And I had asked him if I could work in his chamber, or just sit in his chamber and kind of listen to what what goes on in the chamber. He said, Sure, come on down. So it evolved from there ended up building an initial infrastructure, a very lightweight, one cobbled it up, basically just a wireframe to see if this is kind of with this help them and I went from there. And about two months into working on that, him and his wife asked me over for dinner, handed me a $50,000 check. And these weren’t wealthy people, either. This was out of their retirement. And they said, We trust you. And unfortunately, Paul passed away a few years ago, but his wife is still with the company. And we’re very good friends. And she’s always been very supportive. And so has Paul. So that’s how it got started, went to the top went to the bottom and been trying to crawl out of that ever since.

Brandon Burton 7:07
Yeah. Well, that is a good background there of how you how you got into this. Yeah. Why don’t you spend a couple minutes and let us all know a little bit about Chamber Nation, kind of the, the size of the company, the services you offer. Obviously, you work with chambers of commerce, but just dive into that for a little bit before we get into our topic.

About Chamber Nation

Richard Scully 7:30
Sure. So Chamber Nation is we serve hundreds of chambers throughout the country. And also we were invited into Europe. And so we serve Europe and also have installations in Canada, we are really focused on the chamber industry, we, for obvious reasons, you can see how was started. I work in the Support Center. Every day, I’m in the middle of support, I feel like I need to be there because that’s how I understand what is working, what is not working. So I can make adjustments because our mission is obviously to help everyone as much as we possibly can. And you know, we’re we’re listening or so I think the first thing is human nation is very much listening. We’re two platforms, one, not going to focus on the membership management side, but we have very robust management system. But we learned about seven, eight years ago, that there needed to be a change, because in my mind, the chambers of commerce have always been they’ve been out for over 400 years. And they’ve always been the publishing platform for a community. Of course, that was very different in the very early days, like a flea market, you know, providing scales and things to do trade. And then as you move up the United States, the concept of travelers going into a chamber lobby. Well, prior to that, you know, postcards and telephone calls and things like that, and then going to the Chamber of driving to the chamber lobby, asking for brochures, maps, and then we have the internet, you have Google and you have Bing. And honestly, I was at a conference that I ACC conference a number of years ago. And it had a pretty dramatic effect on me because I was listening to a breakout session. And I heard chamber executives saying, Oh, they just go to Google and Bing. And I just go, Oh my gosh, why don’t do that. Don’t do that. And I was thinking in my mind that you know, that’s true. But the fact of the matter is that you know it, it’s not there. I mean, they might think it’s there, but it’s not there. And I just knew that because I had a problem inside of gym relation. As a CEO. I was pretty upset because we had built a lot of very robust membership tools and I, honestly the usage rate was not good. It was terrible. It’s called member engagement. That’s what everybody seems to talk about. And there wasn’t anything that I could do to move to seemingly move the needle and get membership engagement and, you know, improve that, you know, the management systems was clicking away and doing its thing. And it wasn’t, that wasn’t the problem. It was really everything built inside there. For the member side, that was the biggest problem. So I, I realized that, that Google and Bing really didn’t even have the information that the Chamber executives were saying this about just they just go there. So I’m having an issue of member engagement, I was really trying hard to figure out how in the world to change this. And it seems like, if you put a 12 inch by 12 inch login button, on the screen of your chamber website, it would make a difference. So I had an idea, an idea was to go to ACC for three days, take a clipboard and walk around. Some of you might remember me walk around for three days, when I asked the question, may I ask, What technology do you use for your members? I said it in some kind of way. I don’t know if I said management system or membership system, or whatever it was. But anyway, irregardless of what the system was, that was Chamber Nation. Or if it was the latest and greatest mobile app from Silicon Valley, or some other management system, it didn’t matter, every one of us had the same answer, the result was 90% of the members don’t log in, and when they do, they might contribute a paragraph of inflammation. Well, when I left that conference, I was a static, I was so happy because I realized it wasn’t us failing and how we develop it was simply just a, just a general problem. So anyway, when I got on that plane had a clear sheet of paper. And I said, Okay, we’re going to rebuild everything from the ground up, and we got to figure out what we got to do. So one of the things I realized is that the one thing I know for sure is that chambers don’t have a lot of money. So whatever it was that we develop, it had to be very, very inexpensive, and had to be something that could be easily included in the membership plans, because chambers, they don’t want their members upsold. They really, they really don’t like that. So we developed the first of its kind membership services department, we have over 20 people in that department. Now it’s shared across the country by multiple chambers. So we have a full membership services department, I like to explain it this way, that there’s three words and Chamber of Commerce, you have the chamber, and you have commerce. So the idea being in building this is that our customers would continue to handle the chamber like they always do. I mean, we would never suggest telling them how to run their chamber. But we are going to run commerce. And so if we run commerce, and they run the chamber as a team, we can deliver some really amazing results to the members. And that’s what we, that’s what we built. And then one thing led to the next. That was the concept now we needed to create infrastructure to support that at a very low price point, we needed a lot of leverage to make this thing work. And I also didn’t want to make any mistakes. So I started what was called the chamber collaborative, I invited customers to participate, got feedback from a lot of chamber executives on a constant basis. I was very open and honest with him, I would call many of them and say this is what we’re thinking how we’re gonna roll this out, what do you think? Do we need to make any adjustments. And so it really was built from the ground up to serve the Chamber of Commerce Industry. Our whole objective in all of this was to build something to where even if the member wasn’t engaged in membership, that they would get a value back and writing on a monthly basis. So they would wonder at the end of the year, you know, should I renew? I got this report, my numbers are going up every month I’m I think I better really so the whole idea was really changed things around. So Chamber Nation has two systems in one a membership management system membership development system, and when they work hand in hand, it does some amazing things for the community and the chamber and most importantly the member.

