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Episode 19 — Building Momentum at Your Chamber with Gary Molberg
Clean Speaker-Labeled Transcript
Guest: Gary Molberg
Automated QA: Passed

00:00.242 Gary Molberg
Is at least twice a month myself as president CEO of the Amarillo Chamber, you as mayor, and the president CEO of our Amarillo Economic Development Corporation. The three of us will just call on the business. We walk in, no agenda, and say, Hi, we're from the city, we're from the chamber from economic development. Tell us about your business and how can we help?
00:27.886 Brandon Burton
Gary Molberg from the Amarillo Chamber of Commerce is bringing us a lot of value today, so let's get into it. But first, let's cue the intro. This is the Chamber Chat Podcast, the show dedicated to chamber professionals to spark ideas and to get actionable tips and strategies to better serve your members and community.
00:52.514 Brandon Burton
Thank you for joining us for episode nineteen of the Chamber Chat Podcast. I'm Brandon Burton and it is my goal to introduce you to people and ideas so you can better serve your Chamber members and your community. Along these lines of my mission for this podcast, let's take a moment to hear from the sponsor for this episode to help you serve your members and community better.
01:19.03 Brandon Burton
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02:13.034 Brandon Burton
And we're back. Our guest today is Gary Maulberg. Gary has been the president and CEO of the Amarillo Chamber of Commerce since November 1st, 1997. Prior to becoming the chamber president, Gary had a seat on the Chamber Executive Committee and the Chamber Board, serving as the Membership Council Chair, was voted volunteer of the year in 1992, and volunteered for the Roundup Club. Gary served as vice president of marketing at Amarillo National Bank, senior vice president with Tascosa National Bank, and was the head of marketing, advertising, and credit card departments. He graduated from University of Texas at El Paso in 1972 with a bachelor's in personal management. Gary was drafted by the Atlanta Braves after graduating from Pampa High School and played baseball at Odessa College. And UTEP. He married Paula Rogers in 1994, has two children and four grandchildren. Gary is also an active member of several other local civic and service organizations. Gary, please say hello to the audience and share something interesting about yourself that we might not have learned about you in that brief bio there.
03:35.16 Gary Molberg
Well, good morning, everybody. Happy to be here. And Brandon, thank you for doing these podcasts for the chamber world. I think the main thing I have found out over my career is it's so important for us as chamber professionals to share with one another to make their businesses better. And that's why I love the business. I've met so many outstanding professionals over the years, Brandon, that it's a humbling experience and And I've enjoyed every minute of it.
04:07.086 Brandon Burton
That's wonderful. It is great to be able to learn from others and be able to as I call it, stand on the shoulders of giants, learn from them and and just share what you're learning in this in this industry. So that that's what the purpose of this show is all about. So glad to have you here.
04:22.838 Gary Molberg
Well So happy you're doing that because I I there's not many chamber professionals around that I know of that do not say they've learned something from somebody else in the business. And that's why we enjoy sharing and and helping all our businesses grow.
04:40.622 Brandon Burton
That's right. So Gary, for people that may not be familiar with Amarillo, I mean, if you're from Texas, you're familiar with Amarillo, but for people that may not be from Texas, can you just share with us a little bit about about your chamber, about the size and everything, so we can all relate to the Amarillo chamber and your situation a little bit better.
04:52.162 Gary Molberg
Can you
05:03.138 Gary Molberg
Yeah, people may not know where Amarillo is, but I'm sure they know how the state of Texas is formed. Well, we're right at the top. We're in the panhandle of Texas, right at the top. Some interesting fact, we're probably closer to four other state capitals than we are our own. People say, well, you just run down to Austin. Well, that's five hundred and seventy miles away. But so we're in a big state. We're at the very top of it. Amarillo is a very diversified community. We've had great growth. We have a population that's approaching 200,000 people. But the interesting thing about Amarillo, Brandon, is that we draw from surrounding counties and surrounding communities. And so if you look at that basis, along with I-40, that goes right through our city. Well, we draw a base of 600, 650,000 people because we have so many people. in our surrounding communities that come to Amarillo for medical services, to shop, to go to the quote, big city to get away for a weekend. And now that we have a brand new AA ballpark, the Amarola sod poodles, we're really bringing the crowds in. So we're really excited about what's going on in Amarola.
06:21.142 Brandon Burton
That is great. And so you've been in Amarillo a little while since at the chamber since ninety-seven, right? So you've seen some change and and been part of some of that change, a major part of some of that change at the Amarillo Chamber of Commerce, which brings us to our topic of discussion today, which is gonna be focused around building momentum at your chamber. So over the course of your time there at the Amarillo Chamber.
06:29.026 Gary Molberg
Yes, sir. That's
06:50.252 Brandon Burton
What would you say what what types of momentum are you seeing at your chamber? And w what types of things are you doing to build that momentum?
06:59.682 Gary Molberg
Well, Randy, my background in the banking business was marketing. You know, I'm a people person. And the chamber did a good job on several programs, but that wasn't what I would call a membership type chamber. I think it's very important not for chambers to sit up in their chairs and wait for the people come to them. We have to go out to the people. We have to create networking events to allow our businesses to get involved and to grow. When I stepped in here, the chamber had two non-dues revenue events. Today we have five. The two that we have, I've increased those. I say I, our staff has increased those. And we've added three additional ones. And so we have networking events around the clock. And we get such great feedback from our membership. Because this allows them to network, to talk to one another and to grow their businesses. So I think that's vitally important for every chamber. You have to have networking events to grow the business.
08:09.108 Brandon Burton
I like the idea of you need to go to the people. You can't just sit back and make it and let it happen. And yeah, that's for somebody in the from a sales background even, that that's a great thing is you have the ability to go out and find the people instead of sitting at a retail store waiting for somebody to come in. I mean they're both sales, but different aspects of sales. And I think when you're at a chamber That's what you need to be doing is going out there and showing the services and and what the chamber can do for these businesses instead of just hoping they find you. So that's a great point. Thank you for that. Yes, sir. So in kind of preparation for this interview, I know we talked a little bit about these nondues revenue events that you have and you just mentioned those. can you touch on what those different events are? I know you had mentioned one that you're pretty proud of with the The barbecue social. but can you explain a little bit about that and touch on your other nondues revenue events that you guys are so proud of there?
09:08.554 Gary Molberg
Yes, we some of the events I started, a lot of chambers have this. We have the chamber golf tournament. It's the largest one-day tournament in Amarillo. We started small. We're in our 12th year and we've grown that where we play at a golf course 36 holes and we have two teams start on every hole. So we have 288 golfers. It's the it's the golf tournament and we have no problem at all filling it up each year. So We've worked very hard and there's some we're gonna go in detail. There's some things I did at that tournament that everybody wants in. And if anybody would like to call me, I'll share those thoughts and idea. We also did we had a summer celebration where we kind of showcase our restaurants. We have since combined that with our annual fireworks show that the city puts on, and that's become a chamber project, and that thing is in its second year and it is absolutely taken off. So we're kind of in charge of the fireworks for July the fourth. And we kind of tied it with our other chamber members. we have our chamber restaurants that will serve food at the event, sell food, make money. They all love it. So that's really done well. Another thing that we have done, of course, you talk about the chamber fire you know, our barbecue. Yeah, that thing will be hitting its twenty fourth year. And Brandon, we are just humbled by how that thing has taken off. The momentum just went unbelievable. We've shared that with other chambers, Eddie McBride, and Lubbock. You know, they they've observed our barbecue and started their own, and Eddie's had great success in his. I actually talked to the Odessa Chamber of Commerce, their executive board, and they started a barbecue there. And there's another one in Dallas that started because of the ones that we share. We're willing to share that. Bottom line, we'll right here on the Chamber Grounds, we'll have over a hundred cooking teams and the donations are beyond belief. And it's one, it's easily our largest non-dues revenue event. And then we have a great, great business connection. It continues to be full each year. We have a business connection. Everybody knows what that is, but it's consistently sold out.
11:31.586 Gary Molberg
This year we have about three hundred and eighty businesses, three hundred and eighty booths in it. So wow. You know, we've been very blessed. thing about Amarillo, you put on a great networking event where businesses have the opportunity to network, to share, to sell, to get to know people. They support it.
11:51.074 Brandon Burton
So can you just touch a little bit more on the barbecue social that it's been a long running thing with you guys and you've had a lot of other chambers inquire about it and get all that. So yeah, I we'll definitely put your contact information in the show notes for this episode so people can get in contact with you for more details. But let's let's spend a minute and highlight that a little bit. So if people want to explore that at their chamber, let's see what that's all about.
12:19.224 Gary Molberg
Very much so, Brandon. What we do, it happens on a Thursday. But what we have the cooking team start moving in, and we set all the lines up in front of the chamber. I'm talking about electrical lines on Tuesday evening. Wednesday, the teams start moving in. And then I'll have a hundred teams out here on Wednesday night. On Wednesday night, they provide their own food, and we have called that team night. And what the teams particularly like about this night is It's not open to the public Tuesday or Wednesday evening. It's invited their guests. They get to invite who they want. They get to come out here. And let's say one of the banks gets some of their top customers, may cook them steaks that night and thank them for being members. You'd be amazed. All the banks have built cookers for this. They bring their cookers out. And I'm talking about big cookers. several businesses in Amarillo develop own cookers. So they particularly love kicking it off here. Now we do have our beverage companies. They support both both nights and they give away products on Wednesday night and actual day of the barbecue. So Wednesday night, it's team night. They get to bite who they want. It's a closed kind of party. Then Thursday is when we open it up to the public. And we'll have between those two nights, Brandon, upwards of 7,000 people. That come out here, enjoy barbecue, enjoy fellowship. And it it's five to eight on a Thursday. And ticket sales are just unbelievable. We just have a great time. It's wall to wall people, and I can tell people how it goes about. It's something you gotta build up. But right now we submitted the barbecue with the US Chamber, and it is the for a bit cut I guess a chamber our size. A few years ago was the number nine non-duced revenue event in the United States. Wow. So it's done well, well, well. We're very happy with it. And the really good thing about it though, Brandon, is everybody loves it.
14:33.934 Brandon Burton
It's making me hungry, just just thinking about it.
14:37.806 Gary Molberg
The teams show up. It's not like we have to go find teams. They're there. We have teams waiting to get in, but we're landlocked and we can't let some teams in. All our sponsors, the beverage companies, the coke companies, the ice companies, on we have a Tyson plant here. They donate the meat for it. So all this is donated and people love donating because they get so much exposure.
15:03.022 Brandon Burton
Yeah, and there's something about a brisket being smoked that just draws crowds. So I don't know what that is, but
15:07.534 Gary Molberg
Well believe it or not, we sell tickets by the smell. Yeah, it's right. We have people we have a lot of people work downtown Amarillo and all you have a hundred cookers in front of the chamber. The smoke streams down there and people are working in their office. They actually have told me this. They go, man, I gotta get my barbecue ticket.
15:31.959 Brandon Burton
Yeah. That is great. Yeah.
15:37.87 Gary Molberg
Great deal.
15:39.586 Brandon Burton
You had mentioned earlier that the the barbecue social that that has really built a lot of momentum. Can you share with us the momentum part of that and how that's built over time?
15:50.678 Gary Molberg
You know, the thing is, and I love that we did the team night, because here's what that done. By doing team night, remember I said we had a hundred cooking teams. We actually have a hundred businesses out there on our lawn that the cookers stay all night. They get to know each other. It may be fun and games, but there's business being done. Yeah. In other words, you may have a banker. That might have this trucking company that has a cooking team. And they said, you know, we've been trying to get a hold of them. And they actually make contact at our barbecue, much less all the other people come in. Five years ago, I had the president of one of our largest bank come into my office on Thursday morning for the barbecue. You know, we mind you, we had our Wednesday night. Thank me for having a barbecue. He said, I made a contact with somebody I've been trying to get a hold of. We're moving their business. I committed a million dollar loan because of your barbecue.
16:56.512 Brandon Burton
Wow, that's real results right there.
16:59.034 Gary Molberg
It really is. So we like I said, we have no problem having the people come out and cook in it. We have no problem people sponsoring it. And we have no problem people buying tickets. They they want it well ahead of time. So we're very blessed with this event and it continues to grow and produce year in and year out.
17:19.554 Brandon Burton
That is fantastic. So I know you have a couple other programs too that you guys have implemented there in Amarillo that are helping to build momentum at your chamber. Yes. Do you want to to speak to those and explain what those are about?
17:34.508 Gary Molberg
Yes, sir. I started a program. it depends on your mayor and your mayor of your city. But I started a program called Mayor Calls. When our new mayor, who just recently served two year term and got reelected for two more, she was familiar in Amarillo. She knew a lot of people in Amarillo. She's an attorney. She her and her husband have hotels here and just a dynamic lady. I called her up and I said, Mayor, I've done this with other mayors. I wonder if you'd be interested in doing a mayor call. And she asked to explain. I said, what we do is at least twice a month, myself as president CEO of the Amarillo Chamber, you as mayor, and the president CEO of our Amarillo Economic Development Corporation. The three of us will just call on the business. We walk in, no agenda, and say hi. We're from the city, we're from chamber from economic development. Tell us about your business and how can we help? And we've addressed small issues. The greatest thing on this is we've heard of issues. We've heard of issues at the city, maybe. We've heard of things that we can do better as a chamber. We've heard of things on how the economic development can assist businesses. We've developed business and it has been probably an unbelievable program. Our current mayor, I say she's been in office two years. We probably made a hundred, hundred and twenty of these calls. And she loves them. She's got to know the businesses. It's pretty amazing when you go see a business person as a mayor, they really open up and they'll tell us everything. So we've learned stuff about businesses in Amarillo. Brandon's just been beneficial. We've addressed some needs these businesses have. And it I I just highly recommend if you're not doing this in your community, consider doing this. It's it's just really something when you as a chamber president, you as president of economic development, and you as a mayor takes the time to go to a business saying, Thank you for having your business in our city. How can we help? It's invaluable in my opinion.
19:57.39 Brandon Burton
Sure is. So do the three of you just walk in or do you have a scheduled time that you're going to meet with the business owner? Are you just okay. So is that
20:05.07 Gary Molberg
We set a time. I have we canceled all of them here at the chamber. But let me tell you what, people want to make time for it.
20:13.56 Brandon Burton
So a as you were explaining that, do you are you guys focusing just on chamber members or are you reaching out to businesses that might not be members since it's also the mayor in economic development or how do you how do you figure out who you're trying to get in front of as far as the business owners go?
20:32.91 Gary Molberg
Most of them what we start off and we try to be diversified. You know, we obviously let me tell you a little bit about the chamber since you brought that up, Brandon. We're a pretty large chamber. We have 2,300 members here. And so obviously we could go through our membership and have it take us 20 years to call on all them. Then we also have a lot of large businesses. We go very diversified. In other, we just don't want to call on big business. We want the mom and pops of the world. We want those very important retail businesses that might be family owned that have been here a long time. So yeah, most of them we're calling on right now are chamber members because we have such a large membership and it takes us so long to get through. But if we do hear, you know, if I know of a business that I've been trying to get as a member, they don't know this, but I know this. Yeah. We'll say, hey, can we come out and see you? And then after we make that call, we follow up and have secured some memberships because of that. Because one, they find out we care about them as a business. And two, we get to share a little bit what the chamber's all about, what city's all about, what our economic development, and it's kind of knowledge for these businesses as well. And so that's why it's important not only to call on chamber members, but non members as well.
21:59.222 Brandon Burton
I'm glad you said that 'cause as a chamber, yeah, you're serving the the business community. And I think a lot of the time the focus tends to be on the members, but there's always the businesses out there that for whatever reason are not a member of the chamber. And until they can see the value that the chamber can provide for them and the interest that the chamber has in their business succeeding, then you know, once they know how much you care, then They care more about the chamber and you can usually convert that into a membership and a long term relationship. So glad to hear that.
22:32.62 Gary Molberg
Yes, very much so. And kind of tied to that, you know, Brandon, all businesses are important to our community. And I'm not gonna sit here and say, I care about every business in this city. Whether you're a chamber member or not, you're important to what we're trying to accomplish. And if I if you allow me, I'll tell you another program I started here. I reached out to the newspaper about six years ago.
22:55.682 Brandon Burton
Yeah, please.
23:01.782 Gary Molberg
Our sales tax was declining in the city. And I think that happens in a lot of our communities, and we all know why. The power of Amazon, online shopping, it's pretty doggone convenient, unfortunately, but it takes dollars out of your community. And I started a program with our local newspaper, which was called Shop Smart, Shop Local, encouraging people to do business local. And that program really took off. We had it for several years, and then the publisher of the paper left and that program went away. And I told you two years ago, we got a new mayor and new council. They kind of picked up on that program and expanded it. And once again, when after our program stopped, our sales tax was going in a direction we didn't like. And we knew a lot of it was because of this online shopping. So the city started a new program. Pulled in the chamber called Buy the Way. Now the buy is B U Y. Buy the Way. And it really encourages people to do business local, kind of like Shop Smart, Shop Local. It's been met with that open arms. It's been a very successful program. And we continue to market that. And happy to report, our sales tax is going in the right direction now. We've s once we instigate that program again. We saw the sales tax increase.
24:30.54 Brandon Burton
That is great. Good yeah. I like being able to reach out to the the community in la at large and and involve everybody the way you are. That is awesome.
24:41.706 Gary Molberg
It is. Every business, as I said, Brandon, every business is important to our community. I wish every business would join the chamber. We think we have a opportunity to have them network to grow their businesses and they have all their own reasons. But even if they're not a member of the chamber, I'm still going to do everything I can to make their businesses better.
25:06.102 Brandon Burton
Right. Now, when we spoke before we in preparation for the interview, you had mentioned to me that you're recognizing more and more the importance of bragging a little bit about the chamber. I know that that can be a hard thing to just say, okay, brag about your chamber for a minute, but tell tell us ever tell everybody what have you learned and the importance of bragging a little bit about what you're doing. Well
25:35.448 Gary Molberg
This is a really a funny story. I'm glad you brought it up, Brandon. I think everybody knows the chamber connection, your chamber connection, Jimmy Cassano. the man with I call the weird suits. He he's a legend, and his company is. They have approached me to do a membership drive here at our chamber for years. And I delayed it. And the simple reason I didn't. It's because I explained to you earlier the growth of our non-duesd revenue events. We've met so much success. We're making good money. Well, I gave in. I say gave in. It's probably one of the smartest things I ever did. We had a membership drive last year. Happy to report in a three day membership drive, we brought in 512 new members. It's the largest first time membership drive in the history of that company. And we were just going, wow. What I learned is that we had over two hundred and forty people selling memberships. And it's like Jimmy explained, I never thought of this. Okay, it gets new members, but it also educates all these people selling your chambers what you do. So that gets you allies all over your city. They're out there every day promoting our chamber, bragging on our chamber, even well after the membership drive's done. And to get around to your statement about bragging, Jimmy observed my staff in action. And we sat down, and these are Jimmy's words. Okay, Brandon? Yeah. Sounds like bragging, but I'll tell you what Jimmy said. He said, Okay. Not all of them, but the chamber side. And said, Gary, I've observed, I'm gonna tell you something. You have one of the most amazing chambers, amazing staffs I've ever been in.
27:16.95 Brandon Burton
Yeah.
27:32.47 Gary Molberg
Y'all are just phenomenal. I can tell you by the volunteers that come in, they have so much respect and admiration for the chamber. But here's what you don't do. You don't brag enough. He said, y'all are so successful and so good. You need to tell everybody. You need to brag of your accomplishments. We kind of said what we have done before. And I guess there's a different line from just talking about it to really bragging about it. It it is you know what, Brandon? It's a lot of fun. Yeah. I mean, I think it was nine years ago we submitted our social media site at the US Chamber, and for Chamber of Sides had number one social media in the United States. Wow. I mean our chamber's number one. We bragged a little bit, but we didn't take as much advantage of that as we did. We should have.
28:26.016 Brandon Burton
Yeah, you can leverage that all over the place.
28:28.352 Gary Molberg
Absolutely. So we're i it's not ultimate bragging, let me put it like that. But we tell people, yeah, we are good. We're very talented. We have a great staff. And I don't think if you can do something for a chamber member and grow their business by telling you can do that, it's not bragging, it's what you do. What
28:52.426 Brandon Burton
As long as you can deliver on it.
28:55.951 Gary Molberg
I don't know what Yogi said something like that. If you can do it, it ain't bragging or something, but yogiism's we better not get into that.
29:03.554 Brandon Burton
That's right. Yeah.
29:11.612 Gary Molberg
yeah, you know a lot like I do, man. I tell you I grew up I grew up watching Yankee Game of the Week and I tell you what, that guy was something else.
29:22.86 Brandon Burton
Yeah. So Gary, I wanted to ask you, you've obviously you've got some great things going on at your chamber there in Amarillo, building that momentum and being able to turn that around and and do a little bit of bragging to your your membership and your community. For those that are listening, can you share with them just maybe one action item that they can do to start building momentum at their chamber?
29:52.216 Gary Molberg
Here's what I highly suggest in my years. One is I have a quote here that I share with all my staff. You have to have the team to live the dream. And that's posted all over this chamber. And I let them know on a daily basis that you make this happen. It isn't me, it's us as a team that makes this happen. The community knows that because I continuously brag on this team. I I support this team I have here. I brag on this team to our board of directors. And so I think that's vitally important. You know, us is there's different size chambers, I understand, but always give recognition to your staff and brag on your staff to the business people out there. They like that. And the one other quote, and everybody in this building knows it, and I tell them all the time. You cannot say thank you too much. We, wherever we are, we may have a huge sponsor at one of our events. Every time one of our people, whether I'm there or not, they come across them, they may chat with them a little bit, but I make sure for they leave that person. By the way, thank you for your support of the chamber. And I hear that a lot. I just don't think you'd say thank you too much. So get your team behind me. I meet with my team monthly. I give kind of pep talks and I tell I'm there for How how much I love how much I appreciate and how much I talk about to the board and other businesses. And they'll be proud walking in this building every day 'cause you're making a difference.
31:35.424 Brandon Burton
That's great. I love that. And you have to have the team to live the dream. Yes. We need to make a t shirt out of that or something.
31:43.886 Gary Molberg
I probably do. I I'll get my team to do it. I I tell you I really I know we're probably wrapping up, Brandon. I just gotta say, and I know so many chamber professionals, and there's one thing all of us have in common. we really love this business. I feel I'm a very blessed man that I've got to be a chamber president for twenty-two years.
31:48.716 Brandon Burton
That's right.
32:13.486 Gary Molberg
I'm not saying I'm wrapping up my career tomorrow, but I thank the good Lord many times that he gave me this opportunity. I thank all the people at work this chamber, the current staff that has grown this chamber along with me. And I just thank the businesses for all their support of the chamber. It's a humbling experience. It's a very rewarding experience, but man. It's a fun job. It's a fun job when you have a community behind you and it it's just so rewarding. So we're to be in the chamber of business, in my opinion, Brandon, we're all very blessed to have that opportunity.
32:56.808 Brandon Burton
And you're a living example of your words too. You can't say thank you enough. So it up. Yeah. So Gary, as we look to the future, how can how do you view chambers of commerce and their purpose?
33:01.122 Gary Molberg
Certainly, you can.
33:10.05 Gary Molberg
I think it continues as it is right now. You know, we gotta be the spokesperson a lot of times on political issues. We've got to be the cheerleader for the businesses. But as I talked about a little bit earlier, Brandon, what's vitally important, now's the time to encourage your businesses and your people in your communities to continue to do business local all they can. I think that's one of the shining stars out there because you know it and I know it Amazon isn't going away. The power of buying online is not going away. That is our competitor in the future. And we have to have those retail businesses. We got to have our businesses in our community to grow to for sales tax, property tax, you know, the pay the city to pay the bills. And we need to be the head cheerleader in all of our communities.
33:46.584 Brandon Burton
That's right.
34:10.146 Gary Molberg
how important and how vital it is that people need to do business local all they can. They have to do it for the future because our competition's out there to make sure that they don't do it local.
34:25.333 Brandon Burton
That's right. That's right. Well, Gary, I wanted to thank you so much for spending some time with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast. And I also want to thank everybody who's listening to the show. I'm glad you're here and and spending time with us as well. The show notes for this episode can be found at Chamberchatpodcast dot com slash episode nineteen. And Gary, where can listeners connect with you if they have any questions about what was discussed today or if they want to start their own barbecue social or how you're doing things in Amarillo? How can they get in contact with you?
35:02.958 Gary Molberg
Sure, Brandon, they can call me Gary at Amarillo Dash Chamber dot org. Or they can call me on my phone at eight six three four two two zero zero one. And one other thing for our close. Yes. For your courtesy and I appreciate you contacting me for this podcast. You, Mr. Brandon, have opened invitations. To attend the chamber barbecue the second Thursday in September, I think September 12th this year, and I've got a spot for you as a judge. They bring the food to I want you to come see it in action. So if you can make it, let me know. I'll get you on the porch here. They'll bring you ribs, brisket, whatever you want. And you get to judge it. How's that sound?
35:38.088 Brandon Burton
I would love that.
35:53.107 Brandon Burton
I would love that. Count me in.
35:55.054 Gary Molberg
Okay. I'll look forward to hearing from you. you do it.
35:58.686 Brandon Burton
All right. Sounds great. Thanks again, Gary. Thank you.
36:03.618 Gary Molberg
Brandon, keep up the great work for the ch chamber communities. I know they appreciate it.
36:12.408 Brandon Burton
Thank you for listening to this episode today. I hope that you're finding value as you listen to Chamber Chat Podcast. If you are enjoying the show, I would encourage you to tell your colleagues that are in the chamber industry. Also, please hop onto iTunes and leave us a five-star rating and review to help others find this show. Thanks again, and I look forward to chatting with you again next week.

