Mason City Chamber-ACCE Chamber of the Year Finalist with Robin Anderson

Below is an auto-generated transcription of my conversation with Robin Anderson. Because this is auto-generated there are likely some grammatical errors but it is still a useful tool to search text within this podcast episode.

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Introduction

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

Voiceover Talent 0:14
And now, your host, he just launched a chamber podcasting course. He’s my dad, Brandon Burton.

Brandon Burton 0:23
Hello, Chamber Champions, welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your host, Brandon Burton, and it is my goal here on the podcast to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community.

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Kris Johnson 0:47
Well, Doug and Bill at the Holman Brothers have been a key ally in growth for my professional career working at three different chambers, a local chamber, a regional chamber, now a statewide chamber. And they’ve been the ideal solution, whether it’s a comprehensive training program, whether it’s working on individual sales growth, quarterly check-ins with the team, the ability to grow members has meaning more assets for the organization, more assets means we can do more things to serve our members. They’ve really been the perfect solution for us, a trusted resource partner and a growth partner for us all along the way. So hats off to Doug and Bill for their great success. They’ll be a great partner for you as they are for us.

Brandon Burton 1:28
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Guest Introduction

Our guests for this episode. This is a 2022 ACCE chamber the year finalist series that we’re putting out right now but our guests for this episode is Robin Anderson. Robin has served as president and CEO of the Mason City Chamber in Iowa since 2001. As a native of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, She’s a graduate of the University of Iowa and holds a master’s degree in servant leadership. prior to sending her role with the Chamber she spent 20 years in the banking industry serving as both a local bank president and as a regional executive overseeing operations for Bank of America’s 21 I will locations she earned both professional designations of IOM from the US Chamber and CCE from ACC. Rob Robin is a past chair of MIT American Chamber of Commerce executives, the Iowa chamber Alliance and the Iowa Chamber of Commerce executives. She was selected as a fellow with ACCE educational attainment division and is a member of the US Chamber of Commerce Committee of 100. Robin, I’m excited to have you back with me on chamber chat podcast, you were a guest last year if anybody wants to go back, it was episode 129 as the Mason City Chamber was a chamber, the year finalist last year as well. So this is exciting to have you back. But why don’t you take a minute to say hello to all the chamber champions and share something interesting about yourself so you can get to know you a little better.

Robin Anderson 4:01
Sure, well, hello, everybody. Um, as was mentioned, I’m a recovering banker. But now I have actually spent more time in the chamber industry than I did in banking. And I’m looking forward actually, I’m a little ambivalent that I’m going to be retiring at the end of 2022. So I’m looking forward to a new chapter in my life.

Brandon Burton 4:32
Yeah, I can imagine that. He’s saying that. There’s a little bit of looking forward to it. I know you’ve got plans, I’m sure. Well, tell us a little bit about the Mason City Chamber, size staff budget just to give us an idea before we get into our discussion.

About the Mason City Chamber

Robin Anderson 4:50
Sure. Um, we are a chamber of 4.5 FTE. We have four full timers one part Heimer and we frequently have an intern as often as we can attract one anyway. And we serve a nine county region in north central Iowa basin city, although we’re a small community of less than 30,000 people were that tally seat Trade Center sort of place for North Iowa and we have about 650 number of businesses from this region and our budget is around a half a million.

Brandon Burton 5:42
That really helps to kind of give us a perspective. As we get into our discussion today as a chamber the year finalist, I like to focus our discussions on the the two programs that were submitted on your chamber the year application, and we’ll dive into that discussion as soon as you get back from this quick break.

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Topic-Chamber of the Year Application Programs

All right, Robin, we’re back. As I mentioned before the break, we’ll address the two programs that you guys put on your chamber your applications here. I’d like for you just to maybe just from a high level just mentioned what the two programs are and then we can dive in a little bit deeper on some of those details.

Robin Anderson 9:05
Sure. I think we are not unlike a lot of other chambers in that we are very much focused on workforce attraction and retention. So both of our programs have to do with that. The first one is called Building community with an emphasis on the unity and we have positioned our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Initiative as a workforce attraction and retention strategy. And the other program is a chamber initiative also for workforce attraction to use historic, architecturally significant proper Eddie, as short term furnished housing for college intern.