Brandon Burton 14:48
Very good. So that does give some really good background about services he offer and how you guys came to be. And it’s always neat to see how people land in the chamber world in general, but then developing tools around that. It’s great to hear that origin story. But you alluded to what our topic for discussion is today, which is going to be membership management versus development. And we’ll jump into that discussion as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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Topic-Membership Management vs. Membership Development

All right, Richard, we’re back. As I mentioned before the break, we’re focusing our topic today on membership management versus membership development. So as we look at those two different areas, how do you see that? How do you see management versus development? What’s the difference?

Richard Scully 17:48
Management is operating the chamber. And membership development is operating the commerce. And you really have to have two separate teams focused on each side of that equation. The membership management system obviously needs to be able to send information to the membership development system, you have new members. So when you have new members, it has to notify the commerce side that there’s a new member and a lot of things need to be done. So the management system is supporting the membership development system. And then when the membership development system receives its instructions, and things are done, then it sends notification back to the management system where the chamber lives, the Chamber staff lives and lets them know that this has been completed and this member is ready to be introduced to their new platform. And you know, all of those things occur. And it’s basically a way for the chamber to review everything that’s been done for the member and then they click another button to send out a notification to the member letting them know the chamber has completed their onboarding and click here to look at everything. Click here to work with your member assistant. All that type of thing has to happen between both systems talking. The objective really is so that the membership management system now has a tool that will communicate with members on a regular basis letting them know exactly how well the chamber has been able to promote their business. tracking things from telephone referrals to electronic requests for additional information. You have your reports that run on a monthly basis that come from the chamber to the member letting them know this is what we’ve done providing them reminders. This is how you log in with idea being that they’re much more inclined to engage when they start receiving reports, every month that something significant has been happening in on behalf of their business, and they get curious. So it’s really helped from the engagement point of view, but membership development is really the handle everything. Commerce related. Oh, yeah.

Brandon Burton 20:24
I was just gonna ask from maybe from that point of view, or bridging that gap from the management to development? What is the the training like with the onboarding of a new member to say, here’s how our system works, you’ll enter some information here, what does it chamber need to do on the front end versus when the system takes over and kind of sends those reports and keeps the engagement level up? What’s that, that bridge like?

Richard Scully 20:51
Well, that we look at that as our responsibility, we as a company, we have to deal with that. So one of the things that is very important in the whole process is that we do all of the research on the businesses, and we do all the development, all the membership profile pages, because although we’re our objective is to pivot a Chamber’s traditional membership directory, into a full blown publishing platform. It’s, it’s, it’s really important that you know that the work for the members are actually being done. So we do all the research, all the development, all the build out, you know, the catalogs or mobile applications or texting platforms, you know, all kinds of things or customer testimonial systems, their coupon management, which actually generates coupon booklet. So, we know that electronic coupons are cool, but they’re not used a lot. So what we’ve done is we developed that to where it goes from electronic to print automatically through our community coupon booklet, so that chambers have a tangible something to show and say, Listen, when you go when you do this, it’s not only going on the website, on your mobile app, and in your catalog, but it’s also going to the community coupon book, like another reason that we can kind of motivate them if you will, to get logged in. So they answer your question, we do that onboarding, research, onboarding, we provide all of the support unlimited at no charge to the members, so that it’s very easy to get support. But when they get these monthly reports, to show them exactly what is happening there, they’re motivated to get in and take a look. And we’ve just added the ability now for them to add video profiles. And all of this is designed so when they look at the dashboard, and they click on it, it’s just real self explanatory. We’ve been building a lot of technology for a number of years. And now we’re going to pull that back because we have so much. And we’re just going to focus on improving our training, we have a woman Her name is Rachel, she works at the full Shar Katie, Chamber of Commerce in Texas, she is going to be starting our new monthly zoom member and training. In she’ll be talking about that specifically from the point of view of the chamber, where they do a lot of classes. Now, you know, real estate agents use it differently than mortgage brokers and retailers. And that’s another thing with with the platform, when you’re building a marketplace for a chamber, it can’t be a store. And everything out there that sold is a store and the reason it can’t be a stores because I don’t think you’re going to find one attorney or one, you know, one real estate agent, nobody like that insurance is going to want to have a store with a checkout, you know, on it that does just doesn’t fit. So we had to build this to accommodate the 80%, which are service providers, and then the 20%, which are retailers with one switch, they can switch it into a complete commission free ecommerce platform. So another benefit of being a chamber member is that you get access to all these tools. So self explanatory, easy to use, all the setup being done is is critical for a successful platform. And I mean, even in the very beginning, you know, one of the stumbling blocks we had was, you know, calling the members to learn more about their business and we realize that people don’t answer their phones anymore. It’s almost impossible. So this has been a really hard model to figure out is it’s taken a long time, a lot of technology. We’re making slight adjustments all the time and the technology to make it smoother and smoother. But fortunately for our customers they don’t see See that part of it because we really are handling the commerce side. And although they have access to the commerce platform or the membership development platform, that’s really for us to use, but they have unencumbered access to be able to get into every business and to see all the stats and exactly what’s happening on the Commerce front. And we also have like for chambers that are going out for grants, we have community wide economic development reporting. And that’s really helpful because they can now generate reports on a community wide level, to help justify any grants that they get for, you know, their visitor centers or economic development, all kinds of different things. And we have several chambers that have actually no one grants.

