Below is an auto-generated transcription of my conversation with Allyson Gutwein. 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 recognizes great power when advocacy is done at a regional level. He’s my dad, Brandon Burton.
Brandon Burton 0:21
Hello, Chamber Champions. Welcome to the Chamber Chat Podcast. I’m your host, Brandon Burton, and it’s my goal to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community.
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Matt Morrow 0:45
Holman Brothers provide a great training for our sales team in terms of just outstanding sales techniques. But maybe even more importantly than that, they were able to provide us with a system a process that was repeatable and in that we’re able to see very clearly from one month to the next how the how the pipeline is doing, what prospects are in it, what kind of progress we’re making and what we can do to coach people to success.
Brandon Burton 1:07
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Guest Introduction
You’re joining us for our 2022 ACCE chamber the year finalist series and for this episode, I have Allison Goodwin with me. She is the executive director of the Zionsville Chamber of Commerce. Allison serves as the Zionsville Chamber of Commerce and Zionsville Rhys foundation as executive director in Zionsville, Indiana. With a background in small business development, retention, growth and attraction. She has dedicated more than two decades of her life to creating and supporting small businesses. Allison was named Businesswoman of the Year in 2009. Business of the Year in 2012, was an ACC II national events speaker in 2021. done virtually member of the IC e a Hoosier inner Leadership Academy class, and her chamber is a five time Excellence Award winner with the IC EA. Recently Allison was one of 34 individuals nationwide named to the sixth cohort of the US Chamber of Commerce business leads Foundation, the preeminent program for workforce development in the United States. Alison and her team have gained more members in the Zionsville Chamber of Commerce in 22 months than the previous decade combined. In that same time period they grew their social media reach from 250,000 to over 2 million in 2020 and 2.8 million in 2021. They know that visibility is key element to success as a business and as a chamber. The Zionsville chamber team was recently named and ACCE communications excellent Excellence Award winner for digital content in 2022. Allison is a graduate of Indiana University and has earned certificates and leadership and development grant writing and chamber management from ACC. She has served in the capacity of President for the Indiana University Alumni Club. Herman B will Wells Chapter board member for the Boone County racial diversity coalition board member for the wisdom Hospital Foundation President of Lebanon vitalization Inc. and TEDx Zionsville. Organizer. She is the proud wife to Andrew step mother of two mother and loved one and step grandmother to one. Allison, I’m excited to have you with me today on Chamber Chat Podcast. Congratulations for being selected as a chamber of the year finalist. Why don’t you take a moment to say hello to all the Chamber Champions and share something interesting about yourself so you can get to know you a little better.
Allyson Gutwein 4:29
Well, I don’t know who you just read that bio from but they sound like a pretty cool check. So I would love to get to know her. No, nice. Talking to all of you today. We’re excited to be a finalist, incredibly excited to be a finalist for the ACC. We’re in the small size chamber of the Year category. We truly are a small chamber here in Central Indiana. But we tell everyone we’re small but mighty and We do a lot of things with very few people by being exceptionally efficient. You know, I love to do a lot of things outside of work. One of the cool fun facts about me is that I am a sixth time Indiana State Fair floral design grand champion. What random stuff people do some people golf, some people go out and play tennis. I make wreaths. And that’s my hobby outside of work. So we all have fun.
Brandon Burton 5:29
Being competitive is in your blood. It’s in your nature.
Allyson Gutwein 5:33
Probably more than I like to admit. Yes.
Brandon Burton 5:36
That’s awesome. Well, it tell us a little bit more about the Zionsville chamber you mentioned, you guys are small and mighty. But give us an idea of what that size looks like of your staff and budget and scope of work that you guys are responsible for.
