Closing the Relevancy Gap for Chambers with Betsy Gardner Eckbert, IOM

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

Episode 66 — Closing the Relevancy Gap for Chambers with Betsy Gardner Eckbert
Clean Speaker-Labeled Transcript
Guest: Betsy Gardner Eckbert
Automated QA: Passed

00:00.108 Brandon Burton
Hey there, just real quick before we get into this episode, this is Brandon, and I just wanted to share a quick message. If you are listening to this, chances are good that you are a chamber professional. And guaranteed, if you're listening to this, you also listen to podcasts. Have you considered creating a podcast for your chamber and all the benefits that that can bring? Check out my free chamber podcasting guide at chamberchatpodcast.com/slash podcasting. to learn how you can get started with your own chamber podcast. 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.
00:48.014 Brandon Burton
your host. Enjoy.
00:55.042 Brandon Burton
He's my dad, Brandon Burton. Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. This is your host, Brandon Burton, and you're joining us today for episode sixty-six of Chamber Chat Podcast. And you just heard a an introduction from my youngest daughter, Addy, as she told everyone that I enjoy going on cruises. And in fact, as we record this early April 2020, I should have just been getting off of a cruise ship last Saturday. And unfortunately with all the everything going on on around the world right now with the coronavirus pandemic, that cruise has been postponed. So I I'm not coming off with a nice suntan after after a fun week on board. But I do enjoy going on cruises, my wife and I do, and and we have a lot of fun doing that. But today our guest is Betsy Gardner Eckbert, president and CEO of the Winter Park. Chamber of Commerce in Florida. And Betsy was raised, she was actually raised in Winter Park, Florida, where things came full circle in January 2017 when she became the president and CEO of the city's Chamber of Commerce. She has focused on innovation and closing the relevancy gap to modernize the organization, earning the 2018 Chamber Innovation Awards Grand Prize. Previously, in 2009, She moved with her family to London, England, where she became director of business development for Mentor Consulting Limited, a UK consulting firm advocating for gender diversity at the board level. She would go on to co found an international children's luxury brand of UB UV protected swimwear, Longwave Apparel Limited, that was marketed in 14 countries. That success, after taking time off from Her award-winning biotechnology sales career to raise her children inspired her to create the Chambers Relaunch Program aimed at stay-at-home mothers who are ready to go back to work. A Hall of Fame inductee, the University of Florida graduate, was also the 1991 Outstanding Female Leader. She serves the community on several boards, including Winter Park Health Foundation Board of Trustees, Winter Park Economic Development Advisory Board Member.
03:21.368 Brandon Burton
Greater Orlando Builders Association, Governmental Affairs Committee member, Rollins College, Department of Business Advisory Committee member, Seacoast Bank Community Advisory Board Member, American Arbitr Arbitration Association Arbiter. She has also won several recent allocades, including the Orlando Business Journal Women Who Mean Business, Orange Appeals Women of Influence. and Winter Park magazine's influentials. I'm excited to have Betsy on the show today to talk about closing the relevancy gap for chambers. And we will get into this discussion as soon as we get back from hearing from our sponsor.
04:10.164 Brandon Burton
During this time of uncertainty, most chambers are looking for ways to replace funding from events and programs that have either been canceled or postponed due to social distancing that does not allow for us to meet as large groups. Another topic that is top of mind for chambers is how to help their member businesses recover from the financial impact their businesses experienced. With these considerations in mind, I want to introduce you to Swipe It. Swipe It offers a credit card processing affinity program for Chambers of Commerce that can help answer your questions about how to replace some of your lost revenue while also allowing for you to serve as an advocate to your member businesses by introducing them to a resource that can save them money on their credit card processing fees so they can become more profitable. Swipe It has been a supporter of Chamber Chat Podcasts from the beginning. And they are the best in the credit card processing business. Visit ChamberThat Podcast.com slash CC, which stands for credit card, to learn how you can get swiping with Swipe It. All right, Betsy, we are back. I wanted to welcome you to the Chamber Chat Podcast and ask you to just say hello to the audience and if you would share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little bit better.
05:36.226 Betsy Gardner Eckbert
Well, I'm thrilled to be here, Brandon. Thank you. And a couple well, interesting about me, I as you know, I lived outside the country. I've also hiked five hundred miles with the Appalachian Trail, which is something that my mother didn't love. She thought it was dirty and the kind of thing weird people did. So it was one of the most transformational experiences of my life. And I did live in the woods basically for six weeks back in nineteen ninety nine. So I loved it.