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

Episode 18 — Inclusivity & Community Outreach with Jenna Armstrong
Clean Speaker-Labeled Transcript
Guest: Jenna Armstrong
Automated QA: Passed

00:00.214 Jenna Armstrong
I feel very strongly that Chambers have a a reputation as an exclusive, maybe good old boy, old fashioned type of club. And we are really focused on trying to dispel that and make everyone feel welcome and a part of our organization because we do things that affect the community, not just the businesses.
00:26.462 Brandon Burton
Our guest today is Jenna Armstrong, and she will be discussing her ideas about inclusivity and community outreach here on Chamber Chat Podcast. Let's cue the intro. This is the Chamber Chat Podcast, the show dedicated to chamber professionals to spark ideas and to get actionable tips and strategies to better serve your members and community.
00:54.744 Brandon Burton
Thank you for joining us for episode eighteen of the Chamber Chat Podcast. I'm Brandon Burton, and it is my goal to introduce you to people and ideas so you can better serve your chamber members and your community. Now, along these lines of my mission to of this podcast, of helping you better serve your members and community, let's take a quick moment to hear from the sponsor for this episode so you can better serve the your audience.
01:25.376 Brandon Burton
Every chamber is looking for new ways to increase their non-dues revenue. Has your chamber found a good affinity program? I have a great affinity program to offer your chamber that will continue to increase in revenue year after year. I want to introduce you to Swipeit for all of your credit card processing needs. Swypit has a unique affinity program that 1. Helps your chamber members be more profitable, and three, provides recurring nondues revenue to your chamber. To learn more, please visit chamberchapodcast.com slash CC for credit card. Again, Chamberchappodcast dot com slash C C and get swiping with swipe it. And we're back. Our guest today is Jenna Armstrong. Jenna is the president and CEO of the Lake Houston Area Chamber of Commerce. Her 15-year chamber career began at the Lufkin Angelina County Chamber in 2003. She graduated from the U.S. Chamber's Midwest Institute of Organization Management in 2011. She currently serves on the Executive Board for the Texas Chamber of Commerce Executives, the U.S. Chamber Foundation's Board of Regents for Midwest Institute, and the Umble ISD Education Foundation. In 2014, she was awarded the Distinguished Service Award by the Texas Chamber of Commerce Executives. In 2015 and 2018, the Lake Houston Area Chamber was one of three finalists. For the Association of Chamber of Commerce Executives, Chamber of the Year, North America. In 2019, she was named Woman of Achievement in the Area of Business from Family Time, Lake Houston. Most recently, she was named as a top 40 under 40 by the Houston Business Journal. Jenna holds a bachelor's degree in journalism from Stephen F. Austin State University.
03:43.19 Brandon Burton
She lives in Atascaseda with her two children, an eight year old daughter named Drew and five year old son named Bo. Jenna, please say hello to the Chamber Chat podcast audience and share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little bit better.
03:59.946 Jenna Armstrong
Okay, hello everyone. when I was thinking about something interesting, the one thing that popped into my head is a lot of people don't know that I was extremely active in my high school with our FFA program. And I used to show heifers. I was actually on a a show team, and most people don't even know what a show team is, and that's where we would travel around. From county fair to county fair, showing our heifers and competing and we would do this during the fall of each year. And that's actually a thing. And they still do it.
04:37.646 Brandon Burton
It's actually a thing.
04:40.024 Jenna Armstrong
It is. And I loved it. It was great.
04:43.522 Brandon Burton
That is great. So I'm actually I'm in the North Dallas area, but in a rural area. So believe the FFA is still very strong in my neck of the woods. And I actually know several people in the horse industry that go to these horse shows and it always just blows my mind the amount of money that's involved with horse shows. And I don't understand anything about how that business works. I just know that it works. Yes. That's funny. well, for anyone who may not be totally familiar with the Lake Houston area chamber, can you share with us a little bit about the size of the chamber, maybe membership, budget, just kind of where you sit in the Houston area so we can all get to know kind of where you're at.
05:31.074 Jenna Armstrong
Sure, absolutely. So our chamber is a regional chamber. We're suburban northeast Houston. We have several communities that comprise our organization. We have the city of Umble, we have Kingwood, which is actually the city of Houston, and then we have a large unincorporated area of Harris County. And the communities there are Atascasita and Summerwood Fall Creek, which everyone here calls Summer Creek. and we have a little portion of Montgomery County as well. So we have two counties, two cities, and then four county commissioners between those two counties. our population is about 280,000, about 7,500 businesses are in the area, 1,100 members of our organization. And our annual budget is 900,000 if you're looking at strictly chamber. But we do have an economic development partnership that is under our chamber umbrella and it's privately funded. So it's not funded through half-sit and sales tax or any tax dollars. that money is also raised for that program. So if you add that in, we're over a million with our our annual budget. So our area being a suburban area. We it's it's largely a bedroom community with 82% of our tax base being residential. So that's pretty common with you know suburban areas. and and that's you know one of the challenges that we have is trying to increase the commercial tax base.
07:14.488 Brandon Burton
That's right. so in preparation to this interview, I know we talked a couple of days ago about kind of what direction we wanted to go with this, but you had a lot on your mind as far as different things that you could talk about or things that you're passionate about there at your chamber. But as we address the topic of today of inclusivity and community outreach being our topic, can you let us all know why? This topic is so important to you. you mentioned having the the multiple municipalities that are all kind of in your territory as a chamber, but with where you're located, why is that important to you and how can this topic be relevant for other chambers as well?
08:01.428 Jenna Armstrong
So for our area, it is really hard to get communication out. So our community, we don't have like a daily newspaper. You know, there's the Houston Chronicle, but it serves such a large area, you know, to fight to try to get information in there is a challenge. you know, the radio stations are all greater Houston area. So Coming from Lefkin and working at the Lefkin chamber, we had a daily newspaper. We could always get articles in. We had two or three radio stations. We could pop in the radio station and get on air and spread our news. But here it is a challenge to get out the word of the work that we're doing and solicit feedback and just tell people what the chamber is and what our purpose is. And so we've really tried to focus on different ways to reach out to the community to spread our message. I also think it's important because I think I don't think I feel very strongly that Chambers have a a reputation as an exclusive, maybe good old boy, old fashioned type of club. And we're really focused on trying to dispel that and make everyone feel welcome and a part of our organization because we do things that affect The community, not just the businesses.
09:23.864 Brandon Burton
That's right. So from that I I'm getting the the two things is the the communication challenges and the messaging that you're trying to get across with the chamber. what are you finding is working with the communication since you don't have those maybe traditional ways of communication with the newspapers and radio. What what are you finding that does work?
09:49.292 Jenna Armstrong
But for us, social media is extremely important and that's how we reach out. But we also have different programs within the community that's open and free and provides really good information. and those have have been working well. and I'll I'll talk a little bit about that. We have a program and it it's called BizCom. So we have four main communities, Kingwood, Umbolitask Seed of Summer Creek. At each of those high schools, we have what we call a VISCOM meeting, and that's kind of a town hall. It's free, it's open to anyone to come to. There's a free lunch that's served, and there's five to seven speakers that come and talk about issues happening in that community and with a with a business focus. So we talk about transportation, the new businesses or new developments or new expansions. We have somebody from local government come and talk about what's going on with local government. So it's It's a chance for people to ask a lot of times developers questions about the development, text dot or whoever's doing the road projects questions about the road projects. And as we've developed it over time, our weekly newspapers and sometimes even the Houston Chronicle comes and you'll see the stories are based off of the information they get from those VizCom meetings. By having it open and free to the public to come. We also are able to spread our message of, you know, what we do as an organization, but it also gives leads for our membership. We meet a lot of people that are not members that come. and once they start coming and understanding what our purpose is as an organization, it's such an easier sell. They invest and buy into our organization.
11:40.374 Brandon Burton
That's great. you know, just a a couple weeks ago I had Frank Kenny on the show and we kind of talked about this specifically, about the communication at the chamber, because it used to be that you know chambers had their relationship with the newspapers and maybe cable TV networks in their town and radio stations and they're able to broadcast their message. And now either those aren't the resources people are going to. for information anymore, or in your situation, you don't have those resources necessarily to even have as an option. And he was really talking about social media and the importance, how that needs to be kind of a primary focus for every chamber, especially for getting the communication out there, but also the engagement with the community.
12:31.118 Jenna Armstrong
I think there's a lot of information that is relevant for all parties. And for example, transportation. When there's with their issues that are going on with transportation, if we push that out on because we know and we're in good contact with everyone involved, we may create a map. That shows spots where the transportation is going to be with information about how long, what the road closures are going to be like, and we push it out. We get such engagement from that, not just from businesses, but from the community and the people that live here because they want to know what's going on. And so it's valuable for the whole community, not just the businesses. We do it because we want our businesses to know. I mean, that's our primary focus, but this is valuable information the whole community needs to know. And then it positions us as being information central in our community, that we're the place to go when we need to know what's going on or what's happening, or you have a question. And by positioning ourselves as information central, we meet a lot more people and engage with a lot more people and have that opportunity to grow our membership.
13:50.114 Brandon Burton
I love that idea of being that information central. There's a a need in your community where there's not that media outlet that everybody can just go to to find about find out about road closures or school information or whatever is going on in the community. And you're able to find that that void and be able to fill that and be that go to trusted resource to get that information out. that's going to help build the relevancy with the the chamber throughout the community. So great, great move there. so I'm curious, in your situation there, you'd mentioned is it four municipalities or four you've got multiple municipalities there that you're dealing with. So in terms of public affairs or even advocacy, how are you able to manage that across I mean, it I'm sure it's a daily thing that you're trying to ask yourself that and trying to find out the answer, but what does that look like for you?
14:49.678 Jenna Armstrong
Absolutely. It it took I mean it's evolved over the years and it just took a lot of of work and groundwork to develop the relationships that we we get calls from them telling us what's going on and we get calls from them asking us how does the business community feel. So it's it's it's evolved over time into a good situation. as an organization, we are business focused, business solutions focused. And that helps. I guess what I'm trying to say here is I know that there's a lot of chambers that do other things as such as parades or events or you know, pancake breakfasts and things like that. We choose not to do those types of things. We choose to only do things that have a business focus. By doing that, it has given us a lot of credibility and respect and It makes the elected officials want to engage to us and to come to us because we are information central and because they want to know what the the businesses are are thinking and feeling what's the pulse of business. So at this point we have a lot of elected officials that come to us and it's not as hard to manage. a couple of things that we do though is through our BizComs, we always ask them and invite them to speak at those community meetings. But we have a quarterly regional planning meeting for our area and they are all it's a it is an invite only because we have elected officials come in and they may talk about projects but are not public knowledge yet and it's a time for us to look at what's going on what's happening and people can plan around it so like if Text Dot's putting a road in and it goes through or intersects with a county road and they were planning to do some type of county road improvement to it, they may hold off until Text got done because they don't want them tearing up the work that they just did and the millions of dollars they just met. So we have come to have that place where we convene them so that they can talk and help plan and be more efficient.
17:03.436 Jenna Armstrong
And then I think it's just being good stewards of any time our public officials have information that they post, we reshare it. And they like that we do that because that enhances their reach and we are supportive of the information that they put out.
17:17.889 Brandon Burton
That goes back to being the information central, right? If you're helping to reshare what they're posting, that's perfect. So I wanted to ask you, you mentioned the the focus being business solutions focused. how does that play in with the messaging of the chambers not just a good old boys club? Does that support that? Does it challenge that? How does have you looked at that as far as
17:47.566 Jenna Armstrong
Well, I think whenever you focus on being business, focus on business solutions, that is not excluding anyone. We do a lot of programs, and I think a lot of chambers do things where they're being inclusive and they may not think of it in those terms. So you think about public affairs, your public affairs work. When you work on an issue at the local, state, or federal level, that issue impacts your entire community. So, regardless of whether they're a member of your organization, they get the benefit of your work. So you're engaging, that's your opportunity to engage with all the businesses. They are included in the outcome of that legislation. same goes for transportation. Those are two very easy topics where you can be inclusive is transportation and mobility, and as well as public affairs. We are doing it. We we take on the business issues. We want to make sure transportation, the businesses are aware of what transportations are projects are happening that might affect them. By doing that, like we have we've had a town hall, or not a town hall really, but a preview before a text dot community meeting where for two weeks we had Text Dot's huge, massive maps wrap around our boardroom and invited our businesses to come take a look any time of day. Because a lot of them couldn't make it to that community meeting. And we provided a way for them to give us feedback of what they thought. We ex we were very well aware of the project. We were able to answer their questions. We were able to email and get clarification on those questions. So we do that and open it up to all the businesses and contact all the businesses along that thoroughfare that it was affecting so that we could get their feedback and really represent them when we're at the table with TechTy.
19:40.182 Brandon Burton
I think that's very well said. Both public affairs and transportation, the business community at large is gonna either benefit from or suffer together, depending on what's going on.
19:51.576 Jenna Armstrong
Well right. So one of our main themes here that we look at is that the best thing that we can do for our members as an organization is create a healthy economic climate. And a lot of times that means working with businesses that aren't members yet. I always say yet, they're not members yet. But a big mantra that we have in our office is seek to provide help first and Seek to provide value first, I should say. That's what we say here. Seek to provide value first. So we don't do the chamber handshake, is what we say, where we our hand is outreached and our palm is up asking for money when we meet people. We try to provide them with information. We try to see where we can help them before we have any conversation with them about coming on as a member. do some people Take advantage and not join. Yeah. I say I still like to say they they're not joining yet. But most people, when they see that we're providing information and we're providing value, it's such an easy sell. So we wanna help our all of our businesses be successful. We wanna help stimulate the economy and make it healthy and viable because that's how our businesses are gonna succeed.
21:11.766 Brandon Burton
That's right. Those those businesses that don't join that aren't they're not taking advantage, they just wanted to make sure you're not a one hit wonder. That's all. Right. So just make sure you you can deliver again. So
21:23.682 Jenna Armstrong
to focus too much on that. I know the work that we're doing is valuable. Our members know the work that we're doing is valuable. They'll I think they're gonna come around eventually. And if not, that's okay. We're still doing the right thing. So it's just about doing the right thing.
21:39.438 Brandon Burton
That's right. So you had mentioned in kind of at the beginning of the the interview here, the eighty-two percent of the tax tax revenue is coming from residential. And you're trying to that's one of the challenges that you're seeing is not having as much of a a business tax base. do you wanna speak to that a little bit, kind of how you're working through that?
22:02.722 Jenna Armstrong
Sure. that is why we actually created our economic development partnership back in two thousand and twelve. That of course, school funding in Texas, that's all tied to the tax base. And everybody knows about Robin Hood. Some people pay in, some people don't, and that whole situation. But we our our school is a fast growth school district. It has a ton of kids. I mean, it's a massive school district. It's a large school district. But We rely on the state to give us money. So what happens is people live here, but they may have jobs in other places. The company that they work for is not here. so a company may establish a little bit further south from us, but all the people decide to live here because it's a desirable place to live in a good school district. Well, our school district doesn't give that. taxes the tax value from that business that's up the road because it's not in our district. So it it's it's a you know it's a very complex thing. But that's what we want to focus on is growing that commercial tax base for education, but for other reasons too. You need that healthy commercial tax base to support projects that go on in your area. So that's that was a big emphasis of why we created our partnership.
23:23.614 Brandon Burton
That's right. So in with that economic partnership, is that where you're able to maybe help leverage the voice of the businesses, or do you keep that more on the the chamber side of things when there's different things on a ballot and things like that where these businesses don't necessarily have a vote, but they're paying taxes into it? where does that advocacy come for the businesses? Is that on your chamber side or is that on the economic development side?
23:52.578 Jenna Armstrong
That's on our chamber side. So the chamber handles all advocacy. We since our setup is with the partnership under the chamber umbrella, we work so closely together on all projects. So if we have something that's going on and we have investors and businesses, economic developments working with, they send an email out to those that may not be reached from our chamber communication so that everybody is informed. The economic development president Mark Mitchell and I, we issue out joint letters and joint emails all the time. just so people know that we work together and have such a good relationship because we are trying to reach as many people as possible. We definitely work with them on all our communications.
24:39.852 Brandon Burton
That that sounds like the right way to do it. so with as far as community outreach goes, you'd mentioned some of these town halls and social media and what are are there other things that you're doing for that community outreach to make sure the community knows what's going on and just keep people involved?
24:59.596 Jenna Armstrong
We're always constantly trying to engage through social media by by putting out information, like I said. we have different types of round tables that we get people to participate in so that we can get information. We have a nonprofit round table. and that's our nonprofits coming together, and they work to make sure that there's no duplicate duplicate I'm sorry, duplication of efforts among the nonprofits. making sure they're not scheduling their fundraising events on top of each other. We have a really healthy nonprofit network here. And I'm gonna go off just a little bit, but I I've talked to a lot of chambers and I hear a lot of chambers that see nonprofits as competition. I don't n that's not the right approach for our community. we want our nonprofits to be healthy and successful because they're tackling issues such as homelessness, such as Hunger, such as domestic violence, domestic abuse. And they're doing a very good job at tackling those issues. If they weren't here, we would be in a much worse situation as a community. So we do what we can to support them and to create a way for them to work with each other. And by work, all the nonprofits, they do work with each other and communicate with each other well. And having that healthy nonprofit network in our community is invaluable. Nonprofits are members of our chamber. We do not have a nonprofit membership. They do pay at a regular business rate. They go through our leadership programs. They participate in speaker panels for luncheons. I mean, we we try to be very inclusive of all the nonprofits and not see them this competition. When it
26:48.04 Brandon Burton
I'm sorry, go ahead. Go ahead.
26:51.162 Jenna Armstrong
another way that we seek to be inclusive through maybe, and this is uncomfortable. I can tell you, I've been very uncomfortable with some of it sometimes is getting the adversaries or people that may be seen as adversaries involved with a certain initiative. And that is hard to do. It's hard to swallow and move forward and try to be welcoming to people that don't hear your view. Or that maybe their work is counteractive to what you're doing. but we've had a really good leader that has been focused on that. And what comes to mind the biggest is our flood recovery task force since the Hurricane Harvey floods, and and working together. There's so many different entities that come to play. one of them was a river authority that released water that. when it came to our area and hit our already flooded area, just spread out and flooded so many more homes. And there was no communication between them and our community on when they were releasing water. So everybody here was so mad at them. And I mean it was like pitchforks and fire and they were so angry. But in order to come to a resolution and to solve it and to make sure it doesn't happen again, we had to work with them. So we did do it privately at first. I'm not gonna lie, because we've we thought and they thought if our community knew that we were meeting with them and creating a way to work together, that they would probably run us out on a rail too. So at first we did it very quietly, but now they are at all of our flood test meetings. They are participants in it. This recent flood event that we've had this week, we were in constant communication with them, they were holding water longer. Than their protocol say because they knew how much we were flooding from the flash flooding in our area. so it was very uncomfortable to work with them at first and very com uncomfortable to let down your guard against these people that had done something that had devastated your area that we had to work with them if we were going to come up with a solution.
29:08.398 Brandon Burton
So I think that's an important factor to to look at is when there is maybe an opposition, you might look at it. how did you start those conversations with them to be able to get on the same page and sit at the same
29:23.576 Jenna Armstrong
You know, I am so glad you asked that question. You know how we got it done? We went to the Chamber of Commerce where their headquarters is located, and I said, Do you know XYZ? And it was JJ Holly in the Woodlands. He said, I do, and he's very engaged with us, and he's actually a personal friend of mine. Let me connect you. The very first meeting that we had with this organization was at the Woodlands Chamber. We came to Common Ground and they hosted us there so that we could talk. They trusted JJ in the Woodlands. We trusted JJ in the Woodlands. And isn't that a great I didn't think about isn't that a great story of using your chamber partners and your friends in the chamber community to bring these two very opposite sides together and now we're working together so good. And that's the power of chambers.
30:17.772 Brandon Burton
That's right. The the networking effect and also going back to the information central, being able to know when they're going to release water and being able to give them information of hey, this is our situation here. Please hold on to the water as long as you can. being able to have those open lines of communication is is so key. But being able to start that dialogue and build that relationship, none of it would happen without that. So I'm glad you're able to work through.
30:44.238 Jenna Armstrong
person that had mutual trust. Because if I just reached out to that organization on my own, they probably would be very hesitant to do anything with us because they were getting slammed and online here and in all of our, you know, media and communications, people were just slamming them. So they had no reason to engage with us when they're being just blasted left. That's right. And it was finding that mutual person. And it was, it was my
31:06.83 Brandon Burton
That's right.
31:12.194 Jenna Armstrong
My good friend J J in the woodlands at that chamber.
31:15.47 Brandon Burton
Right. Shout out to JJ. Yeah. so Jenna, as as we start wrapping up the interview, I wanted to ask you, what is one action item that you think listeners can do to improve their efforts in community outreach at their chamber?
31:34.926 Jenna Armstrong
I would say to build those partners that share your information on social media and getting people on board to your social media sites, whether it's Twitter or Facebook, and creating social ambassadors, as we kind of call it, and starting with you should have allies with the school district, if you have a college, your elected officials. And start asking them to reshare your important information. Don't, you know, they don't have to reshare things that are member focused. But when you have legislation, when you have transportation initiatives, those two easy topics I said that are very easy to be inclusive on, start getting those community partners to share it on their social media. And that just opens the door to start being more inclusive.
32:26.318 Brandon Burton
That's great advice. And so there's another question that I ask everybody that I have on the show is that as we look to the future of chambers of commerce, how do you view chambers and their purpose?
32:41.238 Jenna Armstrong
I see that chambers are conveners. I think that's a huge purpose that they fill. They they don't I don't think we have to know all the answers. There's just too many topics to know everything about. I I think when I talked to you earlier this week, I may have said I learned more about hydrology and geology in the last 20 months than I ever thought. And I'm a journalism major, so that is a very foreign concept to me.
33:05.218 Brandon Burton
By more than he ever wanted to know, I'm sure.
33:07.064 Jenna Armstrong
Other than I yes, geomorphology, which I didn't even know was a term. so we don't have to know everything, we just have to be able to bring people to the table. And that goes back to being inclusive is creating those inclusive networks where you have the context to where you can bring people together, listen to their voices, and work together to solve issues. And you can't do that if you're exclusive and closed door. You have to focus and be mindful of being inclusive to make that happen.
33:42.754 Brandon Burton
That's right. Well, I w Jenna, I wanted to thank you so much for s taking time today to sp spend time with us here on the Chamber Chat podcast. I know things are kind of crazy there at home right now with with some more flooding happening. So I really do appreciate you taking the time to do this today. And I also wanted to thank everybody who's listening. I just grateful that you're here and and participating in this program. The show notes for this episode can be found at Chamberchat Podcast dot com slash episode eighteen. And Jenna, where can listeners connect with you if they have any questions about what we discussed today or about how you're doing things at the Lake Houston area chamber?
34:27.013 Jenna Armstrong
my email is J Armstrong at lakehouston.org. You can connect with us on social media. Our handle on Facebook and Twitter is at LHA Chamber.
34:37.57 Brandon Burton
That is perfect. And I'll get those in the show notes too. So if somebody's driving or out for a walk or something while they're listening, they don't need to scramble for that. Just go to the show notes. But Jenna, thanks again for being with us today. I really do appreciate it. Thank you for listening to the show today. I hope you enjoyed this episode and received some value from it. If you are enjoying the Chamber Chat podcast, I would invite you to share this podcast with your colleagues in the chamber industry. And if you've not done so already,
34:50.978 Jenna Armstrong
Thank you.
35:06.478 Brandon Burton
Please hop onto Apple Podcast to leave a five-star review for the show to help us be seen by more chamber professionals so we can continue to learn, inspire, and grow from each other. Of course, you can always find the link to the show notes for this episode in your podcast app or at Chamberchatpodcast.com slash episodes. Again, thank you for being here. I look forward to chatting again next week.

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

Episode 17 — Swypit-Chamber Affinity Program with Kevin Hodes
Clean Speaker-Labeled Transcript
Guest: Kevin Hodes
Automated QA: Passed

