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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.
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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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