About the Zionsville Chamber
Allyson Gutwein 5:51
So we are just north of Indianapolis about 20 miles. And if you are looking at kind of Indianapolis as the face of a clock, we’re at about 10 o’clock. So kind of gives you an idea. And you know, we are truly a charming small town, our town looks like it was pulled straight out of a Hallmark movie, and is the top tourist destination in our county, we have a lovely Main Street brick street that really draws a lot of tourism. So our chamber really has some interesting dynamics because that brick Main Street doesn’t have any chain restaurants doesn’t have any chain stores. So we really have the core of our chamber as small business. So our focus for many years has been on what can we do in order to accelerate and advance many, excuse me, many of these small businesses in our area. Because we have really no corporate headquarters for many businesses, we have a couple kind of on the outskirts of our area. But we really are a small business focused chamber. And we love that and you know, the businesses there are larger, understand that this chamber really has this really unique area because of what Zionsville is, it used to be called the village of Zionsville. So it does have that kind of quaint village II feel. And as it has grown, it really has wanted, you know, the people who’ve lived here, we’ve been a chamber for 61 years, we celebrated our Diamond Jubilee last year. And people have really wanted to kind of keep that quaintness as it has grown. And for many years, people have wanted to really make sure that it’s different and unique and charming. And that’s what one thing that really draws people to us here in Central Indiana, but also makes our chamber vastly different than many others. So some of the challenges we experience is, as a small town, where a small chamber doing a lot with what we have as a staff of three, our town really doesn’t have any public transportation outside of a Boone County Senior Services, which allows seniors and some other folks to get around. So we have some workforce challenges trying to, you know, and attract people and help retain folks in the service sector. So we don’t have a lot of workforce housing. So there’s some challenges in our area that we experienced that I’m sure many other many other areas in the country do as well. But we’ve done our best to work through them and find unique and innovative ways in order to overcome those, or at least address them and say, Hey, this is a long term challenge. We know that what can we do in order to kind of look at the long game. And part of that is we created a foundation for our chamber. And I know many chambers are kind of going to this model and looking to see how they can utilize a 501 C three arm in conjunction with their traditional chamber and for us, we just got that paperwork as of last October. So we’re really excel excited. Yeah, thanks to be able to do that. But now it’s standing that up. What does it mean to address kind of challenges that are long term and we use a golf reference that the Chamber itself has kind of a heads down what’s going on today? It’s the short game, but the 501 C three is kind of a long game. And what are we doing to kind of look at the overall picture of how our community is changing so that we can best utilize our C three arm, which has three tenants. One is environmental stewardship. One is D and AI and the other is workforce and workforce initiatives through leadership and development. So what are we doing within our community in order to make sure that not only is our chamber looking to take care of things today, but looking to take care of things tomorrow,
Brandon Burton 10:26
right. Now that that definitely gives us a good a good scope. And for anybody who’s read Dave Atkinson’s book, horseshoes versus chests will understand the importance of having that foundation that see three arm of your chamber especially looking forward as chambers look into the future. So for this, for our discussion today, we’re going to focus primarily on the programs you guys submitted on your chamber the your application. So I’m excited to get into those programs learn more about how you guys are making an impact and influencing the community or the village Zionsville. As soon as we get back from this quick break.
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All right, Allison, we’re back. As I mentioned before the break, we’ll be highlighting the two programs that you guys submitted on your chamber the year application. Why don’t you take us through the two programs just at a high level and then we’ll circle back in a little more detail on each of those?
Topic-Chamber of the Year Application Programs
Allyson Gutwein 14:27
Sure. So our first program was on micro economic development around small businesses and what are we doing to really look at our our membership very holistically and say, What are we doing to develop this group of businesses that are often easily overlooked? So micro businesses, as deemed by the SBA? Are those with 12 or fewer employees? And many of the businesses that we have in our membership are much smaller even than that Um, so many of you are probably familiar with kind of the standard of SBA as being 500 or smaller as a small business, which, for many people, they look at that and they’re like, that’s huge, especially in comparison to, you know, many businesses that have zero employees are maybe just one or two. So we’ve really taken a look at what we can do in our community to attract and retain those businesses, because many of them are startups that grow into something even greater. And we’re excited to see how that really works and develops as we do more and more of it. But the programs that we’ve put in place for our little staff of three have done a great job of attracting new members. So far, our home based business membership level is now our second highest category of membership in our in our chamber. We just started it two years ago.
Brandon Burton 15:59
Wow. That is awesome. Yeah, that’s, that’s one. What’s What’s the other program you guys submitted?
Allyson Gutwein 16:07
Sure. The second was focusing on a social media and social media series that we started, which was called working for you. So working for you, we literally went and worked alongside our businesses. And we started this before the pandemic, but we really embraced it and leaned in during 2020 and 2021. This business has recovered, wanting to show people, this is what these businesses do in our area. So it’s not just, you know, maybe I want to work in this area. Well, now they know what this business actually does. Or they say, Gosh, I could teach a music class or, you know what, I’ve always been interested in working with equine therapy, I think I could go and volunteer there. So we worked alongside businesses to showcase really what they did, and have continued this as a long term kind of campaign and program in our membership in order to highlight more of our members. But that is one part of our larger social media experience that we have for our members. And we found that that made a lot of sense as a low barrier, especially cost wise low barrier to entry. And great way to meet people right where they are, you don’t have to go out and find a new audience. And you don’t have to even bring them to your website. A lot of times they’ll do that on their own. But if you’re reaching them on social media, and they’re already on Tik Tok, they’re already on Facebook, they’re already on Instagram, and you’re sharing your information. They’re really excited to see that information of faces of their neighbors and friends and business owners that they know, how are we doing the best job of getting that information out about our members, and making sure that it did its job which during 2020 and 2021, was give our members visibility?
