Building/Rebuilding a Chamber with Sandy Barton

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability and to correct obvious transcription errors while preserving the meaning of the original conversation.

Episode 11 — Building/Rebuilding a Chamber with Sandy Barton
Clean Speaker-Labeled Transcript
Guest: Sandy Barton
Automated QA: Passed

00:00.214 Sandy Barton
The thing that I I found was most important was to spend time talking with as many people as I could in the first 90 days of my tenure. I met with not only existing community leaders, leaders within the chamber, general membership. I invited everyone to try to get on my calendar, but I also spoke with members that had chosen not to renew their membership with the chamber because of the unification.
00:37.258 Brandon Burton
Sandy Barton, president of the Greater Magnolia Parkway Chamber of Commerce, is our guest today. She shares her experience with us as she's been going through the process of uniting two chambers into one. She talks about how to go about building or rebuilding a chamber and re-establishing trust with their members. Let's cue the intro. 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.
01:14.242 Brandon Burton
Welcome to the Chamber Chat Podcast. I'm Brandon Burton, and it is my goal to introduce you to people and ideas so you can better serve your chamber members and your community. Our guest today is Sandy Barton. And Sandy is the president of the Greater Magnolia Parkway Chamber of Commerce. And she's been in that role since September of 2017. And she brought to that role extensive chamber and business leadership experience. Most recently as vice president for membership and marketing in the Houston Northwest Chamber of Commerce for the 11 years prior to this position. In her role in Houston, Sandy spent extensive time working for the community, building numerous membership and retention programs, and supporting economic development programs in the Northwest Harris County community. Prior to her chamber work, Sandy held executive management positions with American General and Sam Houston Race Park in Houston, and at Northwestern Mutual's home office in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She holds her undergraduate degree from Alverno College in Milwaukee, her IOM from the prestigious U.S. Chamber Institute for Organizational Management, and her professional community and economic developer degree from the Community Development Institute. In addition to her chamber role, Sandy serves on the North Houston Association Board of Directors, the Lone Star College Small Business Development Center Advisory Board, and the North Houston Regional Center for Economic Development Advisory Board. Sandy, please say hello to the Chamber Chat podcast audience and share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little bit better.
03:05.095 Sandy Barton
Well, Brandon, I want to thank you for inviting me to be a part of this wonderful program. I've been listening since you've launched and I'm just very honored to be included among some of those great leaders that you've already featured.
03:19.544 Brandon Burton
You bet. It's great to have a fan on the show.
03:22.072 Sandy Barton
Yeah, absolutely a fan. something interesting about myself. well, when I was younger and I I still try to keep my hand in a little bit, I used to do a lot of three-day eventing. And that's when you're riding horses the way that they do in the Olympics. And I had a lot of opportunity to have a lot of success and I just had a ball with it. I loved it.
03:51.328 Brandon Burton
Wow. That I never would have guessed that. Do you still get the opportunity to get out on a horse every now and then now?
03:57.816 Sandy Barton
No, not very often. My I I had some some physical ailments that caused me a little bit of distress there and I just can't sit a horse like I used to. But just this past weekend as we were driving down the road, we my husband and I saw a couple of horses that seemed to have been gotten out of a field and we just got out and started playing horse wrangler. So it's a lot of fun.
04:20.97 Brandon Burton
All right. Yeah. Bring back some memories, I'm sure. That's that's great. That's great. now can you share with us just a little bit about the the size of the Greater Magnolia Parkway chamber, just so we can relate a little bit better, maybe membership size, budget, things that you know, that you look at there at your chamber.
04:43.118 Sandy Barton
Certainly, certainly. well, we are currently sitting at about four hundred and fifty chamber members, which we are very pleased with. our all overall budget size is right around $250,000. So we're relatively small chamber, but we are we are fast growing in a very fast growing and very fast changing community. when I joined the chamber about a year and a half ago, we were at about two hundred and fifty-seven members. So that gives you a little bit of idea of of how quickly, you know, our membership is growing and and we're very pleased and proud that we're, you know, gathering the kind of support that this community, this business community needs.