06:05.026 Brandon Burton
Right. Did you see a lot of weird people on the trail?
06:08.146 Betsy Gardner Eckbert
no, I saw a lot of fantastic people on the trail. And so it kind of proved my mother's hypothesis wrong. I met a lot of amazing people. Yeah.
06:15.97 Brandon Burton
That's awesome. Awesome. well that is definitely an interesting fact about you. I love it. can you share with us a little bit about the Winter Park Chamber? By maybe the size, location, budget, just to give listeners a better idea of the perspective that you're coming from as we get into our topic today.
06:34.326 Betsy Gardner Eckbert
One of things I've learned in my short time being a chamber executive, which is only a little over three years, is that you just don't want to judge a book by its cover, right? So people on this podcast have probably never heard of Winter Park, Florida, but Winter Park sits in the MSA of Orlando. And everyone's heard of Orlando, I'm sure. And what's interesting about Winter Park is it's an extremely high net worth community that most of Central Florida's CEOs live in. So while it's a very small community, it's extremely mighty in terms of its influence, both regionally and to some degree nationally. We've got national businesses that are headquartered in Orlando, and a lot of those CEOs lay their head down on a winter park pillow at night. So it's a really fun mix of hyperlocal and small, and then a lot of really interesting thought leaders and senior business people that help guide what we do, which makes it really, really fun. So the size of our chamber at the moment, we have eight hundred and seventeen members. We have fifteen people on staff, half of whom are part time. And we have a budget of a little over a million dollars. And so that's kind of ca a context of where we are from size, location, budget.
07:48.958 Brandon Burton
All right. That that will help to give everyone an idea as we get into our discussion today, which as I mentioned in during the introduction, we'll be talking about closing the relevancy gap for chambers. And as I've been going about producing this podcast for a little over a year now, that the topic of relevancy for chambers comes up very often. And I think this is a neat perspective of closing. the relevancy gap rather than just, you know, how do we stay relevant? How do we keep our head above water? So this is more of a proactive approach as as I see it of how do we actively close that relevancy gap. so I know this is something that's you know a passion for you. So before I, you know, take any any of your thunder, why don't you share with us a little bit about your thoughts about closing the relevancy gap for chambers and why it's so important to you.
08:45.484 Betsy Gardner Eckbert
Well, I think it's interesting because chambers are not immune to this kind of phenomenon that's happening at places that used to be in vulnerable institutions and communities. I'm talking about places of worship, talking about country clubs, koanis and rotary clubs, really the king-making organizations of people's communities that nobody could imagine would ever have a point of vulnerability are now struggling. with how do we keep enough members to keep the light bill paid? You know, so there's a very real and present call to action to sort of at the risk of sounding blunt, innovate or die, right? So I I think chambers are very much in the basket of those groups that are all trying to figure out who they are. We're in an identity crisis as a country. How do we create meaningful connectivity now that a lot of people are connecting through social media? how do we create something that transcends the building that we're operating in? And so I think you know, I grew up with the Winter Park Chamber king-making legislative delegates, you know, king-making congressional delegates. I mean, it it was something I I could never imagine was a was something that would be struggling with how do people understand who we are now? But that's where we are. And I think it's really important for chambers to Call that by what it is, to name it, to embrace it, and understand that you we all have a problem. We all have the problem of understanding how do we create relevant engagement tools and platforms for our members? Because without it, we won't we won't survive. And so we've got to create a new business model. We've got to create something that goes beyond that model of chamber events. You probably know, I mean, when I first got in this role, I I went on and read all the horizon study stuff from ACCE and I'm I really think that metric is significant. Twenty percent of chamber members nationwide attend events. And if we are relying on engaging with twenty percent of our members, how do we expect one hundred percent of the renewals to come in? Because if people are using event attendance as their engagement metric, we're not gonna be successful.