Brandon Burton 25:48
That’s awesome. So there’s a couple of thoughts that came to mind as you were given this explanation of kind of how the software works in the hole bridging that gap. You had mentioned about roughly 80% of Chamber members tend to be more of the service providers and the other 20%, kind of the the retail shops and things of that nature. And you had mentioned, the ability to set up a an E commerce shop. So I know I’ve talked about this, especially through the pandemic, for those that had retail shops that didn’t really have a strong online presence, the important for chambers to kind of be that catalyst to help those businesses get their brick and mortar online. And the potential of selling out the back door more or less. Can you touch a little bit more on what that’s like for trying to get some of these brick and mortar retail shops online with the retail store and ecommerce platform.

Richard Scully 26:49
None of it is easy. I mean, first of all, most people are our most retailers are slanted towards not selling online, one of the things that we learned is that they have a real problem managing inventory, because they have a physical store, they have an electronic store. And if they run out of stock, then and someone buys it online, or they don’t go and take it down, which a lot of them don’t do, then you have a problem. So they shy away from that. One of the things that has helped though, is that what we’ve done is we’ve decoupled the merchant account, there is an ability to use PayPal, but we suggest that they don’t do it that way. And they use our integrated checkout request system. This way, when a retailer has products that they also sell in their store, when somebody purchases that product, it will send an order request receipt to the buyer. And it sends an order request to the member so that the member can now check inventory, and then complete the checkout on whatever terminal they currently use. Which makes it really, really easy because remember, we’re not in the middle of the transaction, charging a commission, we’re not interested in charging anything. This is a this is a member service, it’s included in membership, there’s no upselling. So it’s a very legitimate transaction. So since we don’t have to take a piece of it, then we can decouple the merchant account. And that works great. We also have inventory in the online version where they can put in like they could have 20 available in there and automatically click down until it goes to zero. And then what it does is instead of deleting the item, it puts it in hides it and puts it in the warehouse so to speak. So later on, you can unhide it, bring it back and put inventory levels back in. But it’s a simple in our platform, every every every catalog is full of what we call displays. And they are cataloged displays, because you know, your professional services, you know, catalog display as a store is is the appropriate nomenclature, I guess you would say. And all all a member has to do is begin to take when they open up those displays, they add more displays, they just simply put in a price and when they add the price, the whole infrastructure changes into a store. So and you know we like to say that Amazon is all centralized. So why not your own chamber community including the internet, including the professional service providers, and that’s exactly what’s happening because the Chamber’s always been the central hub of everything. And unless, you know if they don’t take the electronic side of things really seriously, then they’re really going to lose out and you know, it’s not something to celebrate, but in most communities today, local newspapers, you know, the subscriber levels are down and that’s not a good thing. I like traditional media. Local radio same kind of thing. I mean, look, podcasts are competitors to radio now a lot of different things. So I’m, we’re really positioning the Chamber of Commerce now to become the default advertising hub for each and every community across the country. And it works because we’re doing the work. And if you just put in technology, and I know this, because I asked a lot of questions, and it didn’t matter. You know what technology it was, the vast majority of people just don’t log in to anything. So you’ve got it, you’ve got to, you’ve got to deal with that. And that’s, it’s taken us many years and too much money to build everything from scratch all over again. But, you know, that’s what we had to do. And if I didn’t go to that ACC conference, you know, I would have never would have never understood the problem.

Brandon Burton 30:56
So that kind of hits on the other point that I wanted to bring up. As I’ve mentioned in a couple podcast episodes in the past, where I like to encourage chambers occasionally to do what I call the yellow highlighter exercise, where you look at your own membership list and take out the highlighter and markup, you know, all the members that have any level of engagement with the chamber. And oftentimes, chambers are no surprises the right word, but when you see it in front of you with the how low of a percentage of engagement for on any level, whether opening emails, responding on social media, attending a luncheon, whatever it may be, just to kind of have that pulse. And I do it from the perspective of, you know, for chambers doing their own podcast, it’s just another way to engage their membership. But what I like about what you’re, what you’re talking about here with the this platform, is it offers another way, and kind of reminders even for these members to be engaged, to be found easier online to allow the chamber to be a better advocate for their business, you know, based on their engagement. So I’m going to guess that your customers probably don’t need to pull out a yellow highlighter, you probably have a report, it’ll spit out whatever membership engagement level their members have. But I think that’s important for for chambers all over to look at what that engagement levels like further.