00:00.29 Kevin Hodes
Well, what's awesome about the chamber itself is you're always or they're always looking for some sort of non dues revenue generator where they don't have to think about it. It's just it's just kind of working. So it's hard to find those right organizations. How do you do that? You know?
00:17.484 Brandon Burton
I'm gonna help you do that today. Here on Chamber Chat Podcast, I have a great affinity program to introduce you to, so stay tuned as we kick off the intro. This is the Chamber Chat Podcast, the show dedicated to chamber professionals to spark ideas and to get actionable tips and strategies to better serve your members and community.
00:44.046 Brandon Burton
Thank you for tuning in today for episode 17 of the Chamber Chat Podcast. I'm Brandon Burton, and it is my goal to introduce you to people and ideas so you can better serve your chamber members and your community. Our guest today is someone that I've been excited to introduce to the Chamber Chat Podcast community for a while now because he has the ability with his company to bring a lot of value to any chamber that is listening and is able to help many of your members. become more profitable as well. Our guest today is Kevin Hodes, who is the founder and CEO of Swypit and is an ETA certified payments professional. Kevin Hodas is a three time best selling author, executive producer of the documentary Maximum Achievement, the Brian Tracy Story, executive producer of the Jay Abraham movie, and executive producer of the upcoming movie Folds of Honor. His expertise is sought out, and he has been seen on ABC, NBC, CBS, AE, E, and Bravo networks. Staying active in the community and giving back is important to Mr. Hodas, which is why he directs profits from Swypit to go back to the community in many ways and many organizations, with his primary focus being the American Fallen Soldiers Project. Kevin, please say hello. to the chamber chat podcast audience and share something interesting about yourself that we didn't already learn in your bio.
02:18.35 Kevin Hodes
Hello, Brandon, and thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak to your people out there in the world today. Of course, all of what I do is nothing about myself, but it's always about helping others. So primary focus has always been helping others. But I have to tell you, you know, I love what I do and I love being able to help people more than anything else. So what a great opportunity. And of course Whoever that guy was you were talking about a few seconds ago, I wanna meet him. He sounds pretty pretty famous or something. I don't know.
02:49.708 Brandon Burton
I I think he was a Dosecchi's guy. He's one of the he's the most interesting man in the world. So yeah.
02:55.116 Kevin Hodes
Yeah. Definitely.
02:57.484 Brandon Burton
Yeah, so I'm glad to have you on the program today. you know, whenever I consider bringing a guest onto the Chamber Chat podcast, I always want to make sure that they can provide great value to the audience, especially when it comes to potential partners or sponsorships. And I've wanted to bring Kevin on the show because he has a great program through his company Swypit to provide nondues revenue to your chamber. and to help reduce costs to your members and in turn help make them be more profitable. Kevin, before we get into some of the details for this chamber affinity program, why don't you just take a few moments and share with us a little bit about Swypit as a company and what makes Swypit better than the others that are out there?
03:48.472 Kevin Hodes
That's a very good question. And you know, I get asked a lot what really is the difference between your organization and everybody else. And I'll tell you the the biggest secret is is that I basically have been doing most everything for the past twenty years or over twenty years, all referral. So you really had to know somebody over the past twenty years before you actually had the opportunity to even work with us. And I think that's been a real huge factor in separating us from everybody else because most people are we're we're gonna have a guy in the area. You might get a phone call like that. And he's gonna come by and we guarantee to save you money and all that other stuff. And you know, there's a lot of people that can do things and say they can do things, and then at the end of the day it becomes really nothing very special. And being a chef and coming from the food industry, I really have figured out that people are looking for great pricing. And they want great service. And those are two things really hard to hard to find. And so I've been able to offer both of those items to chambers, merchants, and all over the country. And and and all the years I've been doing this, I I really don't have to fight so much with people when they've been referred into us. Can you solve these problems that we have? And a lot of times people don't realize they even have a problem or had an upcoming problem because they haven't done something. And we identify it and assist with that. A few moments before I got on with you, I received a call from one of our clients up in Nashville who was asking some questions about something and didn't realize that he had the ability to do something. And I said, Well, you know, you're starting up your business and you didn't realize everything that's been told to you. So of course, we don't remember everything. Well, I was able to identify what he was missing. And he says, my gosh, this is awesome. And I love working with you folks. You always answer the phone. You're here to help us. And that's what I love to do is be there when they need us, not when, you know, mo mo more times than none, you you need assistance with something and you can't get a hold of somebody. So we we strive to be there all the time. But you know, being in in the food business.
06:16.0 Kevin Hodes
I was a chef on private yachts for many years and I worked from the wealthiest men in the world. And in working for them, I realized some real key factors of what separated them from everybody. And and then I got into business consulting and I learned some of those things and applied those that I learned from these very wealthy individuals. And I just kept finding other ways to help people. And I realized when I fell into this slimy world of credit card processing, as I call it. that I could really help people and in a way they've never been able to be helped. And most people just think that all of us are all the same in the credit card processing industry. And we're really not. And that's why I have so many chambers that work with us now. And we have chambers that have affinity programs with us now. And they're they're very happy. And I love being there for them and our staff loves being there for them. And, you know, it's it's hard to find the the expert in a field. You know, you, Brandon, yourself have been in your field for many, many years, and people know that they can go to you and you'll have the answers for them. If someone's looking for the real answers for the credit card processing world, that they call me or they call my staff and we give them the skinny, whether they they may not like the answer sometimes, but we want to tell them the real info that they need to know. Whether they sometimes like it or no.
07:44.726 Brandon Burton
It's a building that no like and trust relationship to where people will come to you and expect that you're gonna give them honest upfront answers and and the best service that they're able to you're able to provide. I love the fact that that you started off and you still base on a a system of referrals, that you're not out there pounding the pavement, knocking on doors and saying, I've got a great deal for you. You know, you're you're working a referral system. And you gotta know somebody to get in with swipe it. So that I think that's helping to filter, you know, the best businesses, the best chambers, you know, to work with you. But also it it allows you the ability to to serve them in a way where you care about them a whole lot more than if they were just some random person. So I I know you mentioned just briefly kind of in passing that you work closely with chambers of commerce, but also other association groups. and have been for several years now. What is it about serving the Chamber of Commerce community industry that you enjoy?
08:53.346 Kevin Hodes
I would say most that I have the ability to talk to the smaller, medium-sized business owner that doesn't have access to somebody that has the knowledge I have. And the chambers recognize that and they know that they feel more comfortable be able to work with somebody that's not going to jam up their members. The members want, you know, a a fair deal. They want to have the ability to be able to do what they do and not worry about all this crazy language that they have to know. for is for instance, most merchants and even chambers may not even realize what a nineteen ninety-five non-PCI compliance fee might be on their statement. They see it every month and they have no idea what it is. Well, that's two hundred and forty to three hundred and sixty dollars, depending on who and what company is charging that fee. But it's two hundred and forty to three hundred and sixty dollars that's just going right down the toilet every year for these clients. That they shouldn't be paying that because the company that they signed up with probably just said, we guarantee to save you money, or we'll pay you $500. They signed them up. They have a salesperson that they can't get a hold of anymore. And now they're trying to find out what this money is, and they can't even figure out what it is. And I'll tell you what it is. Every merchant in America has to be PCI compliant. I don't care who has told anybody about. PCI saying, no, you don't have to worry about it. We're PCI compliant. The process is the card associations, meaning Visa, MasterCard, Amex, and Discover, need to be compliant. The processing company has to be compliant. And the merchant has to be compliant. So those three factors have to work congruently, or you're noncompliant. The merchant doesn't realize they're charged a noncompliant fee. So we help. Merchants, when we see that on their statement, get compliant. We assist through the process. We don't just say, here, do this. We say, we need some information. This is why it's noncompliant. This is what's going to get you compliant. But I think this is an area that's so overlooked, even by chambers themselves. And some of the chambers that we have helped have they had no idea that they were being charged this fee.
11:14.906 Kevin Hodes
Or they knew they were being charged it. They just didn't know what it was for. So we were able to explain it and get them compliant. And it's a yearly compliance factor. It's not just you get compliant and you're done. It is a once a year reassessment. So an email will come and say, Hey, you got to get re compliant or reassess your compliance. And we see those emails come along and people say, Hey, what do we do with this? We say, We know what to do. We'll help you with that. So I mean there's that's one factor, just one single factor that I think would be you just look at your statement and say, noncompliance fee. Boom. Well, we can help there. you know, we we see a lot where people might have a fair price and their devices might have broken, and then they call the company they work with and they want to charge them an exorbitant amount of funds for equipment. And since in the inception of my company, I knew right away that all these salespeople need to make commissions on the sale of equipment. Well what we did was we took that out of the equation and we just started giving people the s all the equipment they may need and or devices and or knowledge without charging them. So they're not getting charged all these additional monies for things they shouldn't be charged for as far as I'm concerned. Just good old fashioned, great pricing and of course great, great service.
12:41.726 Brandon Burton
The service is what I was hearing. Everything you were saying is was all based around as a service right there. so let's let's get into the kind of the meat of this, the details of this chamber affinity program that Swipe it has to offer. just if somebody's driving or on a walk or something while they're listening to this, you can also go to chamberchap podcast dot com slash C C like credit card, and there's a little slideshow on there that you can get. a lot of this information as well. But sometimes it's nice just to be able to hear it and then have that reinforced when you go back to look at that. So Kevin, can you kind of give us a the big picture of how this chamber affinity program works that Swypit has to offer?
13:27.522 Kevin Hodes
Well, what's awesome about the chamber itself is you're always or they're always looking for some sort of nondues revenue generator where they don't have to think about it. It's just it's just kind of working. So it's hard to find those right organizations. How do you do that? You know? we find them by, you know, maybe hitting Google and you check out rip off report, things of that nature. I wanted to touch on this because and I forgot to mention it. a moment ago, but I tell everybody when it comes to your money, you really need to be Googling people. Google the company, Google the organization, Google it like crazy and and keep checking up on them because things may change. You know, you go to the BBB and you find out that it's a terrible company that you just signed up with and you're like, my gosh, I just made this huge mistake. So my goal for chambers and franchises and other organizations we support is to make sure that they don't have to worry about the company they're working with is going to be a bad decision that they made. And so what I suggest for chambers, if they're interested in even working with us, is we'll do an assessment of where they currently are at and we'll tell them if they're good where they're at or not. We'll say stay there, don't stay there. We'll say If you want to work with us, this is the experience that your clients are going to receive the same way we're treating you. Because we treat everybody the same. I have celebrities that are my clients, and they get the same exact treatment that the merchant that's doing five or seven thousand dollars a month is getting. We do not play favorites. And that to me is something if if you are able to Google me and you see me, I might, you might see a picture of me. I'm five foot one, and there isn't a fight that I ever won. I've been bullied and beat up all my life and I've never cared for the way I was treated. So I wanted to treat people with respect. I want to treat them with honesty. And I want to kill them with kindness so that they never leave us. And it's part of the reason we still have the first customer we ever wrote way back nineteen, twenty years ago. But going back to real benefits for the chambers, you know, there's very exclusive member only pricing that we can offer.
15:47.464 Kevin Hodes
And this will increase, you know, your new member capabilities. So, like members, when they come in and they say, Hey, we want to join the chamber, and you can say, Well, we also have this affinity program that we have special pricing just for our members. And I know you're going to get hit up for credit card processing, but we have screened, we have, and we use them ourselves. So we know they're a good organization and we want you to use them too. And then of course. when your client, your member says, wow, that's great, it'll also decrease your current attrition because now they feel compelled to continue to use the chamber because they're using that merchant service provider. So it kind of works kind of hand in hand, kind of mentally in the background in someone's mind. And of course it will reduce your chamber operating costs because we typically can save merchants up to about 40% on their processing, depending on where they're at and who they're using.
16:46.286 Brandon Burton
Do you say typically forty percent or zero?
16:48.746 Kevin Hodes
Yeah, it could be up to forty percent. You know, a lot of people love to use QuickBooks, they love to use Square, they use they they might think Stripe is the best thing since life spread. What's really amazing that people don't know, here's a little secret for you. We all have the same cost. The card associations, Visa, MasterCard, Amex Discover, they control the cost. It's the people that you sign up with. that could be creating all of your nightmares and you just don't know how to fix them because you haven't found the experts in that field. And that's where we come in and we're gonna help in those areas. We've got bank neutrality. There's no switching banks. You don't have to we could care less what bank you use. We've got cash advanced capabilities for merchants. So maybe a client he might be having a hard time he needs some extra cash. We've got cash advanced capability, check services. I don't offer check services anymore. In fact, I tell people that the cost outweighs the benefit. And there's a lot of people still pushing a check product. I think it's crazy to be using a check. It's it's not something I think is good. Now, if you're a chamber and you're accepting a check from a client, yeah, check take that check and go to the bank and deposit it. But I wouldn't use a service. Unless you're doing like five thousand checks, then it makes sense to get a check reader sitting behind your desk and you can run checks through it. It goes directly into your bank. And I say work only with the bank for check processing only. But I would never sign anybody up for a check product. I have it, I think it's ridiculously priced. So I rather give people the things that are gonna make them profitable instead of making them less profitable. Now, members themselves, you know, we could get people set up in twenty-four hours, forty-eight hours. It doesn't take very long. We're doing free cost analysis on their current processing statements. We know how to read them, we know how to look at them. We do free terminals, we do free upgrades. This stuff all costs me personally money, which I'm investing directly into that client, hoping they're gonna stick around long enough to, you know, maybe we might make some of that money back. And
19:13.58 Kevin Hodes
Really more important, we've got live people. You know, there's no there's some processors out there that charge per phone call when you actually call in for service. And they might charge you per technical issue, which I think is ludicrous. But, you know, the the program benefits, you can always see what those are in our program over you pro review and our the and a lot of the details that are associated with that. And you know, we're We're a person just like you folks. We want to be there when you need us. I know when we receive phone calls, I hate missing a phone call. And one of the reasons is is because I know people aren't calling me to tell me that the weather in South Dakota is cold and steamy or whatever it is. They're calling because they have a question of something they need an answer for. So I respect them for that.