11:08.952 Betsy Gardner Eckbert
So we have to change the conversation about what engagement is and what it looks like. And I think that starts with understanding our members as customers. We call them customers in our organization. We know that we're delivering a service to customers just like a business is. And we behave like a business. We don't apologize for behaving like a business. We are a business. And one of our top priorities is to be a role model for the business community. How can we lead them without setting standards for them to follow, right? So we need to be highly efficient business people ourselves. And I'm lucky that I've had a background in sales and marketing and entrepreneurship that I think we definitely put into our kind of we act like a lean startup and we definitely have a lot of innovation and creativity and a real lust for getting it right on the next iteration. That undercuts our culture internally at our chamber. But I think this notion of identifying, if you don't know that you have a relevancy problem, I hate to say this, but you're not paying attention. Everybody has a relevancy problem right now. And if you just think you've solved your relevancy problem, you've got to move on to the next relevancy problem. Because staying relevant is a constant and dynamic process. So even if you've gotten there, you need to continue to innovate to stay relevant. So We actually changed our mission statement three years ago. When I got into the role, no one could repeat our mission statement. Long rambling paragraph. And I asked everybody that was on the current staff when I got there, I said, Can you tell me what the mission of this organization is? And their faces just went blank. And so I think that's kind of an obvious but sometimes overlooked place to start. I think it's really important if you don't have a mission statement that will allow you To think differently about your business model, you need to create one. And so I'm very fortunate that our board allowed us to play with the idea of this engagement model that was different and highly relevant. And we were able to change our mission statement to something that even our members and our guests can repeat because we say it all the time. Every single program that we do, we did a podcast or I'm sorry, a Zoom call this morning.
13:25.548 Betsy Gardner Eckbert
where we led with our mission statement. And our mission statement is really simple and repeatable. It's to convene people and ideas for the benefit of our businesses and our community. So we bring people together. And we measure engagement now in different modalities. So we measure engagement by did you click on our newsletter? We measure engagement by did you open our newsletter? We measure engagement by did you like or share our social media post? We measure engagement by how many of you attended a webinar. and so we're measuring engagement in a way that goes way beyond this notion of did you show up to an event? Because that's just not gonna cut it. And what I'm really pleased with is that we've grown revenues twenty five percent over the past three years by doing this, and our our events revenue is flat. And we knew events were gonna stay flat, and that's not to to do events down in any way. Events are critical. They're very important and they represent a third of our revenue stream. But while maintaining flat event revenue, we've been able to grow our overall revenue twenty five percent in three years through using these tools.
14:32.59 Brandon Burton
That's awesome. If if I can just mention you're talking about different ways to engage and how the the idea of having members come to events and what low attendance that is. given the current situation in the world, you mentioned you just came off of a Zoom call this morning where you were everybody is reciting the the mission of the chamber. we're conducting this interview over Zoom. as so many of us are working from home at the current time with the the coronavirus stuff going on, this pandemic. And, you know, just the other day I was having this realization that so many people are becoming used to, or over the next few weeks, are going to become used to working from home. And there's going to be a big change in the marketplace, I believe, in when things go back to whatever our new normal is going to be. There's going to be a lot of remote workers, people that are realizing they can do their job just effectively from home as they could in an office. So when we're talking about engaging members, a platform like Zoom and webinars, I mean, these should be probably a standard staple in your arsenal to be able to engage your membership. Is everybody's familiar with Zoom now, you know, given let's take advantage of this opportunity and or see it as an opportunity. and see these tools that people are now familiar with and let's leverage that to help inform them, engage them, and convene them and bring them all together. that that's just something that's hit me over these last few days that that chambers can be taken advantage of.
16:10.326 Betsy Gardner Eckbert
Well, and it's interesting because we, like I said, we have a culture of innovation. So we do 110 events and programs a year. We survey a hundred and ten events and programs a year. So every Monday morning we're in a staff meeting going through our surveys and it's not a gotcha exercise. It is an exercise in how can we be a culture of continuous improvement as staff and a board and how can we look at what we delivered. Did it hit the target of what our audience needs or in did we anticipate their needs ideally? And then how do we get better the next time? So because we have this culture that's really nimble and based on speed of delivery and based on this con this culture of continuous improvement, we were ready to go. Two weeks ago, we were sitting in a staff meeting at 10 o'clock in the morning and we had our first webinar up on Zoom. For our members with seventy-eight people on it by four PM that afternoon. I told my team, let's make this happen. We've got to have, if you know Lean Startup, you know minimum viable product is what you want to get out there. So we had a minimum viable product out by four PM. We had a bunch of people on the call, they engaged with it. More people have now come on to our library and watch that. They shared it. So we've got this huge robust engagement model that goes way beyond these physical events, which is amazing because they're not Costing us anything outside of the sunk cost we have of our personnel right now. And so there's two things going on. We're demonstrating to our board that people need to get paid right now, which is fantastic. And we're engaging with our community in a way we never have before. In our first week, we delivered over 200 live webinar participants, with many more that sat behind that when they downloaded, or even better, shared our webinar with their customer base. So we have a series now called Securing Your Business during the COVID-19 pandemic. And we deliver a webinar every afternoon at four o'clock. And we've done topics on how to optimize your restaurant curbside practice, to having our congresswoman in to talk about the CARES Act, people from the US Chamber to talk about the CARES Act. Every day is something prescrip prescriptive. And as we move into what where we are, our third week at home, next week, we're going to be bringing in someone.