Richard Scully 32:25
Yeah, and you and you almost have to force it. You have to force a level of engagement in order to get them engaged. And I really believe in that. I mean, I had a you know, it’s it’s, it’s one of those things just recently, I was invited to come two days to Green Valley, Arizona, Green Valley, Sarita chamber, and they had some formal chamber member workshops there and, and they had me down and it was quite nice. And it was interesting, because, you know, the members are saying, holy cow, I never had any idea that the chamber was doing any of this, you know, and you’re overwhelmed with questions. And oh, it does that too. And they’re very excited because the chamber typically ranks pretty doggone high on search engines, they do really well with their websites. The directories do well, too. They do they do phenomenally well. It’s amazing. But people really do still use the chamber member directories. And I think it’s because it’s a dedicated local directory, unlike Google and Bing, where you’re going to get local results, but you’re not going to get something that’s like local, local, local, right. So people realize that, oh, when I’m connecting the chamber, I get all of that attention online. I’m getting backlinks from here, I’m getting backlinks from the director of getting backlinks from a catalog, my mobile app, I’m getting, you know, all these different things happening, that are helping to promote their business. A lot of people think of it as SEO, I don’t use that word very much. I like to think that if it’s on the internet, it’s going to be found. But if it’s not on the internet, it’s not. And in most cases, the businesses do not document their products and services at all. So it’s not even there to be found in the first place on Google and Bing. So. And when we add a new business, we’re adding about 10 to 12 additional pages onto the internet for each business, just as a starter point after that they can get into hundreds of pages if they’d like. So I think the the engagement is you’ve got to work to engage that member through a success story. And then when they see oh, wow, this thing seems to be working. They’re much easier to talk to about engagement. I know this because going to workshops, not only Green Valley, but others I was also in Texas, to where, you know, the members are like going, Wow, this is this is fantastic. And they have a new appreciation for the chamber, they realize that the Chamber has grown up and you know is with it and understands technology and understand support. And you know, that’s how that’s how you get it, how you get engagement moving, in my opinion, because that’s how we been able to get it moving.

Brandon Burton 35:28
That’s right. I know, we need to start wrapping up here. But I did want to ask you, if you might have one tip or action item that a chamber champion listening to do to maybe help lift their chamber up to the next level? Yeah,

Action Item/Tip for Chamber Champions

Richard Scully 35:44
I had an experience many years ago, some of you may be too young to remember this company. But most of you probably will, it was called Kinkos. And I believe it’s a FedEx thinner now, and I was traveling a lot trying to build trying to build try step, the company I mentioned before, and I had a proposal that was do very, very important. It was a multi million dollar potential contract, and I ran into some problems on my computer. And I remember going into Kinkos, and the woman sat me down at a computer. And she showed me all these graphics files that were already pre installed. And I mean, they just treated me like the king. And I’ll never forget it. And I’ve always thought about, you know, the chamber, converting chambers into these little Kinkos support centers where when you walked into the chamber, because you’re trying to help grow your business, that they really are a one stop shop for helping you be successful. And I think there’s a lot of chambers that do things a lot a lot differently, but they offer great solutions the way they are. But being able to say listen, you know, the chamber is a one stop shop for everything to promote your business, I think is a is my suggestion.

Brandon Burton 37:04
All right. Appreciate that. So I’d like to ask everybody, as we look to the future of chambers, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Future of Chambers

Richard Scully 37:15
I, I see Chambers as the digital platform. I see the chamber as the attention grabber from the internet to disperse, leads and prospects to its local business community. I see the chamber as the legislative action center, an organization that that surfaces the important local topics that local businesses need to know about. And I see them as an extraordinarily valuable digital hub of the future. That’s how I see it. I mean, some people might think I’m wack. But, you know, I really believe that so many things are moving to the digital side, that somebody in a community is got to be a custodian of local information. And the chamber has always been there for that. And I just believe that they should be there during this digital transformation that we’re just beginning when I mean, you know, we’re already thinking about Metaverse, right? We’re already thinking about how do you do crypto in a community? I mean, there’s all kinds of opportunities that are coming up ahead that that somebody is going to have to be the custodian. The trusted source of local information, as I call it, is the chamber so I see it as the digital connection tool the future.

Brandon Burton 38:45
I love that answer. And then the nice thing about looking at the future is nobody can ever say you’re wrong because there’s always a future. The first Richard, I appreciate you spending time with us today on Chamber Chat Podcast I did I wanted to give you an opportunity to put out any contact information for anyone listening who want to get in contact with you and maybe further explore some of these ideas that you shared and services Chamber Nation has to offer.

Connect with Richard Scully

Richard Scully 39:14
Yeah, thank you, Brandon. So email address. Well, first of all, ChamberNation.com is where you can find us. I always ask people to go to RichardsCalendar.com to find a time that might work for you for a meeting or you can call me just click the sales department option but it’s 855-Add-Members that’s our phone number 855-Add-Members and just click the sales department option and you’ll get me that there too.

Brandon Burton 39:48
All right, we will get this in our show notes for this episode should be found at chamberchatpodcast.com/episode161 but Richard this has been a fun conversation and hopefully one that kind of expands the thoughts and visions of those Chamber Champions that are out there listening. So thank you for joining me today.

Richard Scully 40:07
Thank you man. Appreciate it very much.

Brandon Burton 40:09
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Importance of Digital Content with Patrick Shanahan

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Below is an auto-generated transcription of my conversation with Patrick Shanahan. 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.