05:33.606 Brandon Burton
That's great to see that kind of growth. now people may be wondering what the name of the chamber, Greater Magnolia Parkway Chamber. how did that name come to be?
05:47.596 Sandy Barton
Well in January of twenty seventeen the there were two former chambers in Magnolia, one that was on the west side of the community, sitting primarily in the city of Magnolia. And then there was one on the east side of our community that served primarily the non-city Magnolia or unincorporated Montgomery County area. that is considered magnolia. January twentieth seventeen, those two chambers unified and became, you know, took what was the Greater Magnolia Chamber and the Magnolia Parkway Chamber and combined the names and became the Greater Magnolia Parkway Chamber of Commerce.
06:34.922 Brandon Burton
All right. That was that was a leading question to kind of get into our topic today. Right. Yep. yeah. So our our topic of conversation, just so everybody knows, is gonna be around building and rebuilding a chamber. And we're kind of phrasing the topic that way as as building and rebuilding, because all these different chambers that are listening are coming from different backgrounds. And I've seen, you know, in my travels that you know, there's been some chambers that have maybe gone out of business for a period of time and they're trying to to revamp and build themselves back up. And there's been others that maybe in smaller towns where their main thoroughfare gets all torn up for construction and growth that comes, you know, in certain cities, but it it does so at a a hindrance to the business community and really almost puts a chamber in hibernation to some degree. They they still have a role, but their membership really drops down. And then after that construction period, they're going through that rebuilding phase again. So in our discussion today with Sandy, we're hoping to address some of these things that she's learned as she's gone through the unifying of these two chambers and bringing them together and maybe some of the the challenges that come with that and some of the lessons that have been learned through that. So can you just maybe expand a little bit and tell us why this topic is so important to you and and kind of some things that you'd like to cover today as we discuss this?
08:13.254 Sandy Barton
Absolutely. Thanks, Brandon. The one of the biggest issues that I found in coming into this new role in a relatively new chamber was that there were a lot of voices that had very different perspectives, almost disparate cultures between the two former areas, kind of an East versus West situation. The thing that I I found was most important was to spend time talking with as many people as I could in the first 90 days of my tenure. I met with not only existing community leaders, leaders within the chamber, general membership. I invited everyone to try to get on my calendar, but I also spoke with members that had chosen not to renew their membership with the chamber because of the unification. And you know the old adage where, you know, it's you have two ears and one mouth. That's what I spent a lot of time doing. And and it really spread out really for for the better part of an entire year as I spent a lot of time listening to
09:28.119 Brandon Burton
Yeah.
09:42.958 Sandy Barton
Current members and former members about their concerns, the things that they were most worried about, and the people that that chose not to be a part of the unified chamber, what they were upset about. And what I learned through those conversations and spending a lot of time just listening was that a number of people and and You know, our business owners are people, and while we try to say, it's just business, people are people and feelings can get hurt. And people have a tendency, especially in a smaller community, to run their businesses based on how they feel. and and their directions are are chosen based on on how they feel that they're treated. And during the unification, I think my impression from speaking with people was that some felt that their opinions were not respected. Others felt that they were just flat out disrespected in the in the process. And as a result, and and some felt, thirdly, that they just didn't know enough about what was going on. And so they were just gonna sit back. Until they saw how it all shook out. And what came out of that was, I think, conversations with our chamber membership, showing them how we could be as transparent as possible, really giving them all the information that they needed and wanted. To take, we took into account all of the things that we heard that the chamber wasn't doing on behalf of chamber members that they felt the chamber should have been doing all this time. and we turned that around just into an open, transparent, respectful conversation. And we continue. what we did was we revamped our programming and put program.