Brandon Burton 18:05
Right. So let’s let’s focus a little more on that on the working for you program dive in a little bit deeper on that. So how do you as you implement a new program within your existing social media strategy? How did that fit? As far as content creation calendar wise? And what platform you mentioned different platforms, but sure, I’m curious which ones you’re on and how you’ve grown that social media presence? Sure.
Allyson Gutwein 18:33
So many people who are familiar with social media, Facebook is your largest audience. And we really took to social media. In 2020, whenever we realized folks needed to be seen, they needed to know exactly where, you know. And I kind of say there’s two, there’s two sides to this. There’s kind of the forward facing, which are the customers of the businesses. So we were reaching the customers of the businesses. And then there’s kind of the back side, which are the your Chamber members that you’re trying to help. And there’s often many of our posts, many of our videos were meant to help both but in different ways, right? You’re building loyalty whenever you’re going to a business and you’re sharing their information whenever you’re able to talk about exactly what they do. But all those people in the front side are now seeing it going oh, how can I interact with that business? So you’ve kind of got two two pieces to the same pie that you have to be able to do a good job with your social media having both working hand in hand right? So whenever we started our working for you series, it was really meant to be let’s go inside businesses that people can’t go inside every day. Let’s go inside a plant where I pack beans and I have to wear a hairnet let’s go inside I’m mourning dove equine therapy where I’m mucking stalls. wasn’t talking about their horses, then it became let’s go up inside a church that’s being remediated for over 1000 bats. And I was standing knee deep in bat guano. Because no one had known that there had been bats in their attic for almost 40 years, until the pandemic caused, you know, people to be out of buildings. And then they were starting to see things because people weren’t cleaning the building, as often, they were starting to see that there were probably rodents around, you know, they’re small, mammal rodents. And so, you’ve got, you’ve got evidence now, oh, we needed to get this taken care of. So I went up inside a church, beautiful, historic structure, they were absolutely fantastic people to let us watch this process. But it helped me showcase a business that most people don’t see from the inside out. Most people don’t see what it looks like to remediate, you know, slang types of urine from that. In the midst of this talking about a chamber member, and you know, people want to watch. And that’s what made
Brandon Burton 21:18
me that type of content just draws people in, right?
Allyson Gutwein 21:22
Right, whenever I have a GoPro on, I have a handful of bat guano. And I’m like, it looks like glitter, because it’s all these bug shells that are shiny people are like, show me more. You know, it’s fascinating, and I am not doing anything that any of my members don’t do as a daily part of their business. But what can we do to showcase that? What can we do to say, this might be a career path for you, if you find this interesting, you know, contact these folks for a job, or watch your chamber, because this is what’s happening whenever you need to call these folks, they’re doing a good job of being cognizant of when you can even move the bats out because of breeding season. And, you know, they have to make sure that the bats are taken out in a certain ways to not harm them, because they’re a protected species here in Indiana. So you’ve got all these components that are important that these folks are doing really, really well as part of their daily job. What can we do to showcase that, and it becomes really interesting social media. Now, not every day, am I in McLaren Senna, you know, a hazmat suit, and a respirator. But, you know, there’s so many things that we can show people about our businesses that make interesting content. And that content, where we really put the member out there, as the star of our story becomes why people want to engage, engage with us, as a chamber engage with our members, it really made our chamber kind of rocket to the top of what we could do in social media very, very quickly. And we took that reach, with consistent posting with interesting content with video use, from 250,000 in 2019, to over 2 million in 2020, like you said, and 2.8 million last year. So you know, it’s, it’s all about if there’s anything that people learn about social media, give people content that they want to see, it doesn’t always have to be curated, it doesn’t always have to be those rounded corners, where it’s, you know, perfect. Whenever it goes out. It can be just really interesting content, show people what your members are doing, and people engage. Right.