18:24.344 Betsy Gardner Eckbert
Who leads a session on improv to help us think more creatively and more nimbly as we continue to innovate new business models. So we're trying to provide support to the community through lots of different modalities, but we're finding that people are going on Zoom and using the chat feature to network. They're letting people know what they do so that they can be solutions based as they're interacting with each other. And we're finding that we've become a virtual community center as we go through this price crisis. So we're Definitely vectoring information, but we're also living out our mission. And we say every single time, this is our mission, and we're doing mission-aligned things. You know, somebody somebody wrote me and said, we should be making plastic sneeze guards for our whole community right now. And I said, what a great idea. We're not the organization to do that because that's not mission-aligned. We're putting all of our energy into bringing everybody together and vectoring information and catalyzing business growth when people think it can't be done. And so that's what we're focused on and it and it seems to be working really
19:25.87 Brandon Burton
That's good. So from what I'm seeing, it kind of the the flow of how this has gone in your chamber is kind of redefining what the mission is, setting up a different model for how you're interacting, and then it being creative with how you're engaging the membership. I think in those those three steps, mission model engagement is something that that chambers can look at. to see, you know, where they need to bolster things up and and strengthen their efforts to to help close that relevancy gap. are there other parts to this that that we're missing or as I'm trying to kind of summarize that, are are there other parts that you would want to expand on? Yeah.
20:11.264 Betsy Gardner Eckbert
A great summary, but I'll give you some of the detail of kind of how we make that work, right? So, what we try to do is we build a customer-focused model. What does the customer need? And it used to be that the chamber existed and people came to the chamber and people paid their dues because they wouldn't dare want to be left out of the directory, right? We believe that the same thing is true now. You don't want to be left out of our directory because you get such great Google verified. Search engine optimization. So we we definitely lead with digital engagement on our directory side too. But basically, we're looking at what we can do that nobody else can do. What is the golden handcuffs value proposition that we have that understands that there's a customer out there that's not getting this need met, and that the chamber is the only place where that need can get met. And really we focus on the word hyper-local or the two words hyper-local whenever we think about that, right? So At the moment, two types of media are important, hyperlocal and global, right? I want to understand what's happening in the entire world pandemic-wise. And I also want to understand what's happening here in Orange County, Florida, in terms of the pandemic. And even better, now I've got data about what's happening in Winter Park due to the pandemic. So I think we need two re we need two news sources, so to speak, and we need two presences. We need a global presence and we need a hyperlocal presence. Well, I'm pleased that we do have a local a global presence. We have a global membership of the Winter Park Chamber of Commerce because we get a lot of people from around the world that come to Central Florida and we want to engage with them and help be a boots on the ground resource for them as they think about entrepreneurship in Central Florida. But from the hypo hyperlocal perspective, we try to anticipate the need of the customer. And what's wonderful is the customer usually tells us what their need is because we ask them. We survey them and we ask them. And so we've surveyed them during the pandemic and said, what webinar topics do you guys want to hear from? And I've got a list of 20 of them that we're working on off of. Customers are very generous with their ideas and they're usually extremely helpful. So we use their ideas to drive our solutions for them. And so when we think about what can we do that nobody else can do.