12:04.43 Sandy Barton
pro programming in place that met the needs of our chamber members. We're still doing that. We're still growing, you know, we're a small staff in a and and we're very volunteer led and organized, but we continue to layer programming upon programming that helps support our business community, which is primarily small business with a large focus of nonprofits in our community. And we began to respect people's time. So little things that would would upset our business owners and kept them from coming out and getting involved was, you know, one of the things that I heard again and again was I can't take two hours away from my business to, you know, come to a chamber luncheon. Well, what I found out is that's because we we didn't start on time and we didn't end on time. And with a very large community that has a large geographic territory east to west, a lot of our members felt that we spent a lot of time on one side of the community or the other. And when we did that, we made them feel unwanted or unwelcome in some way because they had to travel farther than the other group. So we found a central location where we could routinely hold a lot of our Our meetings and a lot of our events so that everybody had the same kind of travel commute. We started beginning our programming on time and ending our programming on time so that our business owners and managers could get to the next thing that they scheduled after our event. And we started delivering the kind of information that helped them to be more knowledgeable, more effective business owners today. the on the day that that they attended our event than they were the day before. And that was really critical because if you're gonna ask a business owner to take an hour and a half or two hours away from their business, especially a small business owner, where they are just like many chamber presidents wearing multiple, multiple hats, we need to make certain that every time we ask them to step away, they are seeing value to their business. And so
14:30.514 Sandy Barton
As I went through that first 90 to 180 days, I listened to so many people telling me so many different things. I worked with our board to develop the right kind of programming and a short-term and a long-term set of goals that we could deliver value to our chamber members on a regular basis. And as a result, the growth that we've experienced hasn't come from me being out there. Beating on doors. It has come from our chamber members. we communicate everything and we support every single member and find a way to promote every single member over the course of the last year and a half. We and our chamber members respond. They have been fabulous, and they're telling others about the great things that we're doing. Here in the Greater Magnolia area. There isn't a week that goes by that I don't run into someone that I haven't met before, that when I introduce myself now, they say, my gosh, I've heard about your chamber. I heard you guys are doing great things. And that's just so rewarding to all of us because it has been a tremendous effort on behalf of our members. to come together, to put aside grudges and differences and to grow the chamber together. It really it's it's just a gift.
16:08.704 Brandon Burton
That's yeah, that's awesome. I think you know what you're talking about with having your members being your biggest advocates and and seeing the growth coming from the members talking up how great the chamber is. You know, you hear a lot of businesses talk about how their best form of advertising is word of mouth. And then you ask them, well, what is your strategy for word of mouth? And they can't put a finger on it. But what I find is there you need to have something worthy of talking about, something worthy of sharing with other people. People don't share, you know, something that's mediocre. You know, I went to this chamber luncheon and it was it was okay. You know, you wouldn't go and tell anybody about that. But what do you find are some of those things that your members are sharing about the chamber with other businesses?
16:56.854 Sandy Barton
Well, first and foremost, they're sharing that, you know, the area is growing and that you know the chamber is delivering so many different programs to them that is going to help them grow their business in our community in a way that makes sense for their business, not the next business down the street. So what do I mean by that? I mean that we've instituted we've got some businesses that want to get something done through the chamber, for instance. They let me give you an example. We have a business here in our community. It's a brand, it's a relatively new business, opened up a number of months ago, a few months ago, and hadn't been a member of the Chamber of Commerce. They are in a brand new industrial park with a brand new road and apparently couldn't get The road recognized by FedEx or UPS or even the post office. no. And they were running up against roadblocks, couldn't figure out what to do. And so, you know, out of a kind of a last resort thing, they said, well, you know, let's just call the chamber and see what they can do. Well, in a matter of days, I was able to connect them with the right people in the county, to help them work with the developer and with them in order to get that road recognized. and and we're on the process. It's it's almost an act of God here to get, you know, a private road recognized by the county, but but we're getting there. And and that's something that, you know, that that that member ended up joining the chamber because it was an immediate value and and and we helped them whether they were a member or not. And that was that's an another underpinning of what we're doing. We're here for the entire business community. And we hope that over time that you see value of what we're doing. In addition, I mentioned earlier that we have a high concentration of nonprofits in our community. Higher, I think, than usual. And what we've determined to do is we are instituting a new program that is a nonprofit CEO roundtable, if you will. It's just launching.
