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Chamber Promotional Videos with Eric Hortness

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Brandon Burton (00:00.738)
Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your host, Brandon Burton, and it’s my goal here on the podcast to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community. Our guest for this episode is Eric Hortness. Eric is the Executive Director of the Madison Chamber of Commerce in Madison, South Dakota, a role that he’s proudly held since 2017.

Before stepping into the chamber world, Eric built a career around athletics as a college baseball coach and fundraiser for Dakota State University. His passion for community and teamwork continues to shape his leadership today. Outside of his chamber work, Eric stays deeply connected to the game of baseball, coaching Madison’s spring high school baseball team and cheering on his son who plays college ball at Mount Marty University.

He and his wife Desiree are raising two sports loving kids, including a daughter in sixth grade who’s always ready to compete. Whether it’s family activities, chamber initiatives, or coaching from the dugout, Eric brings energy and commitment to everything he does. But Eric, I’m excited to have you with us today here on Chamber Chat podcast. I’d love to give you an opportunity to say hello to all the chamber champions who are out there listening and to share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little better.

Eric Hortness (01:24.293)
Yeah, I appreciate it, Brandon, for excited to be here and thank you for the invite. Something exciting, you know, I started with the Greater Madison Area Chamber of Commerce in 2017 and that was really my first, I guess, delve into the chamber world. I really…

didn’t have a whole lot of knowledge with a chamber of commerce before that. But it did help that I was fundraising for our university’s athletic department before that. So I knew a lot of the business owners already. Madison, South Dakota, for those that are not familiar, we’re about 45 minutes Northwest of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, which Sioux Falls is the largest city in South Dakota.

Madison’s about 6,500 people. We do have two lakes on the outside of Madison. So when you factor in the two lakes, we’re about a 10,000 population area. And then with the university, we always joke that in the summer, we trade out our college students for lake people.

Brandon Burton (02:48.814)
Yeah, as I say, tourism. So that makes sense. For other college towns, the college students leave in the summer and the population just gets cut in half or something dramatic like that. So it’s nice that you’ve got that balance to be able to keep things moving in the economy. That’s awesome.

Eric Hortness (03:00.825)
Right. Yep.

Eric Hortness (03:08.399)
Yeah, and that’s, you know, we try to, you know, we try to do some things in the summer to draw those, what we call Lakers into our community and hopefully spend some money.

Brandon Burton (03:22.19)
Very good. Well, tell us a little bit more about the, tell us a little bit about Madison. Tell us about the Madison Chamber. Size, staff, scope of work, budget, just to kind of set the stage for, as we dive into our topic today, just to know what kind of resources you’re coming from.

Eric Hortness (03:38.309)
Sure, we’ve got roughly 275 members. We call them investors. We have a staff, including me, two and a half, two full-time and then one part-time staff member. So we rely very heavily on volunteers. Our board is very engaged and I don’t want to call them hands-on, but they are always willing to help.

when we need them to. But like I said, the volunteers for a lot of our different events are huge for us. We wouldn’t be able to do a lot of the things that we do do without a wide range of volunteers. Budget wise, we’re in the $400,000 to $450,000 range for our annual budget. And that comes from

several different buckets from investor dues to some funding that we get from our city because technically we are chamber tourism, downtown, all rolled into one. So we do get about a quarter of our budget from our city. We have some referral programs with some of the companies that we work with that

that generates some revenue as well. And then some of our events and programs help round out our budget.

Brandon Burton (05:15.286)
Yeah, it’s always good to have some good sources of non dues revenues. So you’re not just relying on those investor dues or membership fees and whatnot. Well, I’m excited to dive into our topic of discussion today. We’re going to be covering chamber promotional videos and Eric shared with me a few videos that they’ve done to promote some different events there at the Madison chamber. So we’ll dive in deep on this topic and how they’re doing things there in Madison as soon as they get back from this quick break.

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All right, Eric, we’re back. As I mentioned before the break, we’re talking about chamber promotional videos. Tell us what you guys do. You call them cool dad videos. How did this come to be? What was the idea that generated this and how do you utilize them?