20:06.648 Brandon Burton
So as you were going over those program benefits, I was thinking the ideal situation is for you as a chamber, listening to this, and you think, Yeah, I use ABC Company for my processing. Let me see what Kevin and and his group there at Swipe it can do. And so they would send you a statement, you can look at it, tell them kind of the cost savings analysis, here's what we can do for you. And like you mentioned, it could be as up to forty as high as forty percent. I think even if even if it came in, you know, just five percent less, but it had this affinity program tied to it where you're able to promote this to your chamber members and they're able to save on their processing because a lot of these members are using things like swipe or like stripe and square and things like that that are charging crazy high fees. So you're able to help by promoting the swipe it program to your members and be able to make some recurring revenue off of those referrals. did I miss anything there, Kevin? Is that does that all sound right?
21:16.876 Kevin Hodes
Yeah, we've got a program that will help the chamber actually co brand some marketing materials that they can send out to their members saying, Hey, we now have an affinity program that we've negotiated special pricing for you and all you have to do is get a hold of this company and let them know that you're part of the affinity program. We don't charge for it. We won't make the Chamber look bad for it. We're gonna tell them the honest truth. If they're good where they are, they should stay there. We're gonna do these introductory letters with the chamber, obviously will give us information. We'll get them over to them. You know, the other thing I really you and I talked about in the past is, and I've really been trying to wrap my head. I'm obviously very busy with a lot of things, but I really think it would be really crazy. Going to the actual chamber and doing, say, a QA session and explaining in person the benefits to the actual members. and the the chamber would put together maybe an RSVP and we would say, Kevin, founder, owner of Swypit, three time best selling author, is gonna be here. He's gonna be taking questions from you folks. We'd love the opportunity for you to be there, please. RSVP. Now you've got a hundred people you put in a room. And they're gonna badger me to death. And I love it. I love it. I love it when they hit me up with all these raw questions and why is this and why is this? the the goal is to change their methodology, their their thought process on not all companies are created equal. Not all companies are the experts in their field, not all organizations are looking to hurt people. And when you find the right company. Now you're in a place where you don't want to ever leave that organization because you've found the true experts in that field. And that's why the affinity program that we have for chambers would be really beneficial because they just don't have to worry about working with some crazy company that's gonna really make the chamber look bad or make their members look bad. And those are factors we don't ever wanna do. And if we have zero complaints with the BBB in all the time that we've been
23:38.86 Kevin Hodes
with the BBB. And I'll tell you, that's not an easy task when you're battling all of these crazy guys that just lost their job working at some place. I won't mention a any specific we'll say IBM. Let's say they worked for IBM. And IBM says, we're laying off a thousand people. And now all of a sudden I'm competing with a an individual that doesn't have any knowledge of the industry. And he's just guaranteeing them they can save them money. Well, I always tell a lot of people that, yeah, maybe they're gonna save you an initial a buck or two here, but they're not certified payment professionals like I am, and they are not an organization that is really looking out for the customer's best interest because they haven't figured out what all the ins and outs are of this industry. There's so many factors. And on my website at swip dot com, I've got an FAQ section. where people can actually go and see the actual rates that are published from the card associations. And I really like to show that to people. I had somebody in the office yesterday and he goes, No one's ever shown me that. And I said, well that's because most of this business is really, really filled with a lot of people that don't know the industry and they're just quoting some one specific rate for one specif specific card. And if that chamber or that merchant doesn't even take that card, how would they know? So this is a really complex industry. And when it comes to your money, you have to be really careful who you might be wanting to use. But we obviously in our affinity program want to make sure that chambers feel comfortable with us. And of course, we feel we've done a really good job at taking care of clients. So I think When the chambers come to us and say, Hey, will you work with us? We feel compelled to give all the information and they make their own decisions. We don't really push anybody into anything. That makes sense. Does that kind of cover all of that?
25:45.006 Brandon Burton
Yeah. I think So do you want to talk about how you're able to to give back to the chambers and how this can benefit them beyond the cost savings?
26:00.194 Kevin Hodes
Yeah, you know, the chamber will receive a percentage of the revenue generated. And in the first year, just depending on certain factors that come into play, I'm gonna say it could be up to seventy two hundred dollars and the second year it could compound to being fourteen thousand dollars or more, and then the third year could be up to twenty one thousand dollars per year. And this is just revenue from you referring a legitimate organization. That has special pricing set for their members. And not all of your members are going to sign up. It's just not going to be. If you feel that all of your members are just going to rush to us and sign up, it's not going to happen. There's a a level of liking, trusting, just like you, the chamber itself, will want to be liking and check checking us out at the same time. But you're your actual clients will feel so much better when they are working with a legitimate company and they're going to come to you and say thank you for introducing us to an organization that not only put money back in their pockets, but solved their problems without them having a zero cost out of their pocket. And the the affinity program that the chamber is going to receive is this is basically free mummy, free mummy. free money. It's Mother's Day coming up. So thinking of moms and all that good stuff. But of course, we w we want to be a a partner, not an organization that's going to say one thing and do another.
27:30.413 Brandon Burton
That's right.
27:44.248 Brandon Burton
So what I love about this affinity program, those numbers that you put out there with the kind of compounding year to year is based on, of course, new members enrolling in the in the swipe it program. but the chamber is in any given city, wherever you're located, tends to be a go-to resource for information. And as new businesses are getting started or as they're having trouble with their current processor. They're gonna come to the chamber and say, what do I do? And if you have this as an option to feed your members to say, here's a trusted vendor, a trusted partner that the chamber works with, then they're gonna, they're gonna appreciate you pointing them in the right direction. And then in turn, that's gonna continue to build that base year after year. And I can see, you know, getting five years into this, you know, bringing in a substantial amount. each year that that's all you're gonna be doing is talking about the great benefits of swiping.
28:50.712 Kevin Hodes
So exactly. I I will say, Brandon, also that as a board member of a chamber of commerce, one of the things that I used to hate myself is why would we have somebody join for a year and then not rejoin? Well, if you it what we would do is is we would let them know that we have special negotiated pricing structures on multiple items and it would make the the merchant, that client a little stickier. Because they would feel that something was actually being of use from the chamber. And my member benefit actually kept me as a member of the Chamber of Commerce. So I I've never liked it when somebody did say to me, Hey, the Chamber never did anything for me. A lot of times the members don't really know what the chambers can do for them. And that's why we've put together a letter that would be sent out to the actual member saying, hey, by the way, we have this affinity program for merchant services that you might want to take advantage of because we've negotiated special pricing for you. And we're also a client.
30:05.014 Brandon Burton
Yes. So that's the next thing I was going to mention is for any chamber, I would highly recommend just try swipe it out yourself before you start promoting it to your members. You want to make sure that this is something you're comfortable with before you start broadcasting that. And Kevin's going to take great care of you. He's going to make sure that you're getting the best service out there and answer questions along the way. So that would be my suggestion is to visit you know chamber chat podcast dot com slash cc on there there's a form that you can fill out saying that you'd like to get some more information and possibly work with swipe it and then kevin and his team can reach out to you get some more information and start the bar start the ball rolling to see how they can serve your chamber and your your chamber membership. with is there anything you'd want to add to that Kevin as far as how they would get started?
31:03.566 Kevin Hodes
I think the easiest thing is to take a look at your current statement and get it prepared, send over a couple of months to us, we'll look at it, we'll analyze it, we'll tell you where you're at. Well be prepared to tell us some of the other things that you might have going on. Maybe you have a a golf outing, maybe you have your annual gala and you haven't been able to even accept any types of payments at those events. And we can offer you a product at no cost. To assist you in making more money for revenues into the chamber itself. So I mean, there's there's a lot of factors that we can assist with. My goal is to be an organization that can make you more profitable. Our goal is to give you the service that you've never had and help out the members themselves and reinforce those relationships of why they actually joined the chamber in the first place. I think those are probably the key factors of all we would ever want to do.
32:06.584 Brandon Burton
Yeah. I think that's a great point that I think I I overlooked here is all the different ways that you're able to help with accepting payment. So besides the standalone terminals, you can help with any online payments through their their website for memberships or their website for event sales or ticket sales or something at an off site, like you were mentioning, golf tournaments or different community events that the chamber hosts. So swipe it's able to help with all of those different payment options. Kevin, what is what would be one action item that a chamber can do today as they as they look at their credit card processor to make sure that they're being taken care of properly?
32:53.272 Kevin Hodes
I think that looking over their current situation is finding out when you Google them if they're a good organization that you know that you've been working with the right company. And in the process of thinking of using Swypit itself, S W I P I T, it's kind of a strange way we spell it. When you Google us, you'll find all kinds of positive information that will peak maybe something that you are interested in. keeping in your your mind when you start Googling the other company that you might work with. If you're working with your own bank, your own bank doesn't even process credit cards. They have to farm it out. And they don't make any decisions. And if you had an issue or a problem, you probably were stuck calling an 800 number. And I think it's important to know that you need to find experts in almost every field. And they're very hard to come by. And you have found somebody that has knowledge and expertise and we're looking to get it out to all the people that want to utilize services of us that they've never been able to get from others. And everybody might think we're all the same, but we're truly not the same. We might have s similar pricing structures, probably not the pricing structures that you folks have now. And of course the the chambers, when they look over their information, or maybe they I don't want to take away from their current members. Their current member or members that might have signed them up might have moved on to some other job already and you just haven't had representation. And I'll tell you it's probably 80% of people that I run into tell me that their individual they signed up with is no longer with the company. So that warm and fuzzy feeling Of having somebody that knows all the ins and outs of how your system is set up and can identify the issues before you're even going to have the issue, that's gone. And that's where we come into play. So if even though you want to utilize your own members for merchant services, you've probably used them in the past and found that they're they're just coming and going too quickly. And that this is the time where you can find an organization that's worked with other chambers.
35:22.644 Kevin Hodes
and has a long history of expertise to get the chambers more profitable.
35:31.498 Brandon Burton
The other thing that I would just maybe add to that is whoever they're currently using as a credit card processor probably doesn't have an affinity program that they can offer either to bring in those non-dues revenue where Swipe it's offering this great opportunity to not only lower the cost, but also to bring in additional income to the chamber. So Kevin, there's a question I like to ask everybody that I have on the show as we wrap things up. And I know you've been involved with Multiple chambers of commerce and on the board of chambers and everything. But as we look to the future, how do you view chambers of commerce and their purpose?
36:11.128 Kevin Hodes
That's a really fantastic question. I think it's imperative today to be a member of a chamber. The advocacy, the looking out for members in their community is imperative to the future of business. These chambers are doing things for business owners, they don't even realize the impact of the people that might be within their organization. The the chambers the They I can't even imagine not being a member of my local chamber. It it's just a it's gonna continue forever as far as I'm concerned. People that don't realize all the benefits a chamber can give and they're not utilizing all of what the chamber can do for them, they're missing out big time. And if they're not, they maybe maybe they'll stumble upon this podcast and have listened to what I'm suggesting and that's to join their local chamber. You know, and it's it's not a very expensive thing to do to get involved with the chamber in the beginning. You know, you can graduate into, you know, higher dollar amounts and get other benefits. And as you the merchant grows, we'll expand how much they spend at the chamber. And and I think it's imperative to business today to be a member of the chamber. I've I love being a member of the chamber. I have created some long lasting relationships. I have
37:39.726 Brandon Burton
That's how we met was through the chamber of commerce.
37:42.188 Kevin Hodes
Yeah, perfect example. Yeah. we you and I have met and we've been friends for years. I will say that I have probably I I mean, I was on a call this morning with somebody that was referred me business who's no longer a member of the chamber for seven years. And they referred me over to their company, and they're a very large organization that does worldwide type transactions with large Estee Lauder type companies. And Those are because of being a member of the Chamber of Commerce. So I'm a huge advocate of the Chamber. I love the Chamber. So it's it's very warming to my heart knowing that I can make the chambers more profitable by processing their credit cards, but also being able to have an affinity program to also give them nondues revenue and be there when they need it that they've never had before.
38:34.572 Brandon Burton
That's perfect. Great, great wrap-up and summary there. Kevin, I wanted to to thank you for spending some time with us today here on the Chamber Chat Podcast. I want to thank everybody out there who's listening. I hope you found some value in what Kevin had to share with you today, some hopefully literal value. show notes for this episode can be found at Chamberchatpodcast.com slash episode seventeen. And from the show notes page we'll have a video that lays out how this program works and you can also visit chamber chat podcast dot com slash cc to learn more about this partnership with swipe it and again that's s w y p I T if you wanted to Google Swypit. Kevin, besides Google, where can listeners connect with you if they have any questions about this chamber affinity program or about Swypit in general?
39:26.712 Kevin Hodes
Well, that's the best question so far, Brandon. That's right. They can head right over to S is in Sam, W Y P is in Paul, I T is in Tom.com. And there's a wealth of information there. We also have our YouTube channel where I have all these crazy videos that I do. That in fact, I would suggest they go look and see the three things that I hate about the credit card processing industry. It's one of my favorite little videos that we put together in an Emmy Wood. Emmy Award winning studio in Florida. And I just love all those videos there. So there's an incredible amount of information if you just Google swipe it. And of course, head over, check out the web, check out YouTube. But Brandon, thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to be on your sh podcast today. I say show. It is a show.
40:15.734 Brandon Burton
Right. It is. Yeah. It's a show. Yeah. Absolutely. When we will I'm glad to have you on here and we'll link the the YouTube video mentioned and in the show notes so people can look for it there and make it real easy. But hope you guys all have a a wonderful day and we'll talk to you again soon.
40:17.803 Kevin Hodes
It's a show.
40:37.782 Brandon Burton
If you are a Chamber Professional, please subscribe to Chamber Chat Podcast in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or Spotify. When you subscribe to Chamber Chat Podcast, new episodes will show up in your podcast app each week as they are released. If you're finding value in this podcast, please leave us a rating and a review in iTunes. But most importantly, please share Chamber Chat Podcast with your colleagues that are in the industry.