19:22.68 Sandy Barton
But we were trying to figure out we saw a lot of nonprofits starting in our community and then struggling for a long time. And a lot of that had to do with, you know, nonprofit, a lot of nonprofit business owners and managers have a passion, but they might not have all the business skills that they need to be as effective as they need to be when it comes to acquiring volunteers, when it comes to supporting those volunteers or acquiring funding. And so we worked with one of our board members who happens to be a leader within one of our local very successful nonprofits. And we put together this nonprofit CEO realm table where we have different nonprofit leaders. come in and share information about how these nonprofits can be better businesses today than they were yesterday so we can help them to continue to grow and thrive. I know that some some chamber presidents or CEOs, employees staff might feel that that might be a competition because most of our chambers are are nonprofits as well. But we have the perspective that, you know, A rising tide floats all boats. And we feel that if we help all other businesses in the chamber community, the chamber business community, we are all going to succeed and we're all going to see the benefit of that. So that's one program. We've added another set series of business success seminars where our members can come on out and and actually it's available to members or non-members, all of our
21:04.152 Brandon Burton
Yeah.
21:16.096 Sandy Barton
All of our community events are available to both members and non-members. We have created a series of business success seminars that address different topics that business owners and managers, particularly small business owners and managers, struggle with from a day from day to day. Everything from determining whether or not you're running your business or your business is running you, to whether or not to how to create, you know, and gain a comfort level with a 30-second commercial, your 30-second, you know, elevator speech. And we've had such great success with those programs because and we've had a lot of people coming to the chamber because they've seen value and how it immediately impacts how they feel about their business. And so it's it's very very positive. We also began a very robust government affairs program that we just didn't have in place before. And our members have seen the results of those programs by the people that come out to speak to our chamber now at our monthly luncheons and their reference to the work that they're doing within the chamber on business behalf. It's it's just been, you know, a great set of programming and transparency that has encouraged chamber members and made them feel like the chamber is doing something on behalf of their business every single day. And as a result, they're sharing those things with others in our business community.
23:02.774 Brandon Burton
That's that's great. I wanted to ask maybe more of a logistical question as far as unifying the two chambers. what did that look like? Did you keep certain elements from each chamber and kind of mesh it together, or was it kind of starting from scratch? Did your board did you take some, you know, members of each board and and pull them together or just how did that work? You could spend maybe two minutes on that.
23:28.748 Sandy Barton
Yeah, I'll I'll I'll give that a shot. Brandon, I wasn't here when they they actually did the first unification. That started in January and I came on board in September. And I would say that the first set was those first months were a challenge for the board. And the board was very involved and they did their best to keep the best pieces of both chambers and And and they did that with all the best intentions in their hearts. And what we learned by the time I came on board and started listening to our chamber members is that that wasn't necessarily the right answer. That as we listened a little bit more and talked a little bit more, we learned that we needed to create our own identity as a new chamber. And that some of the things that we thought might have been the best elements of each former chamber wasn't necessarily the case. So we applied all of the learnings that we had from the people that we were speaking with and that we were listening to to create new programming and new processes. And in some instances, we had to strip down to the very foundations of this chamber again and rebuild and give ourselves a good solid foundation. Everything from our policies and the way that we conducted our board meetings and what we put on our calendar of events and how many representatives we had you know connected to each chamber member to you know put Pulling together the programming that I mentioned earlier. It really was a matter of listening and learning, and what our board thought was the first best things to do turned out to maybe not be as insightful as they had hoped. But in the end, you know, after all of these listening sessions,
25:53.644 Sandy Barton
They came together and we've put together a plan of work that I think our members are just really proud of.
26:00.17 Brandon Burton
It sounds like everybody just has to be kind of open minded to what's gonna work best and really taking that feedback from the members and the community and being able to see how you can best apply that back to your chamber. has your board been pretty flexible with that and and you know, kind of bending with with some of that feedback that you're getting from the members?