Introduction

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.

Now, your host, he would like you to join the Chamber Chat Champions Facebook group. He’s my dad Brandon Burton.

Hello Chamber Champions. Thank you for tuning in to Chamber Chat Podcast. I am your your host, Brandon Burton, and it’s my goal to introduce you to people and ideas to help you better serve your Chamber members and your community.

Our title sponsor is Holman Brothers Membership Sales Solutions. Let’s hear from Jason Mock president and CEO of the San Marcos Area Chamber to learn how the Holman Brothers have provided value for his chamber. Two years ago,

Jason Mock 0:51
We brought in Holman Brother to help our organization go to that next level. And in those two years, our team has transformed the way that we think about sponsorships and non-dues revenue. And I would really encourage you if you’re looking to take your chamber to the next level to bring on the Holman Brothers.

Brandon Burton 1:01
You can learn more about Holman Brothers Membership Sales Solutions by visiting HolmanBros.com.

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Guest Introduction

Our guest for this episode is Patrick Shanahan. Pat currently leads the enterprise sales team at Glue Up. Pat’s responsibilities are focused around building a team of consultants tasked with providing full digital transformation for large scale associations and membership based organizations in North America. Pat’s consultative approach to SAS sales has enabled him to grow companies in the hospitality and technology space. Pat’s most notable accomplishment ranged from programs focused on revenue optimization and the hospitality space for some of the largest hotel groups to repositioning and building new teams within technology companies to starting and exiting a technology company of his own. Pat, I’m happy to have you with me today here on chamber chat podcast, if you would take a moment to say hello to all the chamber champions and share something interesting about yourself so you can get to know you better.

Something Interesting About Pat

Patrick Shanahan 2:12
Absolutely. Thanks, Brandon. And welcome, everyone. Thank you for having me, I guess I’d say something interesting is once upon a time, my mid 30s actually went ahead and quit a very lucrative job and just tried to start my own company. It’s kind of like the stars line I had, it was, it was the right time, I was actually still unmarried at the time didn’t have as many responsibilities in the scope of family. And man, my actual family was really just like that, they thought that my trajectory was going really well. And it wasn’t easy. I had, I totally lacked the resources that I needed to, to get it off the ground, I had Uber Lyft for practically a whole year and sort of simultaneously get my, you know, on the street MBA, so to speak. But, you know, ultimately was successful, it’s taught me a valuable lesson in faith. But I kind of call it these days, I don’t know if this is really a buzzword or phrase, but faith by intelligence, meaning that, you know, I like to have as much info as possible before taking a leap of faith. And I’m not saying that this is something that you do when it comes to, you know, religion or anything along those lines. But as a sensor, you can take, take as much information as you can before you take a leap. So it’s still a leap nonetheless. Because that’s something random but interesting.

Brandon Burton 3:33
Yeah, like that reminds me of the quote of Martin Luther King, Jr. About how it goes to the effect that you don’t need to see the whole staircase to take the first step. But you know, if you can see that first step and take that step with faith, and you’re on the right track. Well, why don’t you take a take a few minutes and tell us a little bit about about glue up? What is the company glue up? What do you guys do? What are your services? And then that’ll help set the table before we get into our discussion for today?

About Glue Up

Patrick Shanahan 4:05
For sure, well, it’s there’s kind of a lot to it. So I’ll keep it pretty simple. We’re a software company, you know, a SaaS company, a cloud based, you know, application with, with mobile apps, but at our core, we’re a CRM company that helps member based organizations manage, you know, their, their contacts, their members, their prospects or opportunities. And it’s sort of modular in its in its capabilities in terms of, you know, the membership management, you know, events, community engagement, it being app based it really, really what we do, it’s two things. So we try to kind of go in and discuss with our clients, how do we remove any manual processes here, this is meant to be sort of an all in one out of the box solution that can, you know, greatly enhance the full ecosystem. And the second thing that we do really is just drive engagement. So in a very segmented and relevant way meaning that it’s all about the data that you have at CRM level, how do you segment lists of of data segment your your people and then you know, drive real information and get them to engage you’re basically on a on a mobile app or on the desktop in a community sets. Awesome. So I mean, we see what that really does is it kind of certain things that we do like for example, our virtual speed networking, version two, which is a really cool, kind of putting the pizza lovers with pizza lovers and putting the the wings lovers with the wings, lovers, you know, you ultimately in a networking sense, hopefully what that does is drive perceived value into ultimate tangible value.

Brandon Burton 5:45
Yeah, and we can touch more on that in a in a moment, but I’ll introduce our topic for discussion today is going to be around the idea of creating more high quality digital assets for your chamber, to kind of diversify your digital outreach to your membership and your community in general. And we’ll get into this discussion as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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Topic-Importance of Digital Content

All right, Pat, we are back. And as I mentioned before the break our our focus for our discussion today is around creating high quality digital content for chambers of commerce. And specifically, just to kind of give a heads up to everyone is I’m partnering with Glue Up for a special online podcast live event, if you will, with with glue up and we’ve got a panel as well of speakers that will be on this live digital event really focused on this whole topic. So today, we were hoping to kind of whet your appetite a little bit, hopefully to gain more people to join us for this digital development event.