Eric Hortness (06:09.317)
Sure. So this started a couple of years ago, really by accident. And it’s one of those things that can kind of be chalked up to some of your best ideas kind of happened by accident. So we now, since 2018, we do a downtown concert series on our main street. And it has grown from the first year we had a half a block of our main street closed.

And now it’s gone up to three blocks that we close off for six Tuesday nights in the summer. We have sponsors, headlining sponsors, food trucks, inflatables for kids, all kinds of different activities. With a band and we have a little beer tent area. And now we get about 2,500 people down to our downtown on a

on a Tuesday night in the summer. So a couple of years ago, one of our main sponsors wanted to do a little promo video. And so we came up with this idea of let’s just do a kind of two cool dads at a car show. Because with our concerts, we also have a theme. And that particular night was going to be classic.

So anybody that had a classic car that they wanted to show off, they could come and park on one of the blocks that we close off and just show it off. So that was kind of the start of the idea. Just a couple of quote unquote, cool dads walking around at a fake car show is how the video started.

Brandon Burton (07:57.94)
Alright, well, let’s paint the picture. What are these cool dads? I mean, what makes them so cool?

Eric Hortness (08:05.029)
Well, we have fanny packs that we wear for all the videos. We have hats that really probably don’t fit all that well. We have high white socks that we wear and Birkenstocks. So that was our first outfit as a cool dad.

Brandon Burton (08:25.432)
That’s pretty cool.

Eric Hortness (08:34.341)
You know, that’s, I guess, what we envision of dads walking around at a car show.

Brandon Burton (08:41.866)
All right, so yeah, continue with the, didn’t mean to throw you off of the story of promoting the Tuesday night concert series and everything, but we had to get this visual. So these cool dads, they’re doing this video to promote this, but go ahead and continue with the story.

Eric Hortness (08:58.147)
Yeah, part of the, I guess, the outfit also is of course, this is happening in the summer. And so we’ve got shorts and our t-shirts are tucked into our shorts. you know, those, that type of look is what we went with. Gaudy sunglasses. So that paints the picture for everybody on what this first video was centered around.

And we were just doing a promo video more for our sponsor to help get the word out that they’re sponsoring the evening. And, you know, maybe draw a little bit more classic cars downtown. And the first one that we did, it was kind of a one-off deal. Our sponsor is a Heartland Energy for this first video.

energy provider in town. And the other person, that’s the other cool dad, works for Heartland Energy, but also happens to be a state senator. And so he’s, him and I are the two cool dads in all of these videos. And as you can imagine, the dad jokes were not difficult to

Brandon Burton (10:21.134)
I love it. So this first one happens almost by accident. You’re asked, hey, what can we do to promote this, of shine a little more light on our name as a sponsor, that sort of thing. So you guys come up with this idea. How do you, I mean, was it just shot like with somebody’s iPhone? How did you do the first one and how has it evolved to the different videos you do now?

Eric Hortness (10:50.789)
Sure, all filmed with our marketing coordinators cell phone. We have wireless mics that we wear as we did in the first video. We really haven’t changed how we produce these or how we make them. It’s all filmed with a cell phone and a couple of wireless mics.

And, you know, once that first one was released, it really got people talking not only about the event that we were promoting, but just people enjoyed it so much. We still really can’t go anywhere without somebody mentioning when’s the next Cool Dad video coming.

Brandon Burton (11:45.166)
Yeah, that’s cool. So about how many videos have you guys done up to this point? I don’t know if you know a number of it’s just a ballpark guess.

Eric Hortness (11:55.025)
I think we’re, you know, as far as Cool Dad videos, I think we’re in the 12 to 15 range right now with, you know, it’s really gotten to the point now where people, after that first one was released, other entities that had events coming up reached out to us, hey, can you do a Cool Dad video promoting our event? And that’s really what we,

have centered around now is just promoting some of our other investor events that we have coming up. A little, I guess, info on Madison, Miracle Treat Day is ran, it’s a national event with Dairy Queens, and it’s in July every year, and every…

Blizzard that is purchased, a portion of that goes to help cancer research for children. And our little old Dairy Queen in Madison, South Dakota sells the most blizzards in the nation every year on Miracle Treat Day. So our second video that we did for the Cool Dad was promoting Miracle Treat Day. And it kind of ended with

started where the car show ended. we just kind of played off the car show a little bit. And, if you followed the videos, you can see the connection between our, promoting our downtown Madtown concert series and then miracle treat day. they kind of tied into each other, but now, you know, since then we’ve done several other videos with some of our other investors that have helped.

increase attendance at the events.