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

Episode 16 — Social Media & Digital Marketing with Frank Kenny
Clean Speaker-Labeled Transcript
Guest: Frank Kenny
Automated QA: Passed

00:00.236 Frank Kenny
Yeah, so this is this is kind of big. You know, i if you're doing if you think you're doing social media and digital marketing, your chances are you're just doing social media. From the vast majority of chambers are just doing social media. And what I mean by that is they're doing top of funnel work where you create awareness and they're doing middle of funnel work where they're building no like and trust. But they're expecting bottom of the funnel results where the sale actually comes from, the conversion actually comes from. And people just do not buy through social media. It's inappropriate to be constantly promoting yourself through social media.
00:37.048 Brandon Burton
Today we'll take a dive into social media and digital marketing with Frank Kenny. Let's cue the intro. This is the Chamber Chat Podcast, the show dedicated to chamber professionals to spark ideas and to get actionable tips and strategies to better serve your members and community.
01:01.132 Brandon Burton
Welcome to the Chamber Chat Podcast. I'm Brandon Burton, and it is my goal to introduce you to people and ideas so you can better serve your chamber members and your community. If you are new to the show, please check out Chamberchatpodcast.com slash start to learn what this podcast is all about and what it has to offer you as you serve at your chamber. Let's take a quick moment to hear from our sponsor for this episode. Every chamber is looking for new ways to increase their non-dues revenue. Has your chamber found a good affinity program? I have a great affinity program to offer your chamber that will continue to increase in revenue year after year. I want to introduce you to Swypit for all of your credit card processing needs. Swypit has a unique affinity program that 1. Lowers your credit card processing fees at the chamber, 2, Helps your chamber members be more profitable, and three, provides recurring nondues revenue to your chamber. To learn more, please visit chamberchapodcast.com slash CC for credit card. Again, Chamberchappodcast.com slash C C and get swiping with swipe it. Right, and we're back. Our guest for this episode is Frank Kenney. Many of you will be familiar with Frank. For those of you who may not be as familiar with Frank Kenney, he's a former chamber member, board member, chairman of the board, and chamber president and CEO. He now consults with and trains chamber and association professionals from around the world. He is an author of three books for chambers, business associations, and their members. His area of expertise is social media, digital marketing, and technology. Frank is the founder of the Chamber Focus Show and the seventy five hundred member Chamber Pros community on Facebook. He is a faculty member of the US Chambers Institute for Organizational Management. Frank has a degree in finance and is MBA. Frank and Norma travel full time with their in their RV with their dogs, Trixie and Cooper.
03:23.512 Brandon Burton
Frank, please say hello to the audience and share something interesting about yourself besides your R V travel so we can all get to know you a little bit better.
03:32.502 Frank Kenny
Well, I appreciate being here, Brandon. And something interesting about ourselves, it's usually the the R V thing is the thing that catches people off guard. something else that I'll that I'll share is I used to fly small airplanes, but I never got my full pilot's license, but I did solo and I you know, I went pretty far down the path and I gave it up w in my late twenties and someday I am gonna get that plane and fly around again.
04:03.062 Brandon Burton
Right. That that sounds very fun. It's it's interesting. You go from the plane to the the R V.
04:08.702 Frank Kenny
I'm like a rolling stone or something. I don't like being tied down, I guess.
04:13.42 Brandon Burton
That's right. That's awesome. so for anybody who may not be familiar, can you just share a little bit with us about the Chamber Focus Show and your Chamber Pros Facebook community? As I see them both being a great resource for chamber professionals who are listening.
04:30.22 Frank Kenny
Yeah, so this goes quite a few years back, probably ten years ago, I decided that I was gonna quit my chamber and take advantage of all these speaking opportunities I was being offered. our chamber had doubled membership in eighteen months during the 2008 recession, where almost all the chambers were really suffering. we went from the smallest chamber to being the largest or tied for the largest out of eight chambers in our region. And it was the social media that did that. And when we went through that, I must have got most of the state chamber associations called me to see if I could come out and do a presentation on what we were doing with this new thing that nobody had ever practically heard of called social media. And so that's kind of where I got my start. And one of the first things that we did is we launched profiles on every site possible and tried everything new, looking for that first mover advantage every time. And one of the things was the Facebook group. As soon as Facebook groups came out, we got rid of our old Ning site. For those of you who've been along around a long time, we had a membership site on Ning, but Facebook's groups seemed like that was gonna be the place to go. So we opened one there. And it was kind of amazing. I had one other person in the Chamber World consultant. Reach out and said, You got seven hundred people in one group. You're bigger than most of the state chamber associations. And then it got to be, you know, it was really kind of crazy. Seven hundred chamber people in one room. Usually that happens once a year at the ACCE conference. but then it got to fourteen hundred and twenty one hundred, it's just it just kept growing. And now it's at seven thousand five hundred chamber people all in one room at kind of one time. And it's it's a quite the blessing. And then I started the chamber focus show to kinda parlay that that c community. So there you go.
06:22.71 Brandon Burton
That's that's very impressive. makes sense why you had everybody coming out to asking you to talk on about the topic and and talk about how you did it. obviously our our topic of conversation today is around social media and digital marketing, being that we have you on the show. Those are kind of your area of expertise as your bio explained, but you kind of alluded to it there a bit with your the chamber that you're at and being able to double the membership with your social media presence and things you were doing. How did you get into social media and digital marketing and you know, a lot of people kinda tinker with it, but they don't have that kind of effectiveness. So how did you get into it before you applied it at your chamber?
07:08.014 Frank Kenny
So in nineteen ninety eight, I've told this story quite a few times. In nineteen ninety eight the internet was hitting mainstream and all my college friends that had technology degrees, computer science degrees, all these kind of things, were were jumping on this new thing called the internet that was just like getting all sorts of venture capital money and all this kind of stuff. They didn't even care if it worked. all they cared about was did people follow your website on the internet? Anyway, I I sat out on that. I had a retail business. I was a chamber member. I was involved in community kind of stuff. So I I was on the sidelines during the great boom of the internet in the late 1990s. And I promised myself that I would never sit on the sidelines again if I saw something coming that was a huge, huge, overwhelming trend. And along lo and behold, around 2008, I stumbled across this thing that other people did know about, but it was pretty fringy. called blogging and Facebook and Twitter. And I took it to my board and I said, I really think this thing's got legs. And they said, No, it don't. This is stupid. This is a fad. You're wasting your time. You know, you're I see you on Facebook and you're just wasting our money and our time and you should get off there. And we have a website. We don't need to be doing this. Anyway, three of them went to the board chair and said, you know what, he's doing this social media thing and we got to get rid of this guy. He's like it's a disaster. And my board chair luckily was was a risk taker and also, you know, trying to look for trends and he said, No, we're gonna jump into this with both feet. and but he wanted me to go to a conference. He said, go to the chamber conferences and find out how to do this right. And nobody was doing it. We were one of the first five that that we know of in the world doing it. And so we had to invent our own way. And that's kind of how the whole social media thing got started. We just we we think we thought we saw a trend and we jumped in with both feet and we kind of just figured it out as we went.
09:05.528 Brandon Burton
So then as you started applying it at your chamber, was it just kind of guess and check kind of stuff? I mean, it seems like you got great response pretty quickly. What worked for you and and how did you play with that?
09:19.69 Frank Kenny
So we made mistakes. We we kinda learned by making every mistake possible. and and the big mistake that I realized was we were using social media in the early, early days to just promote ourselves and our events. You know, pretty much every post in some kind of way was, you know, I it was the advertising model. I thought here I I basically have my own newspaper, I'm gonna run ads. and that's not what anybody's on social media to to see is just anybody constantly promoting themselves, self promoting. And so once I could once I understood that, nobody's online to be advertised to. They're online to socialize with their family and friends and to get value from information. I switched gears away from com constantly talking about us, the chamber, and what we had going on next, to who are our members and what do they have going on and what's going on in the community and how to do a bunch of business things. Like I always tried to source content every day about how to make money as a small business owner, how to save money, how to get out of paying taxes you don't have to pay, how to stay out of trouble with the law, you know, just every single day from any resource I could come across that would add value to the lives of our members, I was sharing that. So I was I was give, give, give, give, give, and then I would ask for something. You know, I would give, give, give, and then get. And that that just worked like gangbusters. So much so we had to hire a salesperson to follow up with all the leads we were getting or all the new contacts I was getting. And that's really, you know, me doing the social media plus our salesperson asking for the sale on a consistent basis was kind of the magical recipe and it just worked.
11:03.51 Brandon Burton
That's great. Are you are you familiar with with Gary Vanderchuk? Yeah, yeah.
11:08.834 Frank Kenny
Actually that give give give is his what la jab jab jab right.
11:13.43 Brandon Burton
Uppercut. Yeah. Yeah.
11:15.576 Frank Kenny
But you know, somebody else that even before Gary wrote that, there's a guy named Bob Berg, who I don't know if you're familiar with as a as an author, who write writes a book about the go giver. it's a series of business books about how to be successful in life. And it's in his philosophy is you give first and then you get. So I can't give credit to Gary because really it's Bob Berg that really planted seed in my mind.
11:39.886 Brandon Burton
That's great. It and that's that's the trick. that's you gotta give, give, give, and then you get. You gotta build that become that trusted resource, be that go to, you know, person providing value. And as as your base is seeing that you're providing value, then they're gonna want to give back. Has there been anything else that you've noticed to grab attention of users on various social media platforms?
12:06.926 Frank Kenny
Well how do you mean that exactly?
12:08.738 Brandon Burton
Well I mean we we just talked about the give give give get. Are there other things and you mentioned providing content on a a regular basis? Some people swear by video online that video is getting the attention. algorithms rank that higher. Some people say photos, some you know. I is there anything that you're noticing that gets better results on on social media?
12:35.404 Frank Kenny
Yeah, for sure the video. Facebook has said that they're going mostly video over time. The algorithm shows those videos, especially live video. Chambers doing video are definitely getting better response than somebody does a say a static image of a ribb ribbon cutting. The video will get a lot more views, a lot more engagement, lot more shares. but then the live video from your ribbon cuttings, from your networking events, from just anything, are even more so. So that's the probably the biggest strictly social media trend. that chambers should be they should be going all in on video. And it's really easy. Our phones that we carry in our pocket all the day, they'll do just a perfectly fine video. you can get a fancier, you know, but you don't have to. That it's amazing what our what we have in our pockets nowadays gives us practically a movie studio. And It's just such a blessing and chambers need to be using that to the full extent.
13:36.648 Brandon Burton
Absolutely I couldn't agree more. I I've seen some of these chambers that are doing really high end video productions for their their fa you know, Facebook marketing and and getting the videos out there. And I mean, they've got a whole crew, I'm sure. Yeah, I don't even know what goes on behind the scenes, but it's pretty amazing stuff. It doesn't have to be that, you know, extreme. Like you said, you've got that that video production crew right in your pocket with your phone.
14:02.914 Frank Kenny
Yeah, it's two people is enough. You know, one person to hold the camera and the chamber person in front of the camera or in front of the camera along with a member where they're doing a a story about the member, and you're just doing it with a a fairly new mobile device, and you're good to go. It's sometimes I think that's better than the scripted ones, really. Just off the cuff, real, human, short and quick, and just it's storytelling. And if chambers did this all the time, here's another Gary Vaynerchuk thing is document your life. Documents what's going on you. Think of yourself as a documentarian and you're just telling the story of the community or telling the story of what your chamber's up to. That is what people respond to nowadays.
14:48.824 Brandon Burton
That's right. It's the the epitome of reality TV. Yeah. Yeah. As you get onto social media, people thrive on the reality TV stuff. And the more real you can make it, then people relate to that better. That resonates. So earlier you had mentioned that you try to find, you know, whatever these trends are, all the different media platforms, the blogging, anything that you saw as as something new to test out. It seems like the focus has come back to Facebook.
15:01.442 Frank Kenny
Yeah, absolutely.
15:18.486 Brandon Burton
What has what's your experiences been with the other platforms, pros, cons? What what brought you back to Facebook?
15:25.912 Frank Kenny
Well, Facebook is still the eight hundred pound gorilla, you know, two billion users, most people, of business type people, successful older people, anybody over twenty five say being older. they chances are they're on Facebook. And if you as a chamber wanna reach the people in your community, Facebook is absolutely still the number one place to be. But if you are all in, if you are definitely gonna use these tools to their highest level, then you don't wanna stop at just doing Facebook. You wanna be on Instagram too. And a lot of times people, chamber people are finding that they get more engagement on Instagram than they do on Facebook. Same exact post, different platforms and Instagram outperforms. And I bet there's people listening to this right now who says, Yeah, yeah, our Instagram is amazing how much engagement it gets. And then for some chamber people, they they love to be on Twitter. And if you if you're good at it, if you wanna be there, I mean you shouldn't be on any platform if you hate it because you won't utilize it. You'll probably abandon it and that's about the worst thing you can do. but i if you wanna be on Twitter because you use it personally, well, your chamber should be on Twitter too. And you will reach part of the audience that you're not reaching on Facebook and Instagram. And same with LinkedIn. Some people in your business community, you can't send them a Facebook friend request. It's not like really gonna work to send a big Fortune five hundred CEO a Facebook friend request, but you can reach them on LinkedIn and develop a relationship, a professional business relationship there. So you should be as in as many places as you possibly can be where you can have a consistent presence. That's that's what I teach.
17:06.793 Brandon Burton
Yeah, where it can stay manageable.
17:09.366 Frank Kenny
And it's all about priority. I mean, we all got the same amount of hours in the day. And in the chamber space, you you very, very much have to prioritize because otherwise all the demands will eat up every possible moment of your day, and there would be no time left for social media. And there's probably some people listening to this that haven't posted in days and days and days, because all the other demands of chamber world eat up all the time to do social media. So I teach that you gotta flip it around. social media is one of your absolute top priorities. You do that first. You schedule those posts out. You do what you have to do to have that presence in modern marketing. Otherwise people just they won't know what the chamber does, that you're doing anything. People assume the chamber is part of the government. They assume that it's all volunteer driven. They're shocked to hear in some communities that the chamber exec actually you get paid for going to ribbon cuttings. You get paid to sit around all day in meetings. I mean it's insulting. This is the reality that chamber people find themselves in. If they're not telling the story of what they're doing for the community or how they're improving their members' lives and the community's lives, then people just assume the worst. So if you make social media, if you if you make modern marketing the lowest priority on your totem pole that maybe you'll get to it, it's just a recipe for disaster. Your your relevancy is completely at stake.
18:34.52 Brandon Burton
I love that you brought that up because I've heard so many chamber professionals talk about, yeah, we really need to do more social media, but I just don't have time for that. And what you're saying is that needs to become the priority. And I think some of the reason why they feel overwhelmed with it is they just don't know what to do. I mean, when you talk about putting videos up, then do they need a videographer? That do they need an editor? Do they need a copywriter? Do they need a graphic designer? You know, everything it can become very overwhelming. But start simple. Yeah, just that that would be my advice. I don't know if you'd have anything to add to that as far as if you were to start today, if you were in your your chamber, you know, president and CEO position today, starting new, is there anything that you would do differently? Or how would you start?
19:23.254 Frank Kenny
Well, I would definitely create awareness. I I'll I'll I'll do a little run through of steps here if you don't mind. I I would I would create awareness first because if people are not aware that the chamber exists and the employees of the chamber and the board, if people just doesn't if they don't know the chamber story at all, they're not even aware, like a big chunk of your certainly a big chunk of your community, but even the business community doesn't even really the chamber is not on their radar. They don't know what you do. So the first thing is to create awareness for what you do. And the second step is to build relationships with the people that honor you with their online time, where they like your posts, they comment on your posts, they share your posts, they, you know, they're clicking through. These are people that are hugely valuable to you. You don't know them personally yet, but you're you're seeing that you're getting engagement online. I can't tell you how many chambers just ignore all that engagement. They'll get Three, four, five, six, seven comments, and maybe they go and like, like, like, like, like all the comments. That's not that's not enough. You engage back, build a relationship, build no like and trust because now you're bringing people into your world. So that those are the first two steps is create that awareness by giving, by post that are storytelling, by our that are giving, not all just selly and self-promotey, but you're actually giving value. And then engage online, have a human presence online so that people know, like, and trust you. And then beyond that is where the digital marketing starts. And that's kind of a longer conversation, but that's where I would start if I was starting today in a chamber. I would give, give, give, and I would build relationships with the people that are following me back.