Click image above to register for this free event on February 24, 2022

So Patrick, you had mentioned before that break about how you mentioned segmentation. So taking for example, a Chamber of Commerce to be able to segment their members. Can you talk a little bit more about what what you mean by that?

Patrick Shanahan 9:35
Yeah, for sure. Well, I’ll use the example of email to start with at least but you know, we all get hundreds of emails a day and many of them just aren’t relevant per se. You know, I get a lot that it looks like somebody just didn’t do their research when they’re trying to sell me you know, a sales enablement tool or something or, or data that they’re trying to sell. You know, because we’re a software company we need to acquire data so that we could reach out and, you know, what happens is like, Okay, we get, we’re getting the same even with organizations that I’m interested in or that I’m a member of, I’m getting stuff that’s just way out of my realm, it’s not necessarily truly relevant. And I don’t have time, unfortunately, all the time to, to dig in and just read all that. So one of the things that I like to talk about is how to really segment your your actual audience, whether it’s members or non members, especially the non members, because, you know, hopefully, members are receiving value Otherwise, they wouldn’t continue on. But the non members obviously are being a little bit more picky, perhaps they need some more value to be, you know, instilled in them, or you need to demonstrate that. And it’s really starts with, like, how you reached out to them in the first place. So, I hope that’s kind of a decent answer. But basically, that’s really just one of the probably five Pong endpoint. Yeah, concepts that I discuss on a daily basis for chambers,

Brandon Burton 11:00
that I’ve joked about this a few times. But my background is in chamber publishing, so doing advertising sales, for chamber directories, and maps and different things. And as I do that, I joke about that, I often feel like a bartender, you know, I meet with these Chamber members, and I hear, I hear their complaints, you know, with unmet unfulfilled expectations from their chamber, and so forth. And one of those things that I hear from Chamber members on pretty much a daily basis is how they get so many emails from their chamber, they just can’t even keep up with all the emails. So as you talk about that, just email as a example, the value that comes in segmenting your membership base, maybe as a starting point, to say, yes, there are certain things that every chamber member needs to know about. But there’s other things that maybe just the restaurants need to know about, or maybe something that just this service based industry needs to know about, or the retail, you know, so you can really hone down and you can get as niche as you want with the segmentation, to make sure that the messaging you’re putting out is relevant to those that you’re putting it out to. And then they also feel like you’re doing something for them, specifically, instead of just sending out a wide broad casting net, and hoping that you bring somebody in to the next event, you know, that your chambers doing. So I see a ton of value in being able to segment and in that that’s best done in a digital way, you know, and being able to input your data in a way that makes sense to be able to segment it later.

Patrick Shanahan 12:42
Totally. And then, you know, even on the front end, the marketing front end, you know, the chamber, I see pretty much every chamber just its sign up for a newsletter or something. Yeah, well, you can think through that one even better to you can actually maybe even have a little bit more of a segmented approach from the former facing, like, even in the initial pre membership phase, like signing up in picking sort of an industry segment at that point to receive communications from so

Brandon Burton 13:12
for sure. And then that gets takes us to the next point that I wanted to touch on is the ability to diversify our digital outreach. So I think every chamber out there has got email, most of them have some kind of social media. Those tend to be you know, we’re most chambers kind of a baseline, you know, they’ve got their Facebook, they’ve got email, but maybe what are what are some other examples that come to mind of other ways that they can reach out digitally to their membership base and and prospective members?

Patrick Shanahan 13:48
Yeah, absolutely. Well, there’s a few. Number one is that, you know, this is my perspective. So I’m not necessarily trying to be out here talking about technology, but you know, it’s, it’s an app based world now. And so, you know, we have the likes of the, you know, the Instagrams, and Facebook’s, and LinkedIn, those are certainly very important. However, none of those actually are enable you to truly do what we did in our last couple of thoughts, you know, to truly segment that and actually have it so that, for example, and with our product with with glue up the community engagement solution, you pull up in the app, and you’re privy to what you have sort of subscribe to terms of the topics that you want to hear about, and it works much like a social network. So you kind of you’re scrolling through but it’s all people that are like minded maybe or have the same challenges. And so again, it’s it’s like value driven there because you’re not you know, you ever scroll down forever and you just didn’t really scroll and scroll on most can’t find anything you really are interested in and so that’s that’s, like probably the main the main gripe, actually that I hear from her clients is that A is the same thing we were talking about where it’s like, yeah, we have trouble kind of finding our niche, but it’s because in this whole thing, and actually, I’m just gonna throw out that, you know, Scott Pleasance is, you know, is going to be on this podcast. And I’m super excited because he comes from this economic development mindset, that’s just fantastic. And so when we were designing the community engagement solution, you know, we pretty much worked with him on on understanding what that would entail. It’s very programmatic in nature, it translates very well to industry segmentation, special interests, economic development, so forth. So when, when you’re scrolling forever, on a social network, and it’s not very segmented, there are, of course, you know, channels and people that you can, like, they all work a little bit differently. But when we were designing ours, it was very focused on trying to trying to be able to satisfy, you know, the, whether it’s, you know, economic development, or if it’s topical in nature, industry segment in nature, I’d say that’s the number one. The number one thing in terms of expanding as reaches, so you know, you’ve got, you’ve got all the whatever social networks, you’re using us also, you should have something that can tie them all together. So we’re well integrated into all of the social networks that that you know, a chamber would have or that a member based organization would have. So that’s, that’s the other thing is that it’s got to be something that’s integrated, so that it can be done at scale, because it needs to be done at scale, because there’s a hyper focus on the delivery of the information.