Brandon Burton 10:08
Right, so maybe let’s let’s dive in a little bit deeper on that one, since that’s the one you just mentioned. So this historic property tell us the history of it, and how the chamber came about this and kind of the solution you guys did.

Robin Anderson 10:22
Well, Mason City has a growing reputation as a destination for architecture. We have the last remaining Frank Lloyd Wright hotel in the world that was restored about 10 years ago. And we also have the largest collection of Prairie School homes that are unified by a common setting in the world. So as a result of those things, Conde Nast Traveler, has twice named Mason City, on its list of the world’s best cities for architectures. So that puts our teeny Mason City Iowa, alongside Dubai and Paris and Miami and Seattle, and Istanbul, and Tel Aviv. So it’s pretty remarkable. So when historic property was flooded, and was in the theme of buyout, there were a lot of people in the community saying, wow, you know, how could we let this home be demolished. And the reason that this house is not the primary school style that we’re famous for, it’s actually a combination of Art Moderne and international style. But what makes it really unique is, it’s the first architectural styles that place the garage at the front of the house. Previous to that time, garages were behind the houses, and you access them through an alleyway. And at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, they heralded this motor home as the house of the future. And it really sort of signifies the American middle classes growing love affair with the automobile where we put our garages right out front. And this house actually even had a double garage, which in 1939, was pretty remarkable. So anyway, this is the house that was flooded. And we just saw a need to find a way to save this house. But then how are you going to cashflow it long term. And one of the things that we’ve been hearing from our employers is that we have no residential hotels like a Residence Inn, within 100 miles of Mason City. And we have no apartments that were available for short term rentals. So when businesses wanted to attract a college intern, their pool was really limited to people who could arrange for their own housing with families, or friends. And so they’ve been we’ve been talking for a while about how do we get some short term furnished housing? Well, this house has five bedrooms and four bathrooms. And so we decided, you know, I wonder if we could rent out these room to interns or medic healthcare, students who are in town on rotations, and that we actually hired MBA cohort to do a study a feasibility study on this for us, and they found that yet, today’s students if they had access to short term furnished housing, at a nice price, would not object to sharing a laundry room sharing the kitchen and sharing bathroom. And so that is sort of what we put out there. Sadly, we received our occupancy permit on March 30 of 20. At that time, a lot of businesses stopped having in turn, a lot of medical school rotation sort of stopped. And so we had a period of time where just the caretaker was living in the lower level apartment, but now I’m happy to say we’re full and for the summer, we could have filled this house with interns several times, and we also since we were able to start accepting interns a little over a year ago, we’ve actually had several businesses who have hired their intern full time, because they had such a great experience living in the house, and also participating in our college Connections program, which we run in tandem to the housing project.

Brandon Burton 15:31
That’s awesome. I don’t know if enough time has passed it to really tell if if it really is a spike, obviously, it would be a spike in the summer for interns to come. But if it’s something that you can keep full throughout the year as well, do you have any kind of feedback yet, as far as the demand throughout the rest of yeah,

Robin Anderson 15:48
we’ve actually, we have one of the rooms that one employer has reserved through December of 2023. And we have other employers who are interested in just renting their room so that they have it there for insurance, because we had a lot of disappointed people who couldn’t get in the house. And we’re also looking, there’s another historic property in town that we’re looking at doing the same with the same thing with because this seems to be a model that works. And I think this could be a model that could work in other communities.

Brandon Burton 16:31
That was my next question is, if this isn’t, it sounds like a good business model that a chamber could adapt or even spin off, you know, onto another nonprofit at some point?

Robin Anderson 16:41
Well, exactly. Because, you know, a lot of communities get behind the saving historic homes. But the problem is, there’s not, you can’t just run them as a House Museum. You know, there’s just not enough revenue, you know, people might be interested in seeing one. But that is not enough revenue to keep something going. And so we really feel like, as long as you can get it done without debt, you should be able to generate enough revenue from rental of the rooms to pay utilities, taxes, and

Brandon Burton 17:28
on what a neat story to for those interns that stay there to be able to talk about their time doing an internship and staying in this historic house and Mason City, like they’re gonna remember that. And it’s a lot better than staying at a residence. And even if you guys have one in town,

Robin Anderson 17:41
well, exactly. And that was kind of what we thought to we thought. And we really prefer rather, you know, we could fill it with all med students and rotation, we could fill it probably with all student teachers, we could, you know, kick of engineering engineers, whatever, but we really feel like they’ll have a richer experience. If there’s a mix in the room or in the house. And that at least last summer, we had a really good mix. And then when we did as the students moved out, and we did exit interview, they really did enjoy not having everybody be exactly like them. Yeah.