Brandon Burton (13:55.064)
So that was gonna be my next question. It’s nice that people around town are seeing it and they’re asking you, hey, when’s the next cool dad video coming out? But in the end, what’s it doing to promote those sponsors or drive attendance to the events? can you share with us what things maybe looked like before starting to do these promotional videos versus after, or what’s that increase been like for these different events?

Eric Hortness (14:20.879)
Sure. You know, some of the videos that we’ve done to help promote other events, our local Kiwanis chapter does a pancake feed every year as a fundraiser for their organization. We did a, I call them stupid video. We did a stupid Cool Dad video with the head of the Kiwanis chapter.

where they needed some cool dad help in, in, making all the pancakes. that was the most after leading up to that event, that was after the video was released that year, they, sold the most tickets for their pancake feed, that they’ve ever sold. And this has been, this is something that’s been going on for years and years.

We did another video for our Trojan Athletic Club, is our, basically our booster club for our university athletic department. Funny story about that. We, we did it with the football coach as we were trying out for the football team, two cool dads trying out for the football team. And unbeknownst to us, we walked into the football coach’s office as we were filming.

And the coach had sunglasses, Birkenstocks on, a fanny pack. Right. And, you know, we’re such a small community that, you know, we, everybody knows everybody, good or bad. Everybody knows everybody. So he had seen the videos. He knew what was, what was coming up. He’s a character himself. But we had no clue that he was going to be, I guess, dressed in.

Brandon Burton (15:53.422)
You got the memo.

Eric Hortness (16:17.797)
Cool Dad costume. But that was the highest that year that we did that video for the Trojan Athletic Club was the highest membership that they’ve ever had. It was kind of a kickoff to their membership drive for the Trojan Athletic Club is what we did for the video. So just different things. I mean, we’ve done one for, we had a…

a brand new city hall that just opened up a handful of months ago. So we did a cool dad video just walking around city hall. As you can imagine, school drop off at the elementary school, it could be a reality show in itself. And last year, at the start of the school year, we did a cool dad video of

Brandon Burton (17:06.776)
Right?

Eric Hortness (17:15.109)
the do’s and don’ts of school drop off. So it’s really taken off with all kinds of different aspects of our Cool Dad videos.

Brandon Burton (17:30.71)
So what made you guys land on the Cool Dad brand, we’ll call it? mean, did it, again, just by accident or did you kick around some other ideas? How did it land on this?

Eric Hortness (17:36.229)
Ha ha ha.

Eric Hortness (17:43.299)
No, think just, you know, when that first video, when we were preparing to start it, really didn’t have a title. We didn’t have a title. We just said, hey, let’s act like we’re two cool dads walking around at a car show. And the cool dad kind of just stuck.

Brandon Burton (18:03.734)
Yeah. So is there any kind of scripting that goes into it? Like, do you talk ahead of time about, let’s do this, this, and this, or do you just ad-lib the whole thing with the common goal of what you’re trying to accomplish?

Eric Hortness (18:15.223)
Yeah, most of it is ad-libbed. We just kind of play off of each other. There typically is some text messages the day before of, let’s get a couple of these one-liners fit in somewhere. It seems like when we have a script, we have way more takes that we have to do than if we don’t have a script.

Brandon Burton (18:44.408)
Yeah, you’re trying to make it perfect, right? Yeah.

Eric Hortness (18:45.445)
It just flows so much better when we don’t have a script and we can just kind of play off of each other.

Brandon Burton (18:53.71)
So you’ve tried it both ways. You’ve tried it with more scripting and more ad lib. And then what’s the post production look like as far as the editing and who’s doing that?