Brandon Burton 16:37
Sure, yeah. So you drop Scott Pleasance name. So Scott will be joining us as a panelist on our the live digital event that we have coming up and this is going to be on February 24. So for all you be listening, kind of bookmark that save the date. And we’ll we’ll get a link out for you to register for this here in just a little bit. But also on that panel is we’ll have myself we’ll have Patrick, it will also have Izzy West. And I know a lot of you are familiar with Izzy between her her blog, the Izzy West and she does several YouTube videos and very involved with digital content creation and working with Chambers of Commerce now as a consultant to take on their their social media presence. But as we talked about diversifying digital outreach, you know, the, you’ve got your social media, you’ve got your podcasts, you’ve got blogging, you’ve got video, you’ve got, you know, all of the different social platforms. So being able to reach out to your members or potential members and meet them where they are, and being able to communicate with them effectively in the way that’s going to resonate the best with them, I think is so important, and why we’re going to have this digital event to talk about creating high quality digital content and the importance of it for Chambers of Commerce. So one of those things, Pat, that you mentioned with the with Scott is around economic development. And and we had talked beforehand about how really economic development is something that every chamber should be a part of to some degree. Do you want to touch a little bit more on that about some thoughts? I know Scott’s no expert on that, but maybe give a teaser?

Patrick Shanahan 18:28
Totally, totally. And yeah, I wish he was here. But um, you know, he’s, he’s, I’ll give you a little background. He’s he actually is from Lynchburg, Virginia, at least now in his life. So that’s down and in sort of, sort of the country, at least in my perspective, you know, because I’m from the DMV, the Washington, DC metro area, I’m in the suburbs. And he’s tasked with economic development, he actually his organization is called innovate Lynchburg. And that whole corridor is a place where he and his his board are trying to really think outside of the box in terms of how do we attract, you know, and educate new talent to basically get, you know, economic stimulus via bringing, bringing in organizations like I’ll give another example of Scott for a get back to it. But like, when you think about Fairfax County in Northern Virginia, and I actually live in montgomery county, which is on the Maryland side, Virginia is absolutely crushing it. I mean, they’ve got Amazon Web Services there. It’s already been there. They’re moving, they’re getting the HQ to how does that happen? There’s a lot of things in terms of tax incentives, server time and certain things like that. So a lot of that’s going on and a little bit of a smaller level out there. What he’s doing, but the the point is that, you know, whether we like it or not, and I never really realized this until I spoke with my CEO and this is actually a couple of months ago, and certainly when we had that conversation Two weeks ago, Scott, whether we like it or not, if you start a business, you’re you’re simulating, you know, economy, you’re developing the account, you’re creating jobs, opportunities, whatever we do, it’s all centered around that in a business capacity, and then our allies really, so he’s all about that, very cognizant about that. And he really, I think they started this tech hub in a more hyper focused way to try to get the tech companies that presumably, will grow fast, you know, and, and, and provide faster value, maybe that just any other industry segment out there is. So I think what they’re betting on to start, he actually, I mean, I’m not sure if anybody knows, but I mean, it’s in Virginia, it’s like, it’s like, if you get at a high school, there’s a program where they practically pay you to go to school, and they practically sign you up for the job of your dream career, that it’s a two or four year program. I mean, they made that happen out there. And that is fantastic. It’s having a major impact on lives out there. So hopefully, that’s a good summary of it. And I think it’s going to be epic, they’ll just continue to really, really do well.

Brandon Burton 21:12
Yeah, I’m looking forward to seeing what seeing what Scott has to bring to this digital event. And for those of you who who are interested, this is the the morning of February 24, that we’re doing this, this digital event for creating high quality digital content for chambers of commerce. And you can access it, probably the easiest way to register would be through the shownotes On this episode, which is chamber chat podcast.com/episode 160. And I’ll have a registration button there, that’ll take you to the page to get signed up for it. But Patrick, I don’t want to, you know, giveaway, everything that we’re going to be covering in this event. But I would like to have you, you come from a digital background for sure. Like to get your perspective on a tip or action items that listeners chamber champions can do to help take their chamber app to the next level.

Action Item/Tip for Chamber Champions

Patrick Shanahan 22:12
Absolutely. Number one. Sorry, you said a tip, I have a few

Brandon Burton 22:17
that will take bonuses. I mean, we’ll charge extra for those for the list. No, I’m just kidding. Well, yeah,

Patrick Shanahan 22:23
me too. Now, obviously, number one would be attend this actual event coming up on the 28th. So for sure, register for that. And yeah, check, check out my website, go up.com. But with this series, you know, to, I think a really cool exercise to do would just be to create a list of all the small business businesses that are in your, you know, in your area, that are in your database or not. And that are, you know, they’re not member, take, take a small sample of this random. And, you know, if it’s, if it’s a ton of data, yeah, just take like maybe five of them. Hopefully, once maybe the, you don’t even really know, if you’re in a really, really small place, that’s probably going to be pretty hard. But go to their website, see if they even have one, see if it’s really out of date. We’re gonna chat about this just a little bit, probably, if we can get to it on on the event. But I mean, there’s some chambers that I work with, that are totally making money off of this type of strategy. And I think we spoke about this as well, really out of the box thought process and a really, really cool strategy that I think is, is on the economic development front, it’s on the, it’s on the, it’s on the front of chambers, you know, really spearheading the advancement of their members where applicable.