Brandon Burton 23:51
And I think that often gets over thought when you as for chambers, putting out social media content, especially in the form of video where they feel like it needs to be perfected needs to look right. But, you know, social media gives us so much leniency as far as the content going out there. And really, people aren’t spending hours on that content necessarily. Either they’re scrolling through their feed. So if it gets if it catches their attention and tells a story of a member or something impactful that you’re doing in the community, and getting a portion of that attention, then you win, you know, that’s that’s the goal. And you don’t need to spend all the money and all the time and everything doing all the editing and making it just perfect. Just do it. Get started. It’ll get better as you go and get more experienced, but just get started. Yeah, and we
Allyson Gutwein 24:37
do have a video company that we employ to do some of our videos, but we also do a lot of our videos in house. But you know, the the thing is, the generations coming up, they see things that are a little too perfect, a little too curious, almost disingenuous. So you know Most of what they’re seeing on Instagram, it might be a little edited. But it is certainly not content that someone has always gone through a photo editing program. Not always, they just want to see. That’s right. They always want to see good content. So give your audience good content that they want to see and engage with. And they will engage.
Brandon Burton 25:20
Yeah, so which platforms are you guys on with social media?
Allyson Gutwein 25:24
So we primarily focus on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. You know, for a chamber of our size, there’s always so many directions to be pulled. You know, we have done a few things on tick tock, mainly ribbon cuttings, just trying to put something out there in that platform. But Twitter is kind of its own animal in and of itself, it takes so much time to constantly update, we just don’t have the bandwidth available currently in order to be able to do that one well, so rather than not doing it, well, we would rather step back until we have the chance to really engage more on that platform specifically. So we’ve focused on those three, and those three have done a lot for our visibility for our members and for our chamber.
Brandon Burton 26:11
That’s great. Yeah. Well, let’s shift gears a little bit over to the micro economic development. And this intrigues me I just, so this may go a little bit off topic, but I just actually posted a blog post yesterday, talking about how entrepreneurship tends to attract diversity. So as chambers are after, you know, diversity, equity inclusion, you know, putting attention into that area, are we paying attention to the diversity that entrepreneurship brings and provides. So as you focus on these micro businesses, 12 or less, a lot of these are entrepreneurs, people that are putting it on the line to get started and joke about sometimes these entrepreneurs are unemployable in other places, but they go out and hang their own shingle because they need to make a living, or maybe they’ve got a great idea, or there’s a lot of different reasons why. But I’d love to learn more about the the approach that you guys are taking to help, you know, shine a light on these micro businesses and economic development.
Allyson Gutwein 27:16
Well, and that’s an area where I think it is it’s very easy to kind of go after some of the larger marbles in the bag, right. And I think a lot of times, these small businesses are easy to say, oh, gosh, it’s, it’s a lot of work to deal with them. But we have a lot of programs already in place that we’re using to help all of our members, but it’s really quite easy to mix them in with what we do, we have a few programs that we have developed specifically for them. And that also, they’re they’re very complementary to the rest of what we’re offering to our members. So they made a lot of sense to just kind of bulk up our portfolio overall. So we were really excited whenever we first saw our members starting to come in that were home based businesses. So home based business for us is someone who might work from home, they might have this as a side hustle, they might have a business, that’s a full time gig and those go everywhere from financial services to p are to people who are doing jewelry making. So we have a lot of people in this, you know, this sphere that we find encompass a lot of different elements that we didn’t have as a part of our membership. And you’re right, that diversity piece really does allow us to even encourage our membership to diversify pipelines of suppliers, through some of the small businesses that we’re now attracting because of whom, you know, we’re now offering services for that maybe they aren’t able to find elsewhere. So some of the statistics, you know, in the US, the SBA in 2021, said there were 32 point 5 million small businesses in the US, which accounts for 99.9% of all businesses. That’s a lot.