22:25.738 Betsy Gardner Eckbert
It's standing behind our customers and amplifying their messages. It's standing next to them and burnishing their brand reputation within the community. It gives them a place to give things, resources, like time and money to to bolster their own sense of belonging or the quality of their brand within the community. And then there's other things that people want to get from the chamber. You know, people want to get marketing support and they want to get help with a business launch, things like that. But when we think about who's delivering things like talent in our market, if you've spent any time on LinkedIn lately, you know that it's just a battleground. There's all these recruiters on there all trying to fish from the same trout pall pond. And so basically what we've done is we've said, wait a minute, our community is full of extremely talented people, many of whom have got blue chip degrees from Higher education places that have very, very, very well respected brand names. And these are people that are sitting right under our noses and they're not applying for jobs. And the reason why we're not applying for jobs is because they're highly talented and successful women who are currently operating as stay-at-home moms. And we know that stay-at-home moms typically have a confidence gap that begins from six months or longer at home. This plagues men too, and that's documented by people like McKinsey and Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have all done white papers on this. But we know that that gap exists for any gender, any age, any length of time beyond six months. We know that this affects women disproportionately because more women choose to exit the career ladder and stay home with kids. So when we started thinking about where we can source talent in a way that nobody else can. We started engaging with women who are at home who have law degrees from Notre Dame, journalism degrees from Northwestern, media experience producing shows for National Geographic, women who've done international business who are fluent in four languages, and this is just to name a few. So we had this powder keg of unbelievable talent sitting under our noses, and we cannot get them to apply for jobs because they don't have any confidence.
24:44.91 Betsy Gardner Eckbert
So we built a program several years ago called Relaunch, where we taught these women how to present themselves on a level playing field with someone who's say 25 or 30 years old. They have a professional headshot, they have an all-star LinkedIn profile, they have a resume that's been updated to look like resumes look now and not like they did 20 years ago. we teach them how to dress, we teach them how to communicate, we teach them not to put exclamation points in their emails, which is what moms do a lot, and we teach them not to do that. and we basically level their playing field to go back out into the workplace. And we've become a regional talent source for our region for talent they simply cannot find elsewhere. And so that's a really gratifying thing to think differently about that. When you think what chambers should be doing at their very basic level, economic development and workforce development are usually two of the most often used functions of chamber. And so, you know, in Winter Park, like I said, we're a very wealthy community. Class A office space is almost not available because we're almost fully occupied. And it's not the kind of town where a Verizon Regional Call Center is going to be relocated. But we have the same problem with accounting firms not having enough accountants. We have the same problem with law firms needing to hire part-time people. And we've got a talent pool of people who are ready to go back into those jobs.
26:08.682 Brandon Burton
So I love the idea about the the relaunch program and those are people returning to the workforce. And I was curious, how did you go about engaging specifically those women, those stay at home moms? So they're not necessarily a customer of the chamber. you know, that they're not part of a business, it's a customer. So how did you find them? How did you get in front of them? How did you get your messaging out to them about this is what your goal and and part of the mission of the chamber would be? Regarding them specifically.
26:39.854 Betsy Gardner Eckbert
Yeah. Well, that's the hardest part. And I will tell you that I've had a career you know, running and starting an international business, and I worked in London for a consulting firm and I was a national leader in biotechnology sales before I did this, but I stayed home with my own kids for thirteen years. And I think that my role modeling that is one of the most essential ingredients of the success of the program because even when we take women through the program, Women want to make sure things are perfect before they're executed. And this is one of those things where you're just simply gonna have to close your eyes and jump at the end of this thing. We've trained our people what to do, what to say, how to present themselves, and they still have a lingering confidence gap. Now, what's really interesting is when they get back to work, that gap completely closes and they forget that they ever had one. and that was definitely my experience. I was so nervous when I went back to work. After my 13 year break, I thought someone was gonna find out how much I didn't know about how a Microsoft outlook worked and they were gonna laugh at me in the office. And it was a paralyzing fear. So I know what that's like and I remember what that feels like. But I think it's it's one of the biggest challenges is because even when we brought women to the point where we say you're ready, they're like, No, but I still have to refine my resume one more time and and clicking go is really hard. So I will tell you that the challenge is working through our networks to find these women because they're not people who sign up for the chamber newsletter. They're not engaged with the chamber, but they are driving growth in our chamber. So a typical life cycle for us is we have a very strong presence on Facebook. And as you know, you can game Facebook to reach people of a certain age and a certain zip code. And so we buy Facebook ads and we reach out to people who are. usually between 35 and 55 years old. Not that we have a bias toward any other ages, but those are typically the ages of the people that we see in our program. And so we target our marketing on Facebook to those people. One of the things we found is the most effective thing. It's a video for me saying, did you know I was a stay at home mom for 13 years? And so they can't believe it. And when we tell them that, they think maybe there's hope for me too. It's a really hard sell. It's the hardest thing I've ever had to had to sell
28:59.33 Betsy Gardner Eckbert
Because people actually have to ultimately meet us halfway with self-belief. And that's the part that's really, really hard for us. But Facebook has been super helpful for us. and as we grow our community, there's kind of an underground of people that that will say, if you go to relaunch, you'll you'll get a job, you know. And so we're helping transition people back to work. We are going to begin offering relaunch via webinar, via Zoom, because we know people will have an urgent need to get back to work that have been h That have been home for a while that probably need to get back to work to make their families performance work now. So Facebook has been really helpful. The Underground Network has been really helpful. we do a ton of work with video, that helps a lot. The more we can put pictures out where people can see themselves in the picture, that really helps because we find that we have huge amounts of brand awareness, but to convert people from being aware of what we do to actually having the guts to do what we do. is a is a big leap. And one of the things we found out, for example, was we were offering relaunch on the same morning that all the local tennis leagues were meeting. And a lot of those women who stay home are playing tennis because they're quite frankly bored. And so if we were competing, delivering our content on tennis mornings, we were missing out on a huge group of people that we hadn't even thought about. So there's a lot of learnings for us and how we've executed it. and I'm very excited because I think within the next two weeks we'll be going to a web base format with this program. And at the moment we have people driving about two to four hours to get to our classes. It's a five week class and we have people driving from all of the state of Florida to come. And I'm pleased we're going to be able to launch the the web presence in the next two weeks.