Brandon Burton 23:46
I think that’s so key, especially coming off the heels of the pandemic right now, where, when, when COVID first it and businesses you know, brick and mortar businesses had to close their doors for, you know, the two weeks to flatten the curve, or however long they ended up closing their doors for those who had a website who had a digital commerce, you know, presence, were able to pivot and actually still do pretty well, even through the pandemic. So I think that’s a great tip that that’s us offered is to, to take a look at, you know, a sampling of your members or prospective members and see, do they have a website do they have what kind of digital presence do they have? Are they operating just with a brick and mortar and a Facebook page? Because that’s not going to help a whole lot with SEO rankings are people trying to find them online? I know in fact, one of the sponsors for this show for the for chamber chat podcast is chamber nation. And they’ll they’ll help chambers do this or they’ll build out the number of web pages for their members. So it helps to with rankings with search engines help them to be found in a digital world that we’re now a part of. So I think that’s a huge Did that path just offer there’s to do that evaluation, and then look for the opportunity where you can help these businesses to get more into the digital world, just so they can stay relevant. We always talk about chamber staying relevant, but we need to help our members, businesses stay relevant as well. That’s a great tip. Tony, Pat, as we look to the future of chambers, how do you see the future of chambers of commerce and their purpose going forward?

Future of Chambers

Patrick Shanahan 25:30
Pretty much what your last statement was, I mean, you know, chamber personnel, are some of the most diverse people they know, almost to a level of high granularity, you know, of not only their members, but they, they have the full idea of their area of what can be done, what can’t be done, the trends in all these different segments. And, you know, I think that, I think sometimes we we, we make the mistake of just thinking that someone knows their business, like 360 degree in and out, people are also very inundated with their lives to so a small business owner, and I’ve been with myself, is inundated by a hyperfocus of something, and mostly it’s revenue driven. Right. But perhaps, you know, one could actually kind of take a higher view, you know, back it out and say, Well, what is the risk involved? Potentially, and we saw it with COVID. You know, we saw restaurants like shutting down, you know, if they were able to pivot fast enough, would it have happened? So, having an idea of even like that, for example, they’re basically, you know, it’s it’s all about two things, the economic economic development, but also just basically being able to kind of be a consultant for, you know, all businesses within the area member or not. Yeah.

Brandon Burton 26:51
Which I know, can be hard as a bandwidth so wide. But there are certain things, I think it goes back to the segmenting, you know, if you can segment and share information to these specific groups, you’re not needing to do as much of the one on one stuff, but you can still do the one to many, it just may not be the entire base as many, but maybe it’s 15 or 20, in a group instead of 200 or 400. You know, it’s like

Patrick Shanahan 27:19
the glaring opportunity, you know, go for that, what can be done for everyone?

Brandon Burton 27:24
All types, but absolutely, yeah, yeah, go see where the biggest needs are, and attack those first. Absolutely,

Patrick Shanahan 27:31
totally. And maybe the other thing would just be to continue to focus early, because I know a lot of chambers is really great, but you know, use use the tools and the knowledge and the data that you have to truly put value to value within their relationships, you know, so finding people that, you know, be Cupid, you know, in a business sense.

Brandon Burton 27:53
Yeah. That’d be that matchmaker. Yeah. For sure. Well, Pat, what would be the best way for a chamber champion to reach out and connect with you if they want to learn more about glue app or anything that you had to share? And beyond joining us for this digital event on the 24th?

Connect with Patrick Shanahan

Patrick Shanahan 28:12
Sure, absolutely. Go to the website, glueup.com. Or you can reach me by email. patrick.shanahan@glueup.com. So that’s Patrick Shanahan. And that’s spelled s h a n a h a n at glue up.com. And we’re common. Well, that’s 443-282-8656. Happy to speak with you.

Brandon Burton 28:38
All right, we will get that in our show notes for this episode, which again, is going to be at chamberchatpodcast.com/episode160. And again, we invite everyone to join us for this digital event. Again, it’s going to be on the morning of Thursday, February 24. Depending on your time zone I’m in Texas, so I’m Central. So it’s 9am Central. So do the math to wherever you are, you’re located. But we’re going to have a great discussion on creating high quality digital content for your chambers and why that’s important. And again, I’ll be on that presentation. Patrick will be on there. Scott Pleasants and Izzy West. So we’re going to have a great discussion. There’s going to be opportunity for those in attendance to ask questions, get some live feedback. And we’ll also do some speed networking at the end as well so you can get to connect with some other Chamber Champions that are out there and be a part of this great event. So check out the show notes page again, chamberchatpodcast.com/episode160 to register for that event.

That Patrick, thank you for joining me today on chamber tap podcast, and sharing some of these key highlights and insights and, and helping to tease this event a little bit. We hope we get a great turnout.

Patrick Shanahan 30:00
I appreciate it. Thank you.

Brandon Burton 30:04
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