Eric Hortness (18:57.411)
Yeah. Yeah.

Eric Hortness (19:07.069)
Again, that’s our marketing Danielle with our office. She cuts it and pieces it all together and we’ve done enough of them now. It doesn’t take her very, very long to put these videos together. The program that she uses, she’s able to add in different sounds and we did a 4th of July video.

and she added in some sounds of fireworks going off and different things like that. So she’s great at what she does. I stay out of her way and every once in a while she’ll start chuckling and I know it’s gonna be a good video.

Brandon Burton (19:54.126)
I love it. That’s awesome. So I’m thinking for the chambers that are listening, you know, we don’t, I guess in the chamber world, we’re all about ripoff and duplicate, but I can see, I’m just envisioning, you know, a bunch of different, you know, cool dads, you know, going on at Chambers now, but I don’t know where I’m going with the question exactly, but in the brainstorming of creating a character,

Eric Hortness (20:06.959)
the

Brandon Burton (20:23.744)
rather than just creating another cool dad at another chamber. Were there any other ideas as you guys brainstormed it that could be, hey, if we were another chamber, I don’t know, or even if there’s no men working at the chamber, it’s hard to do cool dads. So I don’t know, what are some other kind of quirky, fun, engaging type of characters that might come to mind? Totally throwing you on the spot.

Eric Hortness (20:50.757)
No, yeah. You know, I guess my opinion is the chamber position, the chamber office should be a fun, enjoyable, have fun with the position. I’m not saying that I’m not serious ever, but I don’t take it too serious.

where it’s going to cause a lot of extra stress that, I mean, yeah, chamber work is stressful, but I’m, I’m one that wants to have fun and have civil conversations and, and make people laugh and different things like that. so I, I guess my number one thing would be just have fun with it. Don’t take it too serious.

I’m okay with embarrassing myself from time to time on these videos. It gets people talking, it gets people aware of the events rather than just a suit and tie video where it’s boring and stuffy and things like that. Just have fun with it. In a lot of our videos, we try to…

make a mention of our wives, know, whether it’s they let us out of the house for a day to go to the car show or, you know, different things like that. So we have talked to them that they don’t like the videos. I’ll be honest with you, are embarrassed by the videos. So we’ve told them that as soon as they’re

two cool moms in a video, then we’ll stop doing the videos. So I guess a long way to answer your question is, you could certainly have two cool mom videos out there promoting events. I think just a little bit of brainstorming and with the idea of just have fun with it, I think people will come up with their own characters.

Eric Hortness (23:19.819)
A segue to that, we do a burger brawl in our community. And some of our promo videos one year, I was dressed as Guy not Fieri. And I had the goatee and the wig and all that type of stuff, Flavortown shirt promoting our burger brawl. And then at the end of the event,

Brandon Burton (23:35.914)
Okay.

Eric Hortness (23:50.085)
We have a chamber investor in town that has a mystery machine, Scooby-Doo van that they drive in parades and they have all the Scooby-Doo costumes. And so that was the premise behind all of those videos is that it was solving a mystery on who had the best burger. And so we finished giving the award and some of my board members were dressed as Daphne and Shaggy and…

Brandon Burton (23:57.461)
yeah.

Eric Hortness (24:20.537)
so I think, you know, if you just have fun with your videos, think outside the box a little bit, use your, your investor resources. they’re, you know, find ones that are willing to, to be in these videos. I think it’ll be, it’ll be an easy thing for somebody to incorporate once they get the ball rolling.

Brandon Burton (24:46.616)
What I really like about the approach you guys take is like I’ve seen other chambers, they’ll have the chamber chicks, you know, that go out in the community, but it’s very chamber oriented. And if you’re not already engaged, involved with the chamber in some level, it’s not going to resonate with you where you get a couple of cool dads that are going out. Everybody’s going to kind of tune in and be like, what, what’s going on here? These guys are ridiculous, you know, but it, it gets the attention. It ties it back to the chamber draws awareness of what the chamber is to people who didn’t know.

about it before. So I think it’s a kind of a stroke of genius of the approach that you guys are taking with this on purpose or not. I mean, I think now it’s more intentional.