30:44.374 Brandon Burton
That's awesome. I love the idea about the video of you saying, Did you know I was a stay-at-home mom for 13 years? And I I see that resonating so well with the those target people that you're trying to get in front of. would it be possible for you to send me a link for the video and I'll put it in the show notes page so those listening can check it out and maybe get some ideas? That'd be great. well as we start to to wrap things up here, I wanted to ask you based on our
31:06.382 Betsy Gardner Eckbert
Absolutely.
31:13.644 Brandon Burton
discussion today, what might be one action item that you could recommend that a chamber professional does to help take their chamber up to the next level?
31:22.766 Betsy Gardner Eckbert
Look at your mission. Make sure your mission is something you can actually execute on. Make sure it's something people can repeat because the more it becomes ingrained in who you are, the more everybody knows what you're about. So, you know, one of the things that terrified me when I got on this job, I had never worked for a chamber of commerce before. I would ask rooms full of people, what does a chamber of commerce do? No one could answer that question. Right? Lay people can't answer that question. So we need to give our customers the tools to become apostles of what we do. And if we tell them what we do, they can go out and tell people what we do, and they can come and bring more people to our tent, if you will, to become part of what we're doing and then enlarge our mission. So it sounds simple, but I've looked at so many chamber missions that you can't repeat. Nobody understands what does that mean? And you know, the other thing too is you may have to pivot your business model. So think about what your business model maybe should be, and then pivot your mission statement to enable you to get there, right?
32:27.244 Brandon Burton
Yeah. Yeah, it's funny you said how the lay people don't necessarily know what a chamber does. When I started this podcast, I was telling one of my friends who were texting and I told him I was starting this podcast, Chamber Tap Podcast, for chamber professionals to get ideas and to implement things back at their chamber and and he was just totally confused. He's like, What do you mean chamber you mean like like hyperbaric chambers or what okay, so there is a disconnect as far as the lay people knowing what a chamber does and and that's a problem. So
33:02.71 Betsy Gardner Eckbert
And and if we want people to understand what we do, we have to tell them what we do. And we've got to be very, very clear about that. So I would say step one is align your mission with a new business model. Make sure those two pieces go together. And then also I think it's really important that everyone understand we have a relevancy crisis. You have got to understand that. And if you don't understand that someone's going to understand it for you and leave your organization. So I think that's a really important call to action is that we get You know, to a place where we are being building these customer-centric models, where we're trying to anticipate and meet customer needs in the models. It's no longer the days of we're the chamber, you have to come to us. We're the big powerful group in town. I built my business into 14 countries using LinkedIn alone. Chamber of Commerce didn't help me build any of that. So we've got to understand there's lots of different ways for a customer to connect and grow their business. and we're a piece of it and I think we're a really valuable hyperlocal piece of it that nobody else can do. But if we don't understand that they have options, they're gonna go somewhere else.
34:08.706 Brandon Burton
That's right. So this question I ask it every I asked everybody that I have on the show, but it kind of goes along with everything you've been saying in our discussion. But as we look to the future of chambers of commerce, how do you see their purpose going forward?