26:22.99 Sandy Barton
Absolutely. you know, boards are always in a building stage because we have some people rolling off and some people rolling on. the board that I inherited just for a few months had just a number of wonderful people on it, but some but we did have a few holes as far as insight and expertise that we needed to be as effective. A board as we possibly could be. And I'd say that we're probably still in that process. But I will say that that every single board member has dug in and is very involved in our programming and in making certain that our chamber has what it needs and is responding to our our chamber membership. They're very responsible fiscally. and that was an important element as well. We needed to, you know, build our this chamber kind of back up to what we knew it could be. And we've spent time on remissioning the organization and revisioning the organization. And they've been, you know, they're they're they're all in, and and that is critical. And I've been blessed, I've been lucky that. The board members that we have are as supportive as they are, because I could have come into a situation where that wasn't the case. But I think part of part of understanding any leadership change and any rebuilding situation is that it takes time. And sometimes you have to work through some uncomfortable situations in order to get to your ultimate end goal. And I think we all have to understand that that's not. That's not gonna happen in in s ninety days or a hundred eighty days. that we have to keep our long term goal in mind and continue to build our membership, continue to build our board, continue to build openness and transparency, and continue to build our listening skills.
28:21.218 Brandon Burton
Yeah.
28:35.118 Brandon Burton
That's right. I was I was kind of going that way with the the listening and transparency as far as you know building the trust in the community and the members. and you've shared some some good examples you know throughout our discussion today. What are what are maybe some messages you have to the community and to the membership that you know you guys are here to stay, you know, you're the real deal, you're you're here for them. You're building i what are you doing to to build that trust that's gonna, you know, show the stability of the chamber today?
29:09.098 Sandy Barton
Well, one of the the first things we did early last year and that we'll be doing here again shortly is to share with the membership really the down and dirty financials that that the chamber you know is dealing with and letting them know and and comment on what they see. I mean we've got a lot of really bright people in our community. And they can see just as quickly whether they're on the board or not what the chamber needs to be doing differently. And it helps engage them because they say, I can, you know, I can help with this. we have, you know, made certain that when we're talking with our members, we're positive, but we're not necessarily sugarcoating everything. Some of the other programs that we instituted here are also designed to underline. that that member and community trust concern that we have. And one of them is something that I brought forward from my former chamber, the greater the Houston Northwest Chamber, to this chamber, which is our our ambassador mentor program. when I came on board, our ambassadors in this unified chamber, we had a number of them, but I In the first number of months, I really didn't see them except at the ambassador meeting because the chamber fed them. And that was a little disappointing. We weren't really seeing them at ribbon cuttings, and I really didn't see them much at our luncheons or other events. And was like, okay, well, let's let's rethink this. So I I had developed this program in my former chamber that helped Our retention process by assigning an ambassador mentor to our new members and having a series of pre-prescribed contacts and information sharing sessions that our ambassadors would have with the new member through the first year of their chamber membership. And the intent of the program is to give
31:26.764 Sandy Barton
The chamber member, someone other than a paid chamber staffer to relate to in the chamber. Someone that they can recognize when they walk in the door at an event, someone that they can bounce ideas off of. You know, geez, should I participate in this? Or you think it would be helpful for my business to sponsor that? We modified the program to fit this community and make it make sense for this set of chamber members. And of course, because it had some requirements for attendance and for you know prescribed follow-up days and times, we lost the great majority of our ambassadors over that time because we also decided not to feed them lunch. And I know that that sounds silly, but but what we needed to do, just like in any everything else, is we had to kind of strip it down to find those volunteers who were really dedicated.
32:13.272 Brandon Burton
Yeah.
32:27.008 Sandy Barton
And interested in helping the chamber to do the work that it really needs to do, which is to help businesses grow and thrive in a community, to help jobs growth, because we all know that's where our jobs growth comes from, is our small businesses. So we got down to just a very small handful of chamber ambassadors. And over the course of the past year, we've built it back up. where we have got a great core of about 12, 15 chamber ambassadors that mentor our new members as they come on board and help them gain a familiarity beyond me and beyond our staff here. And that really the it it's great for the ambassadors because they get to know other members in the chamber and in the business community, not only a great number of them, but to a great depth. They develop the relationships that they need for their businesses to keep them growing and thriving. They develop that trusted valued advisor relationship with more members than you can just get from a networking breakfast. And as that kind of message is getting out, we have more and more people that are showing up every month to the ambassador meeting. And we're having a higher success rate with our membership retention. So We're already seeing dividends from that program and we've really only had it in place a little over a year. additionally, we started we had started with what we call, excuse me, that's my dog. Okay, in addition, we started a program that we called our new member onboarding discovery day, where we invited our new members in to learn more about their member benefits. they spent about an hour with me and then we had our ambassadors come in and Taught them a little bit about turbo networking and and again got them familiar with their ambassador mentors. and we found that there was we planned on only doing it quarterly because we're a relatively small chamber. And we found that since we started it, we're doing one about every other week because there's such there was such an interest.