Eric Hortness (25:25.605)
Well, yeah, yeah, it’s definitely gotten to be more intentional now. The first few were just kind of, yeah, we’ll do one and see how it goes. But yeah, it’s more intentional now. you know, some of the other chamber directors in our state and in our region know about them. They’ve watched them. Whenever they see me, they mention them. And then,

Senator Crabtree, the other cool dad in the video, you know, he’s at our state Capitol for three months out of the year. And so a lot of his fellow seat mates have seen these videos and, and, and the ones that I know, you know, they’ll make comments to me and different things like that. So it really has kind of, I guess, blown up.

locally and regionally a little bit.

Brandon Burton (26:24.662)
Yeah, that’s fantastic. Well, I like asking the question for chambers out there listening who are interested in taking their chamber up to the next level, whether it’s something related to our discussion today or something totally different altogether. What kind of tip or action item might you leave with them and trying to help them accomplish that goal?

Eric Hortness (26:49.221)
in terms of these videos or in terms of really anything?

Brandon Burton (26:54.232)
Just anything, yeah, anything to help elevate their chamber.

Eric Hortness (26:59.173)
Number one, don’t take yourself too serious. Make sure you have impactful conversations with your investors. They’ll tell you what they’re wanting and what they’re looking for. And don’t be afraid to make changes. I think it’s something, it’s an industry that is always gonna be evolving. And so…

The ones that I think are struggling are the ones that are probably set in their ways. And well, we got to keep doing it because it’s what we’ve always done. It’s okay to say no sometimes to events and things like that. And then the pushback when you say no is a lot of times it’s, well, if the chamber’s not going to do it, who’s going to do it? Well, if that’s the case, then it’s probably not an event worth doing.

So it’s definitely okay to say no from time to time to things.

Brandon Burton (28:01.612)
Yeah, absolutely. I like asking everyone I have on the show as we look to the future of Chambers of Commerce, how do you see the future of Chambers and their purpose going forward?

Eric Hortness (28:15.449)
You know, I think it’s going to get, I don’t want to scare the listeners off, but in my opinion, it’s going to be tougher and tougher to get the messaging out, to get the word out about what you’re doing. Everybody’s budgets are getting tighter and tighter. So if you’re not out,

being a champion for your business community, it’s pretty easy for them to write you off when they need to make budget cuts. So I think it’s, you know, goes back to your previous question, always evolving. What’s the, I don’t wanna say the newest trend because you certainly don’t wanna jump on a new trend that in a month goes away. But you gotta be conscious of,

where everything else is going with your investors and trying to mirror what they’re going to be looking for.

Brandon Burton (29:23.66)
Yeah, I think that’s good insight and again, good advice again. Eric, I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners who may want to reach out and connect with you or learn more about your process. What would be the best way for them to reach out and connect with you?

Eric Hortness (29:45.317)
Sure, a couple of things. My email is eric, eric@chamberofmadisonsd.com. Make sure you put the SD in there for South Dakota. So it’s eric at chamberofmadisonSD.com. My cell number is 605-760-0621. And people can call or text me whenever they want.

You know, if they have questions about really anything that we’re doing here with some of our referral programs or anything like that, or more specifically, if they want to see some of the videos, they’re on our YouTube page, or they can email me and I can certainly send them a link to some of the cool dad videos that we’ve done or any of our other videos too.

Brandon Burton (30:41.516)
So these Chamber Chat episodes are going out on YouTube now as well. So anyone who’s just listening, be sure to check it out on YouTube. But specific for this episode, I’m going to try to link one of your Cool Dad videos after this episode plays so it can just roll into a Cool Dad video. I think that’d be a really neat transition and introduction to what it is that you guys are doing. But Eric, is, yeah, absolutely. This has been fun having you on the show and

Eric Hortness (31:06.287)
Sure, I appreciate it.