Brandon Burton 18:27
That’s great. I love that, that that program. So let’s shift gears over to building community. I’d like to play on unity and community and tell us what how did that program come about? What’s it about? I know it’s workforce related. But let’s dive a little deeper into that program.

Robin Anderson 18:48
Well, it is I’ll start by giving you a quick demographic. And that 2010 census, Mason City was about 94.6% Caucasian, and in the 2020 census were 93%. Caucasian. Though we haven’t made a lot of progress in terms of diversity, we also 40.3% of our labor force in our county is age 55 to 64. And our population is shrinking. So when we look at our talent pipeline and our workforce for the future, it’s very worrisome. So the quickest way for us to deal with this is to recruit people to our community, who don’t look like that. And despite the fact that we don’t have much diversity, we really feel like we are a welcoming community. So we have positioned our DEI efforts as a workforce attraction strategy. And we’re doing diversity, equity and inclusion training with our employers, and actually certifying them as an inclusive employer. And then the trip chamber provides them with our building community. Little logo that they can we, we have door claims and or window claims, but also just a little bugs that they can use on their website or on their employment application material. And we have steps that businesses can take to be more inclusive no matter what size they are. And sort of another part of this strategy is we have a community concierge program. And that is led by the Chamber supported very heavily by our members, we give customized community tours, we provide lower pieces in the form of a video brochure that can be customized for one, applicant. And then we provide follow up services. So if somebody moves to our community, who’s that engineer, and they’re Lebanese, and they want to know where they can go to get this Lebanese ingredient, we know where they can go. And we provide that follow up as long as they needed until they get really integrated into the community. And so again, it’s sort of like the intern project. We’re not doing anything huge. We’re just trying to chip away at this workforce attraction problem, one person at a time.

Brandon Burton 22:20
So it helped me understand and maybe maybe I do understand, I just needed a little clarification. But so is the basis of this program to educate the employers about, you had mentioned the DEA and AI, training and everything, but for them to be more diverse in seeking talent, or are you doing that and then still, proactively looking for and trying to draw the diverse workforce into your community?

Robin Anderson 22:52
All of those things? Okay. You know, and I, and I think we’re, you know, just like everybody else, you know, workforce attraction, and retention is not one thing, it’s a million thing. And we really take the public position, that workforce attraction and retention is everybody’s job. Because if we can’t get the workforce that we need, we, you know, we’re short on physicians right now. Well, that’s a quality of life issue. You know, if you don’t have enough doctors in your community, that’s an issue for everyone. And

Brandon Burton 23:31
let’s be honest, with today’s workforce, it’s all a quality of life issue, right? If you can go to a restaurant and get served, it’s a quality of life issue.

Robin Anderson 23:41
Yeah, I mean, it’s everything. So we’re really that’s why. And our chamber is sort of known for using art to solve public problem. We’ve launched a sculptural walk public art program, we’ve done murals on the backs of ugly downtown buildings, too. And so what we’re doing what we decided to do to sort of launch this effort was do a community mural. And then also sort of reinforced that with billboards with a mural image, so that our whole community knows that we all need to be more welcoming not just employers, but neighborhoods and restaurants and schools and everybody this is everybody’s job and it really is a unity thing. Yeah.

Brandon Burton 24:45
I love that and it is such a unifying force to once you can get everybody on board with it. I love those. The videos you talked about to personalize these messages, this video brochures because that in If anybody listening if you’re not doing that, that is a almost becoming a standard in the in the industry as far as workforce and talent attraction is to be able to customize these packages to be able to say, Okay, you’re a Muslim, here’s the mosque in our community, here’s the, you know, grocery stores, what the, that you know, how you would fit in in our community, and really help them feel comfortable. So, Robin, go ahead.

Robin Anderson 25:27
Well, I was just gonna say in chambers, ours is so well positioned. Because all these businesses that provide all these services are our members. And so nobody knows where all these resources are better than chambers.

Brandon Burton 25:45
Right? Even better than Google. Oh,

Robin Anderson 25:50
better. We can give personal testimony.