21:10.326 Brandon Burton
I like that building the relationships with those that are following you back. And while you're saying that, I was thinking you know, chambers have ambassadors. And as we look at new technologies and everything, these are some of your modern day ambassadors. You know, they might not be officially, you know, wearing the coat and everything, but they're they're liking, they're promoting, they're helping to share what the chamber message is all about. And in the end, that's Kinda what an ambassador does is they're s they're helping to spread the word of the chamber. So you need to engage them. You need to build that relationship and and have them continue helping to push the mess message of the chamber. That's awesome.
21:50.293 Frank Kenny
Absolut absolutely.
21:52.19 Brandon Burton
So in a couple of things you've said, I I d you'd mentioned before on Facebook that that's the biggest place, that's where most of the audiences it that a chamber would be targeting. Can you speak a little more to who a chamber should be targeting? Would it be members, prospective members, a greater community, everyone? How do they break down those segments of who they should be targeting?
22:16.878 Frank Kenny
So in any membership-based organization, anybody that has a recurring membership business model, like Chambers do, your most important person in the world is your current member. The lifetime value of a current member who pays year after year after year after year after year, as long as they're finding value. the the the lifetime value of a member is massive in the chamber industry because some people are members for 10, 20, 30 years and every year they write the check, they sponsor things. So your pr your absolute top priority is to retain your current members. And this is a relationship business. People that are members of a chamber, that you you know who they are and they base part of the decision to be a member on do they like the staff Do they agree with the the personalities of the people on the staff and people on the board, the culture of the organization? And if they they might not care about too many of the products and services that the chamber does, and the chamber might not make a huge difference in their business life, maybe more than they realize, but they may think that the chamber doesn't do anything for them, but they appreciate the people that are working so hard at the chamber. They will stay a member because of the relationship. And so you're First priority is the relationship with your current members. But you also want to have a growing organization. And so your second target market is the people in the community that are business people that are not yet members. If you're not following their pages on Facebook, if you're not engaging with their posts on Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn and all that, if you're not reaching out to them to get on their radar, well, that's a big problem because you need new members coming in because just through n there's no chamber with a hundred percent retention rate. You need to be bringing in new members. And they shouldn't just be walking in the door or walk-ins where it's just like a miracle somebody just opens the door and says, I want to join the chamber. They need to be brought into the chamber. They need to be nurtured and invited to, you know, a your networking event or a luncheon or to sit on a committee or just in some kind of way to where they don't have to necessarily be a member yet, but you need some kind of entry, so some kind of
24:34.014 Frank Kenny
introduction to who your organization is. And so that's where, you know, social media is your avenue to reach people that are not yet members and build a relationship with them and then invite them to come to something that the chamber does so that they get a feel. And then a salesperson in the or on or using digital marketing, but a salesperson if you have one on staff can then ask for the full membership sale. So those are your two primary target markets. And then the general community, I mean, if if your chamber does things like international trips or festivals, things to where it's most of the attendees or most of the customers aren't chamber members but members from the community, then you gotta have a ability to reach the members of the community. Chambers used to rely on like a newspaper to be the a the bridge to the community. And we know that all that old school advertising is dying. And so if the chambers don't have a target market of the general public, then then how are they possibly gonna communicate with those people? because that's a big chunk of your nondu's revenue is the general public. So I went on a little long there. Sorry about that, Brandon.
25:46.572 Brandon Burton
No, that's perfect. It hit on all the points that I was thinking about. I including the the old ways of communicating with the newspaper. I was thinking this is kind of the golden age of having social media and just using Facebook as as an example, as you target your main, your number one audience being your current members, those current members, if you're serving them well and you're giving, giving, giving, then they're gonna like and share and engage with those. And then as they do that then those prospective members in the greater community are gonna see that because most of those members they're gonna be friends with their neighbors and the other people in the business community. And you're not, you know, doing a write-up in in a newspaper. You're putting pictures and videos and things that people want to engage with and and keeps their interest. So I think that was a perfect answer. Thank you for that. You're welcome. So in all this social media and digital marketing For a chamber. Do ad purchases come into play anywhere with social media?
26:52.467 Frank Kenny
So are you talking about where the members purchase an ad from the chamber or are
26:56.814 Brandon Burton
No, I was thinking I was thinking more for the chamber purchasing an ad to try to get in front of the right audience.
27:03.842 Frank Kenny
Yeah, it's very you know, it's so funny. I I when I speak to I do board orientation, strategic planning, things of that. And and I often often I'll ask, okay, how much of your budget is set aside for marketing? And it's abysmally, abism small number in the chamber industry. I I think what it was is historically, you know, a hundred years, chambers had a relationship with the local radio station, newspaper, maybe cable TV outlet. They they didn't need a very big marketing budget. they could reach their members and their people in the community through traditional advertising channels. So they didn't have to, it was all trade-out kind of stuff. You didn't have to have like a normal small business, about three percent of their sales, their gross sales, is like a rule of thumb for what you need a marketing budget for. I mean, you need you know, you need substantial money to do advertising and marketing. That stuff isn't cheap, but chambers never had to have that. but in the world we live in now, you do have to pay for reach. You know, you do have to pay to get your messages out to the community. anybody beyond your membership, I mean, for your membership, you've got an email address and that's very powerful. And you can reach, you know, in the chamber world, you might get a 35, 40% open rate. And you're still missing 60% of the members, but at least you're reaching a chunk of people. They're your members and you're reaching them. But if you're trying to reach the general community, That's where like Facebook advertising will come in and it's incredibly inexpensive and ability to target to the nth degree. I mean, you can do zip codes, you can do you know, if you were having a a a women's business expo, well, you can tell Facebook that I just want to put this promotional ad in front of females aged 25 to 65 in this zip code and And I can also say, and only the ones that have been on our chambers website before, if I have the retargeting pixel, which most chambers aren't yet doing. But yeah, I mean, if somebody's come to your page and now your website and they they bounced around on your female or your women's business expo page and you're not serving up an ad on Facebook to reach those people again to encourage them to register or to sponsor or to have a booth. I mean, that is where we're at today.
29:29.814 Frank Kenny
And chambers are getting there. It's complicated, but but chambers are getting there.
29:34.186 Brandon Burton
So in talks of pixels, retargeting pixels, I've had other people just look at me with a blank face, a blank stare, and they just have no clue what a retargeting pixel is. Can you maybe explain just a little bit more detail? So if there's a chamber that is kind of interested in what you just said, but they don't know where to start with the retargeting pixel, what is that all about?
29:56.63 Frank Kenny
All right, so f all the all the companies have this now, all the social media companies have this now. It's a free pixel, which is a little graphic. It's a one pixel size graphic on your chambers website. They'll give you the code for free. You put it in the part of your website where your Google Analytics code is, and it takes two minutes. And now all of a sudden, anybody that comes to your chambers website, the pixel fires. So Facebook knows that this person you now they won't tell you who that person is. It's not so intrusive that you're violating privacy. This isn't spammy or anything like that. It's just helpful. So Facebook will now know that that person's been on your website. They'll even know what pages they've been on your website. So like if they go to your join now page, well that would be a very interesting to you'd be interested to know who in the community's been on your join now page. Well fakes Facebook knows through the pixel. And what Facebook does is builds a custom audience of the people that have been to your website or been to specific pages of your website. And when you get enough, I think it's 20 people right now, if you've had an audience of twenty people, now you can run ads just to those twenty people. So you're not bothering and wasting your money advertising to everybody under the sun like a newspaper would be. You're just throwing your money away in so much old school advertising. When you're doing retargeting advertising, when you're telling Facebook that I only want people that have been on this page of my website to see this ad for my business expo or golf tournament or whatever the big gala is or whatever is coming up, or your join now page is probably the most important. Those only those specific people will see that. And so so this is an incredibly valuable tool that most chambers haven't yet wrapped. their minds around. But it's super simple, easy to do. You just gotta go in there and and do it. So
31:59.738 Brandon Burton
So I I I like the example of the join now page. That seems like an obvious page where you need to have a retargeting pixel. But also if for a chamber, if you're if you have any events going on, any kind of community events where people need to go to register or purchase tickets or anything, you want to have a pixel on there too. So if people are checking it out for the weeks, you know, leading up to that event, stay f in the front of their mind so they come back and and complete that purchase. it's kind of like it's the exact same thing as when you've been on Amazon before. You're kind of looking around at different items and then the next day you're scrolling through your Facebook and you're seeing ads for the item you looked at on Amazon. And it seems a little bit creepy maybe, but that's the way of the world now. That's you know, we have the technology and i we need to be using it. So you mentioned all these different sites have their the free pixel and they can They can do that. Do they need to do one for each, like for Google and one for Facebook and or can they do one and then apply it to all the others?
33:04.926 Frank Kenny
No, they're all they're all individual. They're all proprietary. The the two I would start with is the Facebook one and the Google Google one. And I would use Google Tag Manager if you want to get really complicated here, so that you can I don't want to go too deep into it, but if they just type into Google Tag Manager, that would be a place that would help you install the pixels and manage your pixels. And and then on Facebook you go to your Facebook page and you just grab the code, it's free. And then that same place you just start creating ads, telling them, All right, Facebook just run ads to these people that have been to this page or that page. They've made it so simple that anybody can do it now.
33:45.774 Brandon Burton
That's perfect. So Frank, I know we need to start kind of wrapping up a little bit, but I wanted to ask you, what is one action item that listeners can do to start having a stronger social media and digital marketing presence at their chamber?
34:02.018 Frank Kenny
Yeah, so this is this is kind of big. You know, i if you're doing if you think you're doing social media and digital marketing, your chances are you're just doing social media. From the vast majority of chambers are just doing social media. And what I mean by that is they're doing top of funnel work where you create awareness and they're doing middle of funnel work where they're building no like and trust. But they're expecting bottom of the funnel results where the sale actually comes from, the conversion actually comes from. And people just do not buy through social media. It's inappropriate to be constantly promoting yourself through social media. So so the the step to do the first step to doing actual digital marketing is to collect contact information with all of these people that are aware of you, aware of your chamber and know like and trust your chamber. You gotta get their contact information. And today that is almost always an email address and permission to market to them through email. If your chamber isn't doing email marketing, then chances are you're getting very, very minimal results from your social media work. Because once you get that email address, that's it's almost like money in the bank because this is where business is done, is through email marketing. People get an email marketing invite to your event or an invite to sponsor or all these various kind of things where the where you want the conversion to happen or the registration for your event, all of these kind of things happen in a much higher percentage through email marketing than would ever happen by posting it to Facebook. So get that email address. That's the next step in digital marketing.
35:42.606 Brandon Burton
All right, collect that info and step up the email marketing program. Yeah. So as we look to the future, how do you view chambers of commerce and their purpose?
35:47.63 Frank Kenny
Absolutely.
35:55.66 Frank Kenny
Chambers, they don't realize what a great, amazing position they have in the business world, how how positioned they are for future success in this digital, you know, social media digital marketing world. The business model of a chamber being member driven, so the members are on a recurring revenue basis. And so you don't have to resell every time. Most of your members, the vast majority of your members will renew every year. With they will pay their dues every year. And that covers your overhead and salaries. And it it'll it creates so much stability for a chamber that is built up a decent membership size. And most business people would die for that kind of stability of knowing that, you know, I sold the customer once and they're gonna pay me again every year for you know, for as long as they're in business, chances are they're gonna be a member of the chamber. You know, most business people have to sell somebody brand new every single time. And they have to think every month, how am I gonna bring in money? But with the chamber business model, that money comes in through recurring revenue. So that's wonderful. And then now because of the digital marketing tools, the social media digital marketing tools, the chamber has multiple avenues, multiple channels to reach through their members and their prospects. with value ads or you know sponsorship opportunities, advertising opportunities, event registration opportunities. you know, in the old days, most small businesses would have to have a big marketing budget and they would have to be running ads constantly. And all of that takes money. And the chambers are just blessed to have this position in the community where they're they're a beloved organization. They're well established. Everybody loves the local chamber of commerce and the chamber can Like a if you look at the Vale Valley Colorado Chamber of Commerce, Vale Valley Partnership, they have all these programs that they have generated that will solve problems for the members. They found out what the problem is in the community, what are the members struggling with, and they create products or services to solve those problems. And they're using that their their wonderful membership model to create a ton of stability and then they add a new product every
38:17.73 Frank Kenny
seems like every couple of years they're adding a new product or a new service. And and that chamber is just booming. And I see this all across the country where the chambers are finding out from the members what are what are the problems that we could help you solve. And then they create a program that helps them solve it. And if they if they're using the technology, if they're messaging right, if they're doing the marketing right, those chambers are thriving. And the chambers that are not thriving, a lot of times they're like, you know They're they they got a woe is me attitude. They don't understand the amazing opportunity that they're sitting on, their amazing positioning that they're sitting on. So I I I if I was to go totally self employed again, where I was thinking, what business model would I form? I'd I'd form a chamber of commerce. It's almost perfect.
39:06.604 Brandon Burton
That's right. Yeah. Oftentimes I I think of myself like if I could just be Verizon and I just collect a a payment from everybody, like in the country, every month, just month after month. And a chamber is able to do similar to that, but in their in their community, they have that recurring revenue. And as you're, you know, giving your answer to that, I was thinking, a chamber, you're absolutely correct. They don't need to worry about where that base revenue is going to come from. They've got that that membership base. But then through these programs and different things that they can offer to their membership, they're able to provide leverage for their membership to be able to find out where they're making their next dollar from. Because these restaurants and different businesses out there, every day they're trying to find new people to come into their doors. And the chamber is the perfect place to be able to apply that leverage, create those programs and help the members. That was a great answer.
40:02.114 Frank Kenny
Thank you.
40:03.32 Brandon Burton
So Frank, I I wanted to thank you so much for spending some time with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast. I also want to, as usual, thank everybody for listening. The show notes for this episode can be found at Chamberchatpodcast.com slash episode 16. And Frank, why don't you take just a minute, let listeners know where they can connect with you if they have any questions about what was discussed today or any of the programs that you have to offer.
40:31.766 Frank Kenny
Well, thank you very much for this. the way most people in the chamber industry kind of come into our world is through the chamber prose community Facebook group. That's where we have the 7,500 chamber people all in a group learning from each other, sharing, kind of venting sometimes. but that's the place that's the first place to go is find us on Facebook, do a search for the Chamber Pros community. And then my website is frankjkenny.com. for free resources. we got about fifteen hundred articles written and about twenty free resources. So through those two sites and then of course email me, Frank at Frankjkenney dot com and I would love to touch base with anybody that wants to talk about this stuff.
41:15.628 Brandon Burton
That's perfect. And we'll put all, you know, links and all that in the show notes. So if somebody's driving or out walking their dog or something while they're listening to this, they don't need to scramble. We'll just go to the show notes and find that. But again, Frank, thank you so much for being with us. I think this is a great discussion and everybody can get a lot of value out of it. Thank you.
41:35.084 Frank Kenny
Good. Sure appreciate it. Bye bye.
41:40.406 Brandon Burton
If you are a Chamber Professional, please subscribe to Chamber Chat Podcast in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or Spotify. When you subscribe to Chamber Chat Podcast, new episodes will show up in your podcast app each week as they are released. If you're finding value in this podcast, please leave us a rating and a review in iTunes. But most importantly, please share Chamber Chat Podcast with your colleagues that are in the industry.