Brandon Burton (31:11.44)
talking about something not so serious, but that definitely is driving results. So I appreciate you sharing your example and what you guys are doing, what’s working for you. So other chambers out there can listen and try to replicate or make adjustments for their community, how they see fit. But this has been a fun discussion today.

Eric Hortness (31:30.681)
Yeah, you bet I appreciate the invite, Brandon and appreciate what you do for the Chamber world.

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5 Lessons Learned in 2022

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Brandon Burton 0:00
This is the Chamber Chat Podcast, the show dedicated to chamber professionals to spark ideas and to get actionable tips and strategies to better serve your members and community.

Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to the Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your host, Brandon Burton. And it’s my goal here on the podcast to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community.

Our title sponsor is Holman Brothers Membership Sales Solutions. Let’s hear from 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 0:39
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 0:56
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
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For this episode, I decided to do a top five lessons learned in 2022. Now as I record this, it is Christmas Eve 2022. And this episode we’ll be releasing on the Tuesday between Christmas and New Years. So purposely, I want to keep this episode a little shorter, just so you can still get some good value out of it and ideas. But I want you to be able to spend time with your family and get those things done around the house that you don’t normally have time to do because you’re your normal busy schedule. So before I get into those top five lessons learned now some of the lessons that I’ll share are ones that were directly related to podcast episodes that I’ve I’ve put out over this last year. And some are just lessons from observing the world and things going on in the environment. So keep that in mind as I go through the lessons. But before I get into those lessons, I wanted to share a personal lesson, I guess you can say that I’ve learned and that is that over, I guess almost four years now doing the podcast, I have reached a point where my time is being stretched very thin, a lot of responsibilities on my plate. And I’m at the point where I need to bring on some help somebody to help to edit and produce the podcast episodes, just to free up a little bit more of my time to where I can focus more intently on getting great guests on the podcast and other projects and special interests that I have to develop that are related to the show. So with that I’ve in you’re familiar as a chamber professional is you see a need for growth within your chamber. The next question is how do you go about providing the financial backing to justify it. And we just had a great episode last week, I believe it was last week where we had Susan Williams on. And she talked about staffing. So that episode came at a really good time for me, as I’m thinking about things that I need to do to staff up the podcast, and create a better experience for all of you as well. So continue to serve, you know, bigger and better going forward in the future. So as I was trying to figure out the best way of doing this, we do have some regular show sponsors. So I would love for you to support them and, you know, buy their product support their businesses, because that keeps their sponsorships coming to Chamber Chat Podcast. But I also, over the years have received messages and emails and ran into some of you at conferences, who have expressed the great value that that you find out of the podcast that lessons learned the way you’re able to stay and be able to stay engaged and continue to learn within the chamber space. So if you are one of those people, and you would like to find a way to support the podcast, a way to continue to see the growth of it. What I decided to do was I created a page on my website so chamberchatpodcast.com/support where you can become a sponsor yourself.

So when I created the podcast, the goal was to always have it be free. And that is still my goal to have this be a free resource, especially for those chambers that don’t have the resources to go to chamber conferences and be a part of their local or state association. I wanted to create a resource for them to be able to learn best practices and tips and strategies so they can better serve their business community. Ready. So this will always be free. What I posted on this page on my website, though the support page is different options if you would like to provide some financial support. So this suggestion, and these are just suggestions, so if you wanted to give a different amount, you can reach out and and contact me and we can set up a different structure. But just to make it easy. The suggested amounts, if you are a single listener, be $5 a month. And if you are comfortable doing that, I would appreciate that it would help to you know, if we, if we get several of you doing $5 A month that would definitely help to pay somebody to produce the podcasts for me. Hopefully, you are also sharing the podcast with your staff. So if you have different staff sizes, if you have a smaller staff, maybe two to five staff members, maybe you do $10 a month for your medium size in you know, five to 15 staff members, maybe $20 a month. And if you’re a larger staff more and there’s even a Superfan option. So if you want to check those out, see what makes the most sense for you. Maybe it comes out like as a single listener, maybe the $5 a month comes out of your personal credit card. If you’re doing it for your staff, maybe that becomes an office expense to help support and train sustain your your staff. So I’ll let you decide what what works best for you and your situation there. But with that aside, we’ll we’ll move on to the top five lessons that I’ve learned in 2022. And we’ll get into that as soon as I get back from this quick break.