Brandon Burton 25:53
That’s right. So Robin as a as a chamber, the year finalists, I see all the finalists is kind of setting a standard of sorts for chambers to look towards, and to kind of try to elevate their community, if you will. But I wanted to ask how do you view the role of your chamber in your community?

Robin Anderson 26:17
Well, we are sort of a poker and a broader I, and I think City Hall would say that too. You know, there’s a lot of people that kind of get hung up, and you can spend a lot of time wringing your hands and naming all the problems. And I think what we’re best known for, is actually doing something. And, you know, these Synopsys are examples of things that we do that might be small, but at least we’re moving forward and making a difference. And it can be paralyzing when sometimes, you know, we could look at our demographics, and be paralyzed and spend a lot of time talking about how terrible this is. But that’s not going to help us. And, you know, but it’s easy to get caught up in that, oh, this is terrible. This is terrible. And small towns like ours, across America, are facing these same issues. So we’re just trying to dig in. And, you know, we’ve really encouraged our city, when interest rates are low, this is the time to invest in infrastructure and invest in things, and down the road, you know, we’re going to be glad we did. And that really is a role of government. And now because of funding that’s been provided to government, this really, really is the time to position ourselves for the future. So I think the fact that we get the best business minds in the community, on our board, and we really utilize them, not for attending our golf outing, or networking events, or those kinds of things. When we get them around the board table, we really talk about what issue is facing, you know, what are the issues you’re facing as a business? And what can we collectively do to make it better, has really made a difference to us, and I think has really helped to muscle build our organization?

Brandon Burton 28:56
Yeah, I think that’s so key to use some of those more influential people in your community for things that really matter. And it not that a golf tournament doesn’t matter, but on a scale of importance in a community, there’s probably some heavier topics, some more impactful things that you can, you know, utilize those individuals in to leverage their influence and and people they know and everything else. So I think that is a great, a great piece of advice, which was going to be my next thing I was going to ask if you have any tips or action item, maybe that a chamber listening could do to help take their chamber up to the next level?

Action Item/Tip for Chamber Champions

Robin Anderson 29:38
Um, well, I think the best advice that I have is I’ll leave you with a quote. The world needs dreamers and the world needs doers. But most of all the world needs dreamers who do and And I think chambers are in a great position to dream. But we’re also business people. And we do. And so that’s sort of what we try to live by around here. That’s great.

Brandon Burton 30:17
I love that. Very good, very good piece of advice. So thank you. So I like asking everyone I have on the show. And I don’t know if you remember your response last year when you’re on. But I’d like to ask how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?

Future of Chambers

Robin Anderson 30:34
Well, I think to stay relevant, we really do need to keep changing. And I am amazed when I look at the horizon initiative, at how clairvoyant, many of those items were, that I think one of the things that we learned coming out of COVID is customization, that our businesses, you know, the email blasts are in the past. And we really need to be customizing our messaging and directing it to the people who care about that particular thing. And that’s going to take investments in technology. And that’s going to take critical thinking, and it’s going to take change, we are going to be able to do things, the way we’ve always done them. And that’s one of the things as I look toward retirement. I think, you know, there’s probably a lot of things I’ve been doing the same way for, you know, the past 20 some years. And I think it’ll be really good for our chamber to have some new blood and some new ideas and some new eyes and ears that can take our chamber to the next level.

Brandon Burton 32:05
Sure, I think that is, it is always a good thing, I think to have a new perspective that that comes and and whether it’s a change in the chamber executive or or even just as your board turns over year to year that brings perspective as well. But it is important to keep changing and customize that messaging. So thank you. Robin, I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any contact information for listeners who might want to reach out and connect with you, especially over the next six months before you go off into retirement. About anything that you’ve mentioned today or how you guys are doing things that Mason City Chamber what would be the best way for them to reach out and connect with you sure,

Connect with Robin Anderson

Robin Anderson 32:47
um, email is still the best way for me or if you’re at ACCE convention, you can hit me up there. But my email address is randerson@masoncityia.com.

Brandon Burton 33:07
Right and I will get that in our show notes for this episode as well. But Robin It’s been great having you back on chamber chat podcast, great circumstances to have you back as a chamber the year finalist again, and I wish you guys the best of luck this year as as chamber the year.

Robin Anderson 33:24
Thank you very much. We’re going to try hard.

Brandon Burton 33:27
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