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

Episode 15 — Chamber Publishing with Layne Mullin
Clean Speaker-Labeled Transcript
Guest: Layne Mullin
Automated QA: Passed

00:00.214 Layne Mullin
I think if you have consistency in your publishing, if you have a directory that the directory comes out at the same time that it's supposed to each each go around. It doesn't have to be every year, it could be every quarter, it could be every year, every eighteen months, and if you did it every two years, that's okay too.
00:23.522 Brandon Burton
We are talking about chamber publishing today. Whether it's a map or a chamber directory or a relocation guide, whatever publications you have, this episode will have some value for you. Let's cue the intro and get into this. 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.
00:54.894 Brandon Burton
Welcome to the Chamber Chat Podcast. I'm Brandon Burton, and it is my goal to introduce you to people and ideas so you can better serve your Chamber members and your community. Our guest for this episode is one of the sponsors for the Chamber Chat Podcast. Our guest is Layne Mullin, who's the president of Community Matters, Inc. I've worked for Community Matters for over 12 years, and I'm happy to introduce Lane as our guest on the podcast. Lane has been in the advertising and publishing industry for over 35 years. He began working as a sales representative with Sports Display Inc. in California in 1984. His success in sales and rapid growth of the company allowed for him to move quickly into training and sales management before being promoted into the corporate office to oversee sales administration. In 2004, Lane co-founded Community Matters Inc. and started with One Map in 2004. Community Matters now has partnered with Chambers of Commerce, CBBs, Cities, and Community Associations on hundreds of publications. He says as a company that they're most proud of the long-term relationships and referrals they receive from their clients. Lane and his wife Kim have been married for over 40 years. Have three daughters, three sons in law, and eight grandchildren, four girls and four boys. Lane, please say hello to the audience and share something interesting about yourself that we might not have learned from your bio.
02:36.728 Layne Mullin
good afternoon. thanks for the opportunity, Brandon. I appreciate it. well, besides being old, which you already know, thirty-five years and forty years marriage, something interesting about me and my wife both is that we love to to scuba dive and take every opportunity, every every chance we get to dive and we just love underwater.
03:04.184 Brandon Burton
That's great. I I love diving too.
03:07.713 Layne Mullin
Yes, you did.
03:08.558 Brandon Burton
I do. So that's something interesting about me for everybody. So Link, can you give us just a just like a brief summary about community matters and and what what the company's about and what you guys do?
03:21.908 Layne Mullin
Absolutely. So Community Matters is a publishing company that allows chambers of commerce to and to partner in a turnkey opportunity so we come in and and we would take care of the the marketing and the sales and the publishing under the direction of the chamber. chambers have the opportunity to review and and edit our maps. One other thing about our company is that when we started this business, we went into it with a not a cookie cutter, but a custom map in mind. So each individual city, whether it be a directory or a map, we will look at the area, the things that are important there and create a custom publication for each chamber individually. Which I believe is one of the reasons why Community Matters publications has been awarded has awarded chambers, many Texas Chamber of Commerce media awards over the last fifteen years as well, including our first map for Frisco.
04:35.758 Brandon Burton
So in those the custom publications go beyond the maps too, right? As as far as the directories and chamber magazines and stuff. It it all is up to the chamber's discretion about what their needs are and and being able to work with them to customize that. Yeah.
04:50.582 Layne Mullin
Yes, everything that we do, we do under direction of the chamber and they don't they can be as l as little involved or as as much involved as they'd like to be. but it what's important to our company is that when when the publication goes to print, that it best represents the chamber or other association that it's published for in the way that they want it.
05:16.558 Brandon Burton
Perfect. Thank you for sharing. So our overall topic of discussion today, as listeners may have already caught on to, is about chamber publishing. I think most chambers out there have some kind of published material, whether it's a city street map or a chamber directory or relocation guide, or maybe some niche publication that their chamber does. we're gonna discuss you know a little bit more detail as we as we have our conversation today. But Lane, from your experience and from your point of view, when should a chamber or an organization consider self-publishing and when should they consider outsourcing their publishing to a a publisher such as Community Matters?
06:04.558 Layne Mullin
Okay, that's a really good question. And I'll try not to be self-serving with my answer. but in all in in all seriousness, the when when a chamber has enough personnel and and hours during the week to be able to cover everything that they are are supposed to be doing as a chamber, membership and and events and all the ribbon cuttings that they get involved in. Only after that should they really consider in investing the additional time in in publications on their own. Now there's a lot of chambers that do very well at this and and there's probably many chambers that are listening now that that have done it for several years and we know of many that have done it for several years. Granbury Chambers, one that has done their their own directory for as long as I remember, and we do their map for the last twelve twelve years as well. They don't they don't want to do their map because maps are a little more difficult on a publication side than a than a directory or a magazine. But one of the one of the com one of the concerns that ends up coming across with some chambers, in their midst of of directory publications that they might be doing is that they don't have the time to do everything. And so something gives either the the publication may take a little longer to get out because there's only so many hours in the day, or something else that the chamber may suffer. And we have done magazines for and directories for chambers that have done it previously. And Coppel is one chamber that had done their directory and then we took that over and it was for those same reasons because they wanted to spend the hours that they had during the week devoted to taking care of their members and adding value to the chamber altogether.
08:12.834 Brandon Burton
I can see where with the directory or magazine kind of format where it may be something easier to bite off, maybe, at least in concept, as a chamber gets into that. In the end, as you're looking at overall profitability, what would you what would your guess be as far as a chamber self publishing versus outsourcing as far as revenue that a chamber can see from a project either way?
08:39.958 Layne Mullin
Right. a lot of it depends on the the cost of printing and what they're trying to accomplish. But you're you are correct about the the ability to to publish a directory, self-publish a directory through a chamber. one of the one of the i'm happy to talk to any chamber that would like to discuss it because I have told chambers before that you're doing a great job or this is perfect for you. keep on keep on doing that. And let's talk about your map or we'll keep doing the map. But I want the chamber to be able I want chambers in general to be as profitable as possible. And when you take into consideration all the aspects of publishing, there is a there is besides the turnkey opportunity with community matters, we've also have like a middle range opportunity where a chamber may decide that they want to sell their own ads, but They don't wanna have to deal with the actual publishing or the or the ad creation, or maybe they do. And we can design a program where a chamber can actually contract for the publication in almost off a menu of things that they wanna be able to do themselves and then things they'd like us to do. And then we can include the printing. Our printing cost is most likely better than than most local chambers. we'll get because of the volume that we do. but when you look at the whole program, you could you could sell the ads as a chamber and do the billing and collect the money. And then if you want, after you're done with with sales, you can choose to have our sales staff pick the ball up with the rest of the people and the members in the chamber to contact a lot of the members that you either weren't able to contact or are harder to reach and and we will make an arrangement for those sales to really up the the publication revenue. And we we did a we did a publication for Choctaw is a good example. It's a three two or three person chamber and we contracted with them to publish their their directory and they wanted to take care of the sales. So they did all the sales first. and
11:02.27 Layne Mullin
all the premium locations were gone and all the big investors had bought the pages and and they did a really good job and they ended up with around fourteen, fifteen, sixteen thousand in sales. And then our company went in and our sales staff went in and added another twenty one thousand dollars on top of that. And the chamber ended up making a a real handsome, a handsome profit off of that a publication.
11:30.828 Brandon Burton
I think that's a a terrific point to make as far as you know, some chambers are gonna have more strengths in certain areas than others. for example, sales. They may have those relationships with some of those chamber members that have been around a long time or they know who's gonna advertise and to be able to handle the sales on their end, or maybe they, you know, have somebody that can do sales and they have somebody in the graphic design and you know, put the whole thing together. It really depends on what kind of staff they have. on hand at their chamber to be able to to manage the project or pieces of it and to be able to have a company like Community Matters be able to help you know bridge that gap to be able to get them to over the finish line and be able to be as profitable as possible. I I like those examples. You shared a couple examples of chambers that have done some self-publishing on their own and then had Community Matters come in to do it and examples of Chambers that self-publish some publications, but then outsource for others, like their map, just because it's a little bit more complex. What would your response be to the chatter that goes on today about how everything's going digital? Digital this, digital that. Where's the value in a printed publication these days versus just an online resource?
12:51.318 Layne Mullin
Well, you know, that's a a great question. And for the last for many years, starting around two thousand ten, we've we hear about how maps and Google Maps and Waves Ways and all that come around and and so we were wondering ourselves how this was gonna turn out and what's happened is our maps our map side has has been more productive each year. people want printed maps. It's the most asked for publication, requested publication in a in a chamber. And what's really interesting is how many chambers and how many executives and and employees at chambers just shake their head and and they get they go through so many maps with with relocation packets and people new in the area and with the at least for community matters, we we we FedEx ground all the advertisers and the points and the distribution points their maps right away this so the chambers don't have to be worried about having a lot of maps that need to be distributed come to the chamber. And so it's been really neat and we have an online interactive map available for websites for the chambers so we are in the digital age in that regard, but it it is amazing on how popular the s the printed street map is. And there's something about the map or a printed directory that people like to hold on to.
14:32.622 Brandon Burton
Yeah, as you were saying all that, it it just reminded me over the course of doing some of these podcast episodes, there's been several of these chamber executives that I've talked to that have mentioned how the maps how popular maps are at the chamber. In fact, let's take a quick time out and hear what some of these chamber executives said about their maps. It's funny, one of the the biggest things that people ask for when they come here are for those, you know, old school maps. yeah. Chambers of Commerce still do maps. you would think with phones and technology and everything else, but that is one of the biggest things that we can consistently get asked for is a city map. We still produce a
15:16.344 Layne Mullin
fold out map which I know sounds crazy because because of technology, but people I mean they fly as it the maps fly off our shelves. I mean it's what and I do want to tell you Brandon that we appreciate so much what you do with our project with our community map and that is a great source of non Jews revenue and it's something that those members really value. So I also want to tell Chamber execs to reach out and
15:19.768 Brandon Burton
Because
15:26.808 Brandon Burton
People like like that.
15:44.034 Layne Mullin
Bring those resources into your chamber if you're not already doing that.
15:48.042 Brandon Burton
All right. So I I find that just fascinating with all the the digital technology out there that so many chambers are saying that the maps are still so popular at their chamber. Mane, you mentioned a little bit about the online map. Can you explain to the audience a little bit more about how that works? And we can also include a link to a sample in the show notes so people can see it. But if you can explain it a little bit so they wanna check it out.
16:14.19 Layne Mullin
Sure. We're in the in the very final stages of upgrading our online interactive map to feature a lot of the of Google Analytics and and so people are people are used to that. So there's gonna be our our cartography will be overlaid on the Google platform and all the advertisers that are participating will have their logos placed wherever they're located on the map. And there'll be a search bar or search menu for types of categories or points of interest, which includes schools. And each one, when you when you drag your cursor over the logo or the school, an image will you know pop up and you'll see at the bottom will have information about that particular business or service or point of interest. And then you can choose to click to go to the website. You can there's a function where you can zoom in further. on that on that particular point or you can also get directions to that location from where you're going to be. It's a it's a great it's a great innovation and we're really excited about hitting the hitting the market with this very soon.
17:28.533 Brandon Burton
I've seen this new online version, online map version, and it's really it's pretty impressive. better than anything I've seen out there. And the functionality of it I think will plug in well, very well on most chamber websites where you have you might currently have like a Google map or something on your chamber website and this can plug right in there, but have it, you know, focus and highlight some of these chamber members that are supporting the program. So that it's something to worth checking out. And I can see it go ahead.
18:01.502 Layne Mullin
I was gonna say and it works on all platforms. So if you have a a s a mobile device or a small cell phone, it will show up and it's very it's it's very interactive and very usable on all platforms.
18:16.334 Brandon Burton
So we'll we'll put a link to that new online interactive map in the show notes, which will be found at chamber chatpodcast dot com slash episode fifteen. So if anybody wants to check that out. But Lane, as as we've been talking, is there one action item that you can suggest for listeners that they can do to up their game with their publications at their chamber?
18:41.454 Layne Mullin
You know, well I I think I think if you have consistency in your publishing, if you have a directory that the directory comes out at the same time that it's supposed to each each go around. It doesn't have to be every year, it could be every quarter, it could be every year, every eighteen months, and if you did it every two years, that's okay too. But the consistency of the publications because I've Our experience has shown us when when they get out of sync as far as the the timing, it it starts to affect some of the advertisers and and some of the businesses that are participating on the publications. Not to mention sometimes the publications run out before you get your next your next distribution.
19:32.14 Brandon Burton
That's a good point to make. I did a whole episode on frequency and resonation with your chamber members, which is episode five of the podcast. If y'all want to go back and check that out, that'll play into what Lane is saying about having the frequency and consistency of your publications coming out at the same time when they're supposed to come out. So Lane, as we look to the future, I I ask everybody this question How do you see the future of chambers of commerce and their purpose?
20:02.956 Layne Mullin
Well, I think chambers are awesome. I think the the sense of community, the the loyalty that chambers some chambers have that is extraordinary, versus other chambers that may struggle a little bit more. And there's a lot of reasons for that that I won't get into, but there's just many reasons and factors economically and otherwise that can cause, you know, loyalty issues either way. But I will say that the chambers that I that I've been in around over the last fifteen years, the ones that are the most successful are the ones that make sure that all the members have what they need, that they they care about the members and the added value to the membership and they're always looking for ways to extend thou those values to the members. And you know, there's that old saying about people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. And I think when chambers really show the community by what they do and the actions that they do that that they care, that's when they get the following and that loyalty factor comes in.
21:15.02 Brandon Burton
I've seen that for sure. That showing the care makes all the difference. Lane, where can listeners connect with you? If they have any questions about what was discussed today, or if they have any additional questions about community matters.
21:30.37 Layne Mullin
Wow, that's a great question.
21:34.22 Brandon Burton
Not to be self serving, but where can they find you? Yeah.
21:38.018 Layne Mullin
Well, I am available. our eight hundred number is eight hundred three eight zero two four five zero. I have a SILF, a number direct, which you're you're more than welcome to call, nine seven two nine nine eight nine two two eight. And my email address is Lane L A Y N E at Community Matters Inc. com. I would love to talk to anybody that has any questions at all. I'm here to help and if even if you choose to go a different direction, I I'm happy to give you the opportunity to get all the the angles at least from where we're at and options available to you so you can make an informed decision.
22:23.222 Brandon Burton
That's great. Thank you. I'll I'll also point everybody to a page on Chamberchatpodcast dot com. If you enter ChamberchatPodcast.com slash CMI for Community Matters Inc., it'll have some more information there about Community Matters and a form that you can fill out to request some more information and a bid for your next chamber publication. But I wanted to to thank Elaine for spending some time with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast. And I also want to thank all of you for listening. Show notes for this episode can be found at Chamberchat Podcast dot com slash episode fifteen. And again, if you have any interest in checking out Community Matters, you can fill out the short form at Chamberchatpodcast.com slash CMI to request more information about how Community Matters can help you with your next publication.
23:21.11 Brandon Burton
If you are a Chamber Professional, please subscribe to Chamber Chat Podcast in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or Spotify. When you subscribe to Chamber Chat Podcast, new episodes will show up in your podcast app each week as they are released. If you're finding value in this podcast, please leave us a rating and a review in iTunes. But most importantly, please share Chamber Chat Podcast with your colleagues that are in the industry.

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

Episode 14 — Being a 21st Century Chamber with Lisa Hermes
Clean Speaker-Labeled Transcript
Guest: Lisa Hermes
Automated QA: Passed