That’s almost everybody. So again, that’s 500 or fewer employees. So that’s quite a few businesses that many micro businesses would say, well, they’re not small, well, the SBA, that is their standard, but then 81% of those of that 32 point 5 million actually have no employees. So I mean, you’re looking at a giant percentage of our small businesses in the US that are exceptionally small. And, you know, the SBA says that micro businesses are 12 or under so I mean, that percentage even grows whenever you’re taking into account those that do have some employees but are still 12 or fewer. But small businesses have created 65.1% of the new job growth since 2000. So as we look at Sectors of growth, and to your point, what were claimed it kind of look at for the the growth of chambers, what are we doing to make sure that these businesses are a part of our chamber? are talking to our other members are feeling supported? are being utilized locally? For many you have a grocery store chain? What are you doing to connect some of those micro businesses, with your grocery shops? What are you’re doing to connect your brick and mortars with some folks that could be local wholesalers mean, now you’re talking about all these individual components that come into it, that’s more environmentally sustainable than having to ship something halfway across the country that’s more environmentally sustainable is to be able to reduce the amount of packaging because they don’t have to use packaging in order to potentially deliver something. So there’s a lot of pieces that feed into this. But if we’re doing a really exceptional job as a chamber, to make connections, we’re able to help a lot of different aspects of business be created. And that’s exciting to see and exciting to be a part of. But for us, it also means that we’re attracting more people now, because we have options, and they’re seeing, hey, my size of business is being supported, I have a place at that table. And we want to make sure that whenever they come into this area, you know, other people are telling that story for us who are also small businesses, whether they’re a tech startup, or someone who’s you know, a mom, and maybe with a side hustle of making jewelry, who knows what these businesses are going to turn into, but we’re going to support them today. So whenever we need to say, hey, we’ve got maybe a new brick and mortar that is opening, who’s interested in going in, we already have a developed pool of candidates that we have worked with, to plug into those openings. So we never really have a gap on our main street, really here in town. Businesses fill those spaces quickly, because we have a curated pool of people we’ve worked with,
Brandon Burton 32:25
that’s awesome. And I can get fired up on this topic. Because this is something I’m passionate about is the influence and the role that a chamber should have with these small and micro businesses in their community. But often what I see is these, you’d mentioned these home based businesses. You know, it’s easy when you see a new business, open their doors, you know, they hang a new sign, and you can approach them about membership. And you know, let them know about the value proposition of your chamber. How do you go about finding some of these home based businesses and expressing the value? And once you get their attention, it’s easy to express the value of the chamber, but how do you get their attention initially?
Allyson Gutwein 33:03
To be very fair, a lot of them find us. And that goes back to our social media reach. Whenever we have a social media reach where people are seeing that we’re sharing information about members and our members are visible, that what we’re doing as a chamber for those members as visible, they find us. So yes, have we gone out and actively sought out? Some businesses? Most certainly, are we finding just as many businesses that are finding us? Yes. So one of the ways that we actually connect many of our home based businesses is through something called micro groups. So think of as a distillation of our membership down into individual components where if you are a real estate agent, you’re going to have different needs different concerns than those that own a restaurant. So what are we doing in order to address those needs more directly and more specifically, and we have a home based business micro group. So peers can really share information share tricks that they have learned in order to make their business more visible, in, in encourage one another through what has worked for them. We actually learn a lot from these micro groups because they’re able to really say, Okay, this is what’s going on in our area. What can you do to support us here and we’re like, man, we wouldn’t have known that. Had we not listened to our micro group, listen to our members. So these meetings go on in these individual kind of little groups, once a quarter. For us, they’re really, not only are they the facilitation of peer to peer communication, they give us ideas for programming for the future. And that is a really important for member loyalty and member retention.
Brandon Burton 34:59
Yeah, And so this next question, I think you’ve addressed it throughout our discussion, but I’ll ask it formerly and maybe have you put it in a nutshell for us a little summary, but how do you see the role of the Zionsville? chamber there within your community?
Allyson Gutwein 35:15
Sure. So we really are a conduit of information and a facilitator for visibility. So for many of our members, we are not only the source of information on how to be able to grow a business, but how do you make your your business seen and heard, once it’s up and running, or once you’re getting it there? What do you do in order to create that kind of solid foundation for business creation of any size. So we truly are meeting with members that run the gambit of large national corporations that are interested in coming into the area to someone who, their sole proprietor. And that’s exciting to see that we’re we as a small chamber are able to facilitate both of those conversations effectively in order to make our membership robust, and unique.
Brandon Burton 36:11
That’s awesome. So and I think that shows with as you’ve been going through these programs on your application of that, that role that you guys have in your community, but I like asking everyone that I have on the show, for any tips or strategies that you might have for a chamber champion listening who would like to take their chamber up to the next level? What would you suggest?
Action Item/Tip for Chamber Champions
Allyson Gutwein 36:36
If you haven’t yet embraced the small businesses in your community, and those micro businesses do it, make sure that those those businesses feel as though they have as much place at the Chamber table as any of the other larger businesses. And as time goes on, you’re going to find that those people are some of your loudest voices supporting your chamber, because they feel included, they feel like they have a part of something larger than maybe they have ever felt that they’ve had a part of in the past. Many think gone are the days of, you know, chambers, just focusing on on large businesses, we have to make sure that if entrepreneurs are truly bringing 65.1% of the growth since 2000, what are we doing to be the voice to help them have a louder voice? So we’re the megaphone. We’re the people who are providing that information. And if we’re doing it, well, those folks are going to turn around and be our champions, too.