34:47.674 Sandy Barton
much more so than we anticipated for people coming out and learning more about their chamber and how they can become involved to the extent they need in their business, that we ex we we we opened it up and now it's called member onboarding. It's no longer new member onboarding, it's member onboarding because we have so many members that might have been a member of the chamber for a number of years, but they never really took advantage of their member benefits or got involved with the chamber as as deeply as maybe they they would like to because they didn't know how. And so we're giving them an opportunity to come on out at a time that makes sense for them. We hold them on different days at different times. And, you know, every session we keep the sessions small, you know, 12 to 13 members at a time. it doesn't need to be just the primary representative. It can be anybody that the member feels would be helpful to learn a little bit more about the work that we're doing. And how their business can benefit. And our sessions are full. They're full every month. And we've got, we, we like I said, we thought we were going to do them quarterly and we're doing them about, you know, every other week. it and in the last couple of weeks we're doing them every week and we're doing another one next week. So it's it's just, it's, it's giving, it's, it's just being open. You know, I mean I I I I I always, you know, thought of you know new member orientation or new member onboarding or whatever you wanted to call it. But you know, again, it's that listening to, you know, our members saying, geez, I wish I had known more about this. You know, listening to ambassadors, other members that were involved in different ways when we started telling them about these programs, and then saying, Well. We're open to we can we can do that. We can you can certainly come to the next one. Come on out, you know, come on in and enjoy and you know we'll, you know, we'll have a little, you know, a little coffee clutch in the morning and and and help you gain a comfort level. it's just being open to and flexible to responding to what your members are telling you that they need.
37:04.616 Sandy Barton
And and it's it's just it's been rewarding and I think it's been rewarding for our members, and that's the name of the game. And that's you know, they feel invested. Our ambassadors feel invested, our members feel invested, they feel like they're getting what they need, and they can participate in the way that makes sense for them, not in the way that makes sense for us.
37:24.706 Brandon Burton
That's right. I love how both of those programs kind of do the the mentoring and the hand holding for these new members to really help them maximize the most out of their membership. with the ambassador program, I know that's it's initially set up for the first year of their membership, but I'm sure that relationships are being built and friendships where you know they can call upon that ambassador or that other business, you know, down the road as they have questions. But As you try to match up these ambassadors with these different businesses, is there what what kind of thought process goes into the matching up of the ambassadors with the new members?
38:04.11 Sandy Barton
Well, we we you know, like most ambassador programs, we meet month once a month at the beginning of our month, and we assign all of the members that joined it the month before to a different ambassador mentor. And since it's an open assignment situation, really the ambassadors are looking for those you remember as I I mentioned that they're developing their trusted valued advisor relationships. Have a tendency to migrate to those businesses that they have a natural affinity for. You know, let's say that you know we've got a home inspector that is one of our ambassadors. Well, if there's a new realty company that have has just joined the chamber, it's a natural relationship for that you know, business, that inspection business owner to want to get.
38:54.958 Brandon Burton
Perfect.
39:02.37 Sandy Barton
To know this realtor a little bit better. And and and and those have developed long term relationships. This this inspection person that I talked about, I mean, his since we've developed this program, he has come into me so many different times and said, My gosh, Sandy, God is good and this chamber has blessed so many ways because he's made relationships that that he wouldn't have made.
39:05.932 Brandon Burton
It's right.
39:23.224 Brandon Burton
Yeah.