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All right, we are back. So the top five lessons that I have from 2022. Again, these are these are no particular order necessarily. They’re just what stood out to me as I look back on the year. So one, the first lesson that I’ll highlight is the importance for chambers to be advocates, while also remaining as a sane center in their community. So Though we had an episode 162, Marc Cohen from the Greater Rochester Chamber was on and he talked about the role of chambers and advocacy and policy. And it was a great episode, I would highly recommend people go back and listen to that one. But also Episode 175, we had Bill Connors, on from Boise talking about being the same center at your chamber. So not being too extreme one way or the other, but really listening to what those needs are of your members. And then creating programs around that supporting candidates and policies that would enable strong business in your community. So there’s a lot of good that in those two episodes right there.

The second lesson that I wanted to highlight was the great value that comes out of collaborating and creating partnerships with others. So these may be collaborations or partnerships with other chambers. They may be another organization in your region, maybe a Convention Visitors Bureau, maybe an economic development, maybe your city itself. But what really came to mind is like created the CIO, or came up with this lesson learned. It was from a reflection, as I look back on some of the chamber, the year finalist interviews that I did this year. And a couple of those chambers, partnered with local banks through the COVID pandemic to help get funding to their members. And as we know, funding was extremely important at that time. And that was a very good strategic partnership for those chambers that took advantage of that. So keep your eyes open, keep them peeled for opportunities to create collaborations or partnerships that make sense to benefit your members.

The third lesson from 2022 that I wanted to highlight was actually an episode all in itself. So it was episode 188, with Jordan Clemons from Greater Louisville Inc. And he talked all about LinkedIn, for growing your chamber membership. And he has a great strategy. If you haven’t heard that episode, I would encourage you to listen or at least have your your membership staff listen to it, as he has a whole strategy of how he uses LinkedIn specifically, to put posts out that really highlight your community and drives a lot of engagement. And then he’s able to see who engages with those posts, learn more about them through their LinkedIn profile, and then reach out to them and create a dialogue that’s already a warm conversation because they’ve already interacted with his post. And by utilizing the strategy, he’s exceeded his sales goals year after year, and really done a great job for GLI. So getting that was episode 188. If you’d like to go back and listen to that one again.

The fourth lesson that I wanted to highlight was the importance of leaning into digital to create relevant and personal communication channels, or strategies. And we had a great, great episode with Sara Ray, and Episode 166, where she talked about just this, about creating relevant personalized communications, specifically through email. So when you look at your email response rate, your email engagement, you’re probably not as satisfied as you’d like to be, if you’re like any other chamber, but by creating relevant content. So as you look at what, why did this member join your chamber? What are they expecting? What are their expectations? What are they looking for what needs do they have to support their business. And then if you can customize your communication to these members based on their needs and desires, that will put your engagement through the roof, both on the digital front with email engagements or social posts, but also for having people show up to events that are relevant to them. That way, they’re not just tone, you know, tuning out everything that comes from the chamber because so much of it’s not relevant to them. Now they’re only getting things that are relevant to them so they pay more attention and engage at a much higher level.