Brandon Burton 37:47
Yes, that’s what I was gonna come back to is oftentimes those large businesses, or maybe what funds a chamber and a lot of ways. But by being able to focus on those small and micro businesses, those are the ones that it’s kind of a paradox, right, because they tend to be the ones that need the most from the chamber, but can afford to pay the least in as far as their membership levels go. But as they see that impact that you can have on their business, they become some of your biggest advocates and best word of mouth and testimonials, you know, throughout the community to attract more business onto the mission of your chamber. So, Abdullah. So, Allison, how do you see the future of chambers and their purpose going forward?
Future of Chambers
Allyson Gutwein 38:34
Sure. I think for a lot of folks, you know, it’s, it’s kind of a interesting time where they see kind of gone are the days of many people becoming joiners, right, everyone joining a chamber because it was just something you did for the community, you have to show value, you have to show that there’s something there as a real interest to their business, everyone’s busy. And if you can show that there’s something in your chamber that is going to be worth their time and their money, you’re going to be a group that people still want to work with. chambers are vitally important to being liaisons for advocacy, and, you know, information as a whole. But people are saying, well, I can find that elsewhere, not in the same way that you can through a chamber not in the way that you can through networking with your peers, not in the same way that we can help facilitate. And if we can show that value, and long term legacy of, hey, there’s real power in having a singular voice. Whenever you’re trying to advocate for something that will help our members that and telling that story. How do we tell that story going forward? Many of you know our local newspaper that served just our area closed down during the pandemic. So you That goes back to what are we? Where are we reaching our audience? And if that’s on social media, are we telling our story effectively for our members and for our chamber in order to make sure that people are seeing us as a place of value?
Brandon Burton 40:14
Yeah, I like that. I actually, I like to help chambers get started with their own podcast. And one of the things I’ll ask is what void in your community could your podcasts fill. So when you talk about local newspapers, shutting down or, or drastically cutting back, there’s voids all over the community, as far as storytelling and information sharing goes, whether you’re addressing that through social media, or through my my choice of platforms of a podcast, but there’s ways to reach members in your community and fill those voids. And and you’re absolutely right, that Gone are the days of just people joining you need to show the value and, and a reason to be a part of your chamber. So I appreciate that. And Alison, I wanted to give you an opportunity to share any contact information with listeners that may want to reach out and connect and learn more about how you’re doing things in Zionsville. And, and to be coached on how to get their social media over to millions. What would be the best way for him to reach out and connect,
Connect with Allyson Gutwein
Allyson Gutwein 41:15
always happy to help because, in fact, we have something coming up soon called Social Media summer school. And you know, we’ve been encouraging even our peer chambers to come join us we want to help. We’ve been able to have amazing amounts of success for a very small chamber, we have 500 members, you know, we we have a small budget, in fact, I’m sure I am sure our full budget are smaller than some of the marketing budgets for our large share chambers and in the US, and that’s kind of nuts. You know, we we can show we have data to show that we outpaced chambers that are many times our size. And that’s truly through our visibility, consistency, and what we post, people want to see interesting content. That’s something that we can show people how to do so please reach out to me, my phone number is 317-873-3836 where you can reach out to me through my email, agutwein@zionsvillechamber.org. You can also find us on please follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. So Facebook is zville chamber and the rest are Zionsville chamber. So we would love to have you follow our content and ask any questions. Sometimes you may say well, why did you post that? Or tell me why you’re posting two or three times in one day? Well, I’ll give you an answer.
Brandon Burton 42:56
Yeah, no, I like that. I appreciate you being generous with the fielding those questions as well happy to do it. I’ll get your contact information in our show notes for this episode. And I’ll link to the your social media pages as well. So everybody can hop on and follow and take these tutorials from what designs they’ll chambers doing with their social media accounts. So
Allyson Gutwein 43:17
they’re also one ACC EADS website to
Brandon Burton 43:21
There you go. Yeah. I appreciate you joining us today on Chamber Chat Podcast and you provided a lot of value and great example, as you guys are chosen as a chamber, the year finalists are setting the bar and doing great work. So I appreciate you coming on and sharing some of that with us.
Allyson Gutwein 43:39
Thank you so much for having us today.
Brandon Burton 43:42
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