39:29.098 Sandy Barton
Otherwise and his business has grown tremendously to the point where he makes the chamber a priority because he knows because he's committed to it now. He's invested in it.
39:41.342 Brandon Burton
He he's seeing the value of it and he's he it's worth putting in the time for it for sure.
39:46.082 Sandy Barton
Absolutely, absolutely. And and it's, you know, again, and it and it just comes from, you know, not me assigning a member to an ambassador, it's them choosing. It's giving them again, it's their choice. It's their chamber. If they see a need, they're the ones that are bringing it forward. And and you know, my job as as the chamber president is to execute the plan of work that the board sets. I bring ideas to the board. The board makes the decisions. Our chamber, they the the board represents our chamber membership. Our membership is making those decisions on what they see is important and the most valued. And same thing with this ambassador relationship. I mean, these are are developing into long-term relationships. Not all of them are. Well, that's okay. They're they're obviously getting what they need out of the chamber. And hopefully they'll continue as well as long as we're continuing to reach out and show them the value that we're providing. but but most chamber members, when they join a chamber like ours, they want to be involved. They just don't know how yet. And between the ambassador mentor program and, you know, the other onboarding programs and the business success programs that we're doing. You know, they have an opportunity to find out, and then come out more often and become involved in a way that makes sense for them.
41:21.388 Brandon Burton
That's perfect. That's perfect. So Sandy, I know we need to start wrapping things up here, but before we go, I wanted to to ask you the question I I ask everybody. A as we look to the future, how do you view chambers of commerce and their purpose?
41:39.894 Sandy Barton
I think the purpose of Chambers of Commerce doesn't really change. We all have the same basic mission, which is economic development and jobs growth in our respective communities. The things that need to change is the way that we deliver those values. I had a member that came in about a week ago, and the only reason she said that she did was because of the social media presence that we've developed in the past. year because we are so active and because we're promoting a different member of the day every year that we're doing it. We're delivering our programming sometimes very differently. In some instances, you know, we're doing you know phone calls or these kinds of you know Skype calls or webinars so that we can make it as accessible and flexible to what our members need as opposed to what we're used to doing. We are we like to hold our our our candidate forums, but we've got a candidate forum coming up for our Magnolia City Council here, but time is short and we're not gonna be able to hold a forum that does is gonna make sense. You know what we're gonna do? we're gonna Facebook live it so that people can can chime in. We Facebook Live all of our luncheons now, and we always have people listening in. even if they can't attend because they they're obviously feeling that the content is valuable, but they can't break away from their office for some reason or another. So I think the biggest issue is that we need to be flexible and we need to listen to what our our members want and look for ways to deliver it in a way that makes sense for the business, not for the chamber.
43:27.566 Brandon Burton
I like that being able to offer other ways for these members to engage with the chamber beyond the traditional ways. That's that's a great point. So Sandy, I wanted to to thank you for spending time with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast. I also want to thank everybody for listening today and for making it all the way to the end of this episode. The show notes for this episode can be found at Chamberchat Podcast dot com slash episode eleven. Sandy, if listeners want to connect with you or have any questions about what we discussed today, how can they get in contact with you?
44:00.812 Sandy Barton
Well, they can they can either reach me via email, which is Sandy B at Greater Magnolia Parkway C C dot org. Yes, I know it's long. Or they can feel free to call me anytime on my cell phone. It's the first number on my business card, which is nine three six five two zero six eight two eight.
44:20.92 Brandon Burton
That's perfect. I appreciate it. Now, if you're a chamber professional, please subscribe to Chamber Chat Podcast, either in Apple Podcast or iTunes or in Google Podcasts, Google Play. As you subscribe to the show, new episodes as new episodes are released each week, they'll automatically show up in your podcast app of choice, so they're ready to listen to whenever you're ready. If you are finding value in this podcast, please leave us a rating and a review in iTunes, and most importantly, please share Chamber Chat Podcast with your colleagues that are in the industry. Hopefully you can take some of the tips that you learned from Sandy today and apply them as you serve in your chamber. And please tune in again next week as I continue to continue to bring you more great content to help spark ideas. I'll look forward to chatting with you again next week.