34:23.767 Betsy Gardner Eckbert
Well, I think that that chambers are going to become more marketing partners because I think of the way search engine optimization works, you need someone verifying who you are online. And we do that. We provide that very important piece of it. I remember growing up, my parents had a dog eared, water stained chamber directory, and that's where we got our plumbers from, and that's where we got our bankers from. And you went to the chamber directory to understand, you know. what was happening and who to go to. I think that mechanism is still in place and it's even more powerful than ever. So when we say about you, what you say about you as a business, Google loves that. And Google gives you a vote for that. And that moves you up the search engine of optimization. So we believe that we've done all of the value generation for a basic tier membership at the First stroke of the key that says you're in our directory, because that's a very valuable piece of what we do. And then I think we do have to create these opportunities for people to engage in person, but we also have to create leadership-driven models. We have to give people a way to understand our community and themselves better through training and programs. I think we've got to do a fantastic job of advocacy, and we've got to tell people. You know, that boring piece of parking ordinance that somebody sat on like an egg for a year, we made that happen, right? And so we ask the question every week at our staff meeting, what doesn't get done if we don't exist? And then we tell that story back to the community all the time. We're here doing these things, and you need us doing these things because believe me, nobody else is gonna do it. And so I think that's a really important piece too. Chambers have got to have a sense of urgency. about understanding that community and customer need and then ideally anticipating it and being there before anybody else can bring that need to them. And oftentimes we're the only ones uniquely suited to doing it. So get out of that business of what anybody else can do and get in the business of only what you can do.
36:33.28 Brandon Burton
I love that question of what what doesn't get done if we didn't exist? And that's something every chamber should be asking themselves and asking their their boards and committees. well, Betsy, as we finish here, I wanted to just give an opportunity to for you to maybe share some of your contact information. If if people listening have any questions about what what was discussed today or if they wanted to continue this discussion offline, how might they get in contact with you?
37:03.214 Betsy Gardner Eckbert
So you can contact me several ways. I'm on LinkedIn, Betsy Gardner Eckbert. I'm also, if you go to winterpark.org, my email address is super long and ridiculous. So I'll just suggest you go to winterpark.org about us staff, and I'm the CEO, so I'm the very first person in the drop-down there. You can find my contact details there. You can also call us at 407-644-8281-282. We have a community care coordinator that's full-time right now receiving phone calls in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. And then we go back to the office, she'll be available all business hours then too. You could also find me on on our e-newsletter, which we would love for people to sign up to and receive, where you can hopefully see some of the practices that we engage in. And that's just as simple as going to winterpark.org and we have a simple box where you load in your email. And we can start sending you our e-newsletter, which we would love to do. So I look forward to hearing from people. I will tell you my my email address if you want to write it down. It's it's like I said, ridiculously long. It's bardneckbert at winterpark.org. Feel free to reach me directly. I love collaborating with my chamber peers. I think there's a lot of best practice out there. I'm absolutely so privileged to be able to work in the chamber industry. The kind of people that are attracted to this work are really amazing people. Who I've learned a lot from. but I will say that I have the best staff in the business. They're absolutely incredible professionals. And when I started, I said I had fifteen staff. and just to be clear about that, half of them are stay at home moms who've transitioned back to work through me. So we punch way above our weight. That's awesome. A lot of extremely talented women. We do have two men on our staff, so we don't run a sexist organization, but we have a lot of a lot of middle aged women on our team who way outperform what anybody else could be doing. And so it's a highly successful business model for us internally as well.
39:03.416 Brandon Burton
That is fantastic. And no matter how long your email address is, I'll update all that contact information in our show notes page to make it easy for people to find you. So they can go to they can go to chamber chatpodcast.com slash episode sixty-six and all of all of Betsy's contact information will be on there. and I think it's a great idea to sign up for the newsletter. I know of some other chamber professionals that as they go on vacations, they Whatever city they vacation at, they end up joining that chamber even just for one year. So they get all the communications and get ideas to see how different chambers do things. So this would be a great thing, great resource to sign up for the Winter Park Chamber newsletter and and learn how they're doing things there. So Betsy, thank you again for spending time with us today. I so appreciate you sharing all this valuable information for us, great ideas for other chamber professionals to implement. implement back at their chambers. So thanks a lot.
40:04.344 Betsy Gardner Eckbert
Brandon, it's been a privilege. Thanks so much for what you do and for your time. I hope everyone stays safe and well. And I look forward to going back to a bricks and mortar lifestyle at the chamber someday soon.
40:16.224 Brandon Burton
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