The fifth lesson fifth and final lesson that I will highlight from 2022 is really a personal observation as I look at business environments, economy trends, I see a future where chambers Of Commerce can really benefit by embracing cryptocurrency and NFTs. So for those of you who may not be familiar, NFT stands for non fungible token, meaning there can only be one of that token. So think of it as maybe a coin or an image or some kind of a digital asset that has kind of like a stamp on it that says this is a one of one one of a kind token. And with that NFT’s initially kind of rolled out as expensive JPEGs. So, people would put out these digital images of cats or, you know, different cartoon type characters, and they would sell them for ridiculous amounts of money. It made zero sense to me, I can’t understand why anybody got behind that. But as I learned more about it, and heard about people creating NFT projects, they really focused on the community building aspect of NFT projects. And then my ears perked up. And I had somewhat of an aha moment. Right that anytime I hear the word community, I think Chambers of Commerce need to be involved. So when you look at building an NFT project, creating a community around it, how can a chamber of commerce utilize this? So here’s an example. I recently came out with a chamber podcasting guide to teach chambers how to create a podcast. About the same time I was creating that, that course that chamber podcasting course, I was learning more about NFT’s. And I thought, I wish the technology was developed enough that I could release this course as an NFT. So in other words, if I had access, I launched this course and I have 10 tokens, let’s say that are NFT’s non fungible tokens to access this course, then I can sell them to chambers, as a chamber takes a course learns how to podcast, then they don’t need the course anymore, because they know the material that’s in there, they could then turn around and resell that NFT to another chamber, who can then learn to podcast and that first chamber can get, you know, some or all or more of their investment back of what they initially paid. And within that NFT there are smart contracts that are involved. So within the smart contract, I could write in there a commission. So every time that NFT is resold, or every time that course is resold, I could get a 10% commission, let’s say, based on whatever the sale price was. So think about how would that apply to your chamber? Do you have programs? Do you have courses? Do you have tutorials, do you have different resources, that could be packaged as an NFT, that would allow for your members to market your product and services that would allow them to regain maybe their initial investment in that in that token, and continue to promote that to other businesses in your community. So that is a thought that I had had. But as I continue to think of chambers of commerce utilizing NFT’s many of you already have a tiered dues membership platform. So maybe you look at offering membership as NFTs. So if you have a different NFT for each level of your membership, and you have a certain number of NFT’s for each level, as a chamber member maybe levels up to a higher level of membership, they can sell their initial membership to another member and become an advocate for bringing other businesses into the chamber.

If a chamber were to move out of the community, they don’t have to just lose their chamber benefits but they could resell their membership to another business, there could be a whole other resale market. And with that, you can have the smart contract involved where you’re making revenue off of that every time that membership is resold. But my thought with this is you end up having your members become advocates who are out there are ambassadors we can say that are out there really promoting the value they get from the chamber especially as they go to resell their NFTs and level up their membership. So I don’t know that the technology is ready For Chamber’s to jump right into the NFT space, but something to keep in mind is as we look to the future, look to the kids look to the youth who are playing video games. They’re playing games like Minecraft, and Roblox and fortnight, you know, games like that you and I may look at them as games. I don’t play them. I don’t know much about them. My kids play them. And what I do know is that lots of commerce is being done within these meta verses. So dropped a couple of words there. So commerce when I hear commerce, I think Chamber of Commerce, how should a chamber be involved? There’s commerce happening in these digital platforms. And it is these games are levels of Metaverse where they’re buying and selling digital goods, whether it’s a skin or clothes, or a gun, or some sort of a weapon or a horse or whatever these things are they’re buying and selling and trading. Commerce is happening in the digital landscape. How can your chamber be involved? So have that in your mind? Because we hear these promises of the metaverse coming, which would be kind of an all inclusive digital landscape. I I don’t know I have some reservations about a full full blown metaverse. But there are definitely Metaverse landscapes that are out there. So pay attention to those see if there’s any way that makes sense for your chamber to be involved, especially as these youth aged up into the working class, the the the people that are being employed in your communities, what can your chamber do to be involved in that space? So with that, it may come back to NFT’s as NFTs even in these games. There can be NFT’s that are bought and sold that are a hat or some kind of a article of clothing that is an NFT but it can be utilized within the metaverse. So there’s a ton of opportunity here. So I guess moral of the story with this lesson number five of the future of chambers, embracing crypto and NFTs is learn about it. Be ready as the shift comes to your chamber can stay relevant. That is the biggest advice that I can give you right there. But with that, that summarizes the top five lessons that I have to share with you from 2022.

And again, I’m going to plug it if you would like to take a look at being a supporter of Chamber Chat Podcast. That website is chamberchatpodcast.com/support to see the different sponsorship levels that we have available there. So if you could check it out, I’d really appreciate it. Otherwise, we will look forward to see you again next week, and I wish you all a happy and safe New Year.

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