00:00.174 Lisa Hermes
Current chamber website was trying to be all things to all people. and so I think having those two websites really helped where we could say, okay, our audience for our chamber website is this. It is for business, it's business resources. Our McKinneyonline.com is really focused to to the community. And so that's where we could have, you know, community events and stories about the community and
00:27.084 Brandon Burton
You just heard a quick soundbite from Lisa Hermes, who is my interview from the McKinney Chamber of Commerce, as she talks about being a twenty-first century chamber of commerce. And one of the things that they did was create two separate websites, one for B2B and one for business to the community. So stay tuned as we learn more about how Lisa is doing things at the McKinney Chamber. Let's cue the intro. This is the Chamber Chat Podcast. The show dedicated to chamber professionals to spark ideas and to get actionable tips and strategies to better serve your members and community.
01:08.75 Brandon Burton
Welcome to the Chamber Chat Podcast. I'm Brandon Burton, and it is my goal to introduce you to people and ideas so you can better serve your Chamber members and your community. Our guest today is Lisa Hermes. And Lisa is the president of the McKinney Chamber of Commerce and has she's been in that position since October 2014. Lisa has extensive Work with chambers beginning in 2006 at the McKinney Chamber of Commerce as their communications and public policy director. She later served as president of the Rowlet Chamber and later vice president of the Louisville Chamber and president of the MetroCrest Chamber, which serves the Addison, Carrollton, and Farmers Branch areas. Her background is in journalism, where she began her professional career at the Star Group of Newspapers in Burleson. Before venturing into the chamber industry, she was a managing editor of Inside Collin County Business. She also graduated from the Institute of Organizational Management through the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in 209 and most recently earned her her certified chamber executive designation. She also was named one of the top forty under 40 by the Dallas Business Journal in twenty eighteen. In addition to her work, In the industry, Lisa serves on the Texas Association of Business Board, North Texas Commission Board, Imagine International Academy of North Texas, and the Community Lifeline Center Board. Lisa also enjoys traveling, hiking, reading, and playing golf. She and her husband Dennis love raising their daughter Harper in McKinney. Lisa, please say hello to the audience and share something interesting about yourself that we may not have heard in your bio.
03:05.474 Lisa Hermes
Okay, well hello everybody. excited to be on the show today. Thank you, Brandon, for inviting me. so something interesting about myself. probably talking about the hiking, my husband and I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro in 2014. We watched the sunrise on January 1st, 2014 at the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro. So that's the The tallest freestanding mountain in the world and the tallest mountain in Africa.
03:43.032 Brandon Burton
That is awesome. I hope you got lots of good pictures.
03:46.988 Lisa Hermes
I did, I did. It's a seven day hike and there's no showers or so it was a very I've got some good pictures of myself after seven days, yeah.
03:58.966 Brandon Burton
I I bet. We're getting personal now. No. Too personal.
04:03.239 Lisa Hermes
Probably, yes. Good thing there's no video on this, right? Like
04:07.374 Brandon Burton
That's right. That is great. I I love the outdoors and being able to to get out there and see some of those, you know, breathtaking views and kind of once in a lifetime opportunities. So that is cool. Thank you for sharing that. So can you share with us a little bit about the McKinney Chamber? maybe the size so everybody listening can relate a little bit better, you know, membership size, budget, things like that that you look at at the chamber there.
04:33.902 Lisa Hermes
So the McKinney Chamber, we are over a hundred years old. McKinney is was, I guess, a suburb of Dallas, but we're 30 miles north of Dallas. But now as the Dallas-Fort Worth region has just boomed, we continue to to grow in population and grow with our number of companies. Our chamber, we have we're almost to 1400 members. I just looked it up today. We have 1,394 members. We our budget is one point three million. And yeah, so we're we're just part of a I I I like to to not only just say like the budget size and the membership size, but I also like to put in context the geography because I think that's important when I'm visiting with other chambers. I think sometimes it's a little different when you might be a standalone community versus part of a bigger region because we do a lot of work with our neighboring chambers and build a lot of partnerships and coalitions because because we are part of a a very large region.
05:41.46 Brandon Burton
Absolutely. That's a great point to make. I'm sure a lot of your members cross over into some of the other communities as well. Yes. so it it makes sense to have those coalitions together. And if you're a standalone chamber, you know, out on your own, then that means something different. You know, those numbers do for sure. So today our topic of conversation is gonna be focused around being a 21st century chamber. So Lisa, can you just explain to us what does it mean to you to be a twenty first century chamber?
06:16.952 Lisa Hermes
That is such a great question. some of some of the elements that will make our chamber industry strong are things that we have been doing for a number of years. And I think that's really understanding our communities and and becoming really becoming experts in our field. I think the Some of the challenges we face that might have changed over time is that is that people, businesses, they're f they have so many options for communication, for finding resources. In fact, it's almost as if there's so there's there's so many resources out there that it's an overload. So so an example. Let's say somebody wants to get connected and and network. Well, they can go to, especially in in our region, there's all kinds of networking groups. There's B and I's, there's there's other chambers, there's of course, technology, there's LinkedIn, lots of ways to connect with people. So we have to figure out how to find our unique value proposition and stand out from the crowd and and and the noise of everything. So I think what what we can provide is being able to kind of filter and information and digest it and be able to give that to our members in a way that is easily digestible, I guess, would be would be my my take on that.
08:06.806 Brandon Burton
Yeah. so I'd like you mentioned finding what your unique value proposition is. I think, you know, some chambers as they think about that may struggle a little bit to find, you know, that identity or what they can broadcast to their members as far as what that value proposition is. What are you finding works for you in McKinney and what are your members responding to?
08:31.764 Lisa Hermes
So I think what we have to do. So in McKinney, we're kind of we're we're unique in a way. We our chamber, several years ago, right when I first started working at the chamber, or again, I guess I should say at the chamber in 2014. So our chamber for a long time had published a magazine. We were we had our chamber you know, the typical things that you do in a chamber advocacy and membership development and leadership programs, but then we also owned a for-profit subsidiary where we published a a magazine. And and at the time it was, I think, a unique value proposition, right? Because what the leaders when they started it saw was that we didn't have we didn't have an opportunity we we a a medium for getting information out to the community. and our community was growing and so they we wanted to be able to provide be be a r information source basically. But over time, print, media, well, they have their own set of of challenges. And we were seeing sales declining. So our board back in 2015 made the decision to close the the publication and close the company and we really had to blow up our chamber in a lot of ways. So we we hired a a consultant and had Kathy Hyde, I'm sure many of you know her. She's she's terrific. and she came in and we we redefined our purpose, our vision, and put together a three-year strategic plan where we really focused on delivering value to our members. That's one priority area, organizational sustainability, and advancing community excellence. And we said these are the things that we're going to do as an organization, and we're gonna just really just hyper focus on those things. But to back up, before we could get to that place, we had to understand our community. And as you mentioned, I've been in a lot of different chambers and and I know everybody's heard the term, if you've seen one chamber, you've seen one chamber. It's really true because every community is just a little bit different. And we had to do a fact-finding mission of really understanding
10:52.738 Lisa Hermes
what our members' needs were. And like I said, every every community's different. So we have a large healthcare pot you know industry, so we had to learn what was important to them. We have manufac light manufacturing is has a presence here in McKinney. And so we needed to understand what their needs are and that takes this is where the good old fashioned work comes into play. It just it takes rolling up your sleeves and going and having meetings and face to face meetings and and then trying to put all that data together to figure out what your what you can do and what you can provide that's going to be unique to each of those, you know, to your community.
11:36.782 Brandon Burton
I find that interesting. Where you were mentioning with the publishing side, you know, the publishing business that the chamber had there, that it came because of a need to be able to reach, you know, the community and and the information that the chamber had to share. But then once you found that that was maybe not the best way to distribute information, you guys kind of took an evaluation of that and made a pivot to be able to kind of stay with the times and stay current with how to you know, get your messaging out to the community. I think that's a valuable lesson for every chamber to to pay attention to and look at any programs that you have and see what is still relevant and what changes might need to be made. You had mentioned with with these like healthcare and light industry and things, you know, that have a presence in McKinney. Did you did you have any committees formed or anything to learn more about them and what kind of attention those industries needed or Or was it just more face to face interactions or what did that look like for you?
12:38.378 Lisa Hermes
Yeah, both. So we did we did one on one conversations with CEOs and then we also pulled together some focus groups, which was w was really valuable because it's great to be able you know, the one on ones are great, but then also when you're in a focus group, I think each of the leaders like it's like a brainstorming session, right? And so they they start giving you they feed off of each other basically. And one idea spurs another idea and so that you're really able to extrapolate a lot of good information.
13:15.758 Brandon Burton
You had mentioned before the you know, with the changing in technology. In being a twenty first century chamber, how is technology playing a role there at the McKinney chamber?
13:27.374 Lisa Hermes
So going back to to the the conversation, and this kind of relates to that to your question, when we decided to not do the the monthly publication, we did decide we needed to we were going to produce certain niche publications. So we were finding we have our community resource guide that we produce. we still produce a a fold out map, which I know sounds crazy because because of technology, but people I mean they fly as it the maps fly off our shelves. I mean it's people like like that. we also do a business to business guide. So it's very it's more focused on companies relocating or if you're a company here, what resources are available to you. But then with the technology, this is where this plays in, we we all we actually h operate two websites. So while we we killed our publication, monthly publication, a community publication. We have a community online news source. So we have our McKinneyChamber.com, which is we redesigned that to where it's really focused on more B2B. And then we have McKinney Online dot com, which is focused on B2C, basically. It's for the community to learn more about what's happening to provide information, events. and it's also a way for a lot of our businesses to connect to the community. So they have they can build out their chamber listing. It's very robust on that on that end. They can post articles, news stories, they can post calendar of events, hot deals, just all kinds of things. And so we we really wanted to segment how we were communicating. And I think that that's also another really important thing that chambers need to learn to do. When we decided to use technology instead of with a website, instead of printing a monthly publication, we also had to go back and and decide how what we were putting out. So our what our current chamber website was trying to be all things to all people. And
15:47.212 Lisa Hermes
It was just too cluttered, it was too hard to find information. and so I think having those two websites really helped where we could say, okay, our audience for our chamber website is this. It is for business, it's business resources, this is where you can find advocacy, all kinds of stuff. Our McKinney Online dot com is really focused to to the community. And so that's where we could have, you know, community events and stories about the community and I think that's I think that's really important. And also in our email communication, that's another step that we're taking is segmenting our audiences, even with just our, you know, almost fourteen hundred members trying to figure out how to make sure that we're communicating just the information that they want to to receive versus a one size fits all for everybody.
16:39.618 Brandon Burton
I really like that. You'd mentioned something to the effect of you were you know, a lot of times the messaging is all information for everybody. And oftentimes when you go about that approach, you end up serving nobody. So being able to take a look at what that messaging is and who your audience is, I think it it seems like it's been a a great thing and it's working out well for you to have those two different targeted audiences, the one the B to B and the one to the B to C or to the greater community. I I think that's a some great advice that other chambers can look at too. If they don't have a separate way to be able to reach the community, there's it's obviously a great way to leverage and and help your your member businesses get known better throughout the community. I I assume on McKinney Online, the business the business to consumer or community website has advertising opportunities and things like that on it as well. Is that correct?
17:38.25 Lisa Hermes
It does, yes. Yes. I would and I will say, quite honestly, it's that has been challenging. we're really looking at different ways. There's there's banner ads and and we haven't had great success in selling those, but now we're starting we're gonna start a different way to try to make money on that to to turn some revenue on that. And that is we're gonna have what we call kind of like a special section. So a newspaper back in the day might do a home and garden section to include in their publication and they would focus on that industry with certain advertising and stories. Well we're about to launch something very similar. So if you go to McKinney online, it's going to pop up a special section that you could X out of or you can read. So for instance if it's home and gardening then we'll have, you know, maybe roofers, landscapers, pool companies we'll have content, like real content, not just advertising, but also advertising opportunity. So if any listener out there would like to see what that looks like, you'll have to stay tuned because we're we're kind of in the early stage of that. But what we have seen, so so while the advertising has not been a strong presence in in driving revenue for the chamber, I will say it has been having McKinney Online and having and our members being able to communicate with the community at large and with consumers, especially for the retail and service-based industries, it's been a way for us to retain and sometimes recruit members. So somebody's, you know, you know, somebody wants to drop and what do they what do they say? Either they find no value or they have no time to go to your to an event. And so our, you know, our comeback to that is, well, you don't have to go to an event. You we have an opportunity for you to be visible to the community 247. And that's helped us, you know, retain some members. because we're not to get too far off the subject, but I guess it kind of goes back to that adapting. We in the past, I think as as the chamber industry as a whole,
19:55.362 Lisa Hermes
We tend to think, we we'll add another event, we'll add another event, and time is so precious for people that we've got to find other ways to connect and to provide value without it necessarily being attendance driven.
20:10.882 Brandon Burton
That's yeah, that's true. I've heard that as I've been doing, you know, these interviews with different chamber executives, that seems to be a common thread of you know, so many members of of your total membership, such a small percentage is able to actually attend different meetings and events that the chamber puts on. So what are those other ways that you can engage with your members? Some of that is leveraging technology. You had mentioned earlier in our conversation these things digital. you'd mentioned LinkedIn. There's other local networking groups. Are you have you as a chamber been able to find ways to leverage those groups or or technology in a way it rather than looking at as as maybe competition against a chamber, ways to leverage that and to help get messaging out to membership that way?
21:01.816 Lisa Hermes
So like a lot of chambers, we're still like really trying to grapple with that and make sure that we're we're really focused on utilizing all these different platforms. And so we're we're out there and we're on LinkedIn, we we are on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and I would say yes, we have utilized it. I I I So first of all, I think number one, we can't look at things as competition. I think that was a good point you just made. I think we have to look at these as other mediums that we can communicate with with our members, with businesses and and the community at large. I would say we're probably more efficient or more effective on Facebook, which I know that seems odd because we really should be on LinkedIn as if it's a professional site, but But a lot of our members are on Facebook and they use it. So we've been very successful with that. One thing that we've well actually that just that just reminded me. I'm so glad that you brought that up. So we had we have candid forums all the time, right? And for a number of years, our candidate forums were really highly attended, which was awesome. but over the years we saw that they were dwindling, and our last one. we did. We we broke it up 'cause we have a local city council election and then we also have our school board and our our Collin College our community college election. So we did two different forums. and I was really disappointed in the attendance. I thought, okay, we've got, you know, we used to get a hundred people and now we're getting you know, thirty people in the room or twenty-five people in the room. And but we decided to Facebook Live, both of the forums. Well, our city council forum was viewed over 2,000 times. Yes. Now school district education one was only like 700 times, but but it really shows the power a lot better than 30. Absolutely. Because again, it goes back to that timing of somebody, and I'm sitting there watching as my communications manager is is is FaceTime or what do you call it? See I've got to keep up with it. Face
23:08.462 Brandon Burton
A lot better than thirty.
23:24.718 Brandon Burton
Face timing.
23:26.414 Lisa Hermes
It's not really face timing, is it? It's like li like face lies.
23:29.432 Brandon Burton
Why? Yeah.
23:31.794 Lisa Hermes
so while she's doing that, I'm watching and I'm seeing people pop in and watching, you know, that they're watching with us. And so that was really, really cool. And so I think again, like to your point, utilizing these mediums could really help us.
23:47.086 Brandon Burton
Yeah, and one thing that that you said, I don't I don't know if you noticed it so much when you said it, but it really stood out to me. You had mentioned that it would make sense for a chamber to be on LinkedIn and really push that platform, but you guys are finding more success on Facebook because that's where your members are. And that's the key thing is find out where your members are and be there. You know, have that be the platform that you magnify and and reach those people. And I love that example of being able to Facebook Live these different events. And I mean you're you're gonna get people watching it that may not even be members, but it exposes the chamber to the greater community and shows what the chamber's doing to serve the community. So great example there. So I wanted to ask a little bit about as an organization, I know you you know you're continually trying to make sure that you're providing value to the businesses that you serve. What are some things that that you're doing to stay in tune, yeah, with the increasingly diverse world that we're in today?
24:54.912 Lisa Hermes
So it I think you have to do it in in multiple ways. You one thing that we do is you know going back to when we originally kind of blew up the chamber and had to do kind of a listening tour, so to speak, we continue to do that. So we we have focus groups, obviously meeting with members one-on-one. And we also utilize our ambassadors. We changed our ambassador program up a little bit. I know a lot of chambers will have the ambassadors go out and do goodwill calls or member retention type calls. And we looked at the form and and I I realized the questions were all about us and not about them. And you know, as like as our membership continues to grow, it's hard for staff, there's we have nine people on staff to to be able to call people and really d get a lot of information. So we used our ambassadors and said, why don't you ask questions about the company first? And then as they are giving you feedback, that's where you can show, hey, maybe you can get connected to the chamber in this way. Or maybe, you know, if you're looking for skills and training, the chamber offers these webinars, or they have a competitive edge workshop or watch their blog because they are posting different on different topics. so again it's it's really I think less about ourselves and more about listening to the the the businesses and utilizing every avenue that you have. so our ambassadors are one. also I think I think surveys are always good too just for a sampling or a temperature check. Keep it simple. and even paper surveys. one of our so we have a like most chambers, we do a a weekly networking event. we have anywhere from 100 to 120 businesses who show up every Wednesday and do their 30-second commercials. And we had to revamp that program because it was kind of getting stale. And what we found was by putting two questions on a piece of paper out on all the tables, we were able to get a lot of great feedback that way.
27:19.798 Lisa Hermes
So you can use technology, but sometimes even just utilizing a quick postcard at an event is also very helpful in getting information. And I think it's important that we have to get information in so many different ways. You can't just use one, you know, survey monkey and then feel like you're in tune with your with your membership.
27:41.9 Brandon Burton
So I have to ask, do you remember what those two questions are that you had out on the table?
27:47.64 Lisa Hermes
So it it that's a good it it always changes. so one, it could be something as simple as something about the program itself. So like this seems so trivial, but our steering committee that runs that networking group would would sit there and debate for an hour during their meeting if if they should allow the people giving door prizes to have a certain value amount. Well, instead of debating it for an hour, they put that question out on the table, they got the feedback, and we can make a decision very quickly and move on. But then when when you're at a like our quarterly luncheons, we might ask a question about what's happening in the community. Like for us, we have a major thoroughfare that our state is looking at either widening in place or creating a bypass. And it's a very controversial issue. And so that's a good question that we can just put out there. to our membership so that we can get a good sampling of where they are, you know, get the pulse of what how they feel about this particular issue.
28:53.996 Brandon Burton
Those are great examples. I love how you had mentioned the how the ambassadors brought up to you. We should be asking the questions about the business, you know, about them, and then being able to interject their needs with what the chamber can do to meet those needs. I think that's so valuable.
29:10.382 Lisa Hermes
But I'll tell you it takes a lot of training though. It really does. ambassadors about how like almost flipped out because they were so used to the form of is this the correct you know, do we have your correct contact information? What event have you attended? You know, do you what how how is the chamber performing for you? And if they got a hold of somebody, everybody's like, Fine, I don't know, don't have time to attend.
29:14.39 Brandon Burton
I'm bad.
29:38.006 Lisa Hermes
And so but they but the ambassadors are so used to it. So we had to do a lot of training of but also promoting and saying, look, you're an expert too. Like you are stepping up as a volunteer and as a business in our community, that you're stepping up and you're you're seen as almost like a consultant. So I I I think it's it's made our ambassadors stronger, but it it was it wasn't a painless process, I will say that.
30:06.294 Brandon Burton
Yeah, I can see that learning curve for sure. So one of the early episodes that I did on this podcast, I did a it was a solo episode just with myself talking about the importance of frequency and resonating with with your members. So I wanted to ask you, what is what's one action item that listeners can do to better tune in to the needs of their members? So I've I'm thinking as far as frequency and resonating, how can they tune in?
30:37.982 Lisa Hermes
Okay, so I I would say I would challenge the listeners to I think to come up with a a structured program. I I say structured program, but I think I think you've got to put things in place like this month let's let's do an online poll or I'm gonna visit as the chamber president, I'm gonna be intentional about visiting three members in these three different industry groups, right? And like creating that action plan for yourself and putting it on your calendar and doing it. But then also it's taking that information and and finding a way to communicate that with your staff. but also to communicate that with your board so that you're you're not just getting the information, but you're actually acting on it and So I'll I'll also, this might be a little off topic, I guess, but I'm sitting here staring at our three year strategic plan. And I had somebody ask me one time, like, why do you do just three years at a time? And that's because while we're currently trying to stay in tune with our members, we have to be able to be adaptable and flexible. And if our plan is five years out, ten years out, it's it's That's difficult to be that flexible, right? So so we do a three year plan and we we try to build on them. So they're not necessarily like you're getting a whole new plan every three years, but we're also able to adjust and make those make those changes based on the information that we're getting from our our members. And also our non-members. I mean, don't don't forget, I mean, we only have a penetration rate of about sixteen percent in our community. And so Our other goal is what who are we not serving? You know, if we're supposed to be the voice for business, what businesses out there are not utilizing the chamber and how can we help them?
32:44.088 Brandon Burton
That's a good point. I think it's easy to get caught up on the members and and you should. You should be trying to figure out what the needs of the members are. But like you said, you're you're the voice for business in your community, the ones that you're not getting through to, what what needs to change to get through to them? And and I think it it could be valuable to have maybe a vision that's five to ten years out, but keeping that that plan to about three years. Seems like a good sweet spot to be able to adapt and and change with the times to be able to meet that vision that's further out. So great point there. So Lisa, as we wrap things up here, I have a a question that I ask everybody that as we look to the future, how do you view chambers of commerce and their purpose?
33:30.446 Lisa Hermes
So I believe that chambers have the ability to be a leader in our community and lead business. but I also think that we have to be valuable to our members on a one-to-one basis, but I think we also have to take on community initiatives. And I think that's gonna show a lot of relevancy to to the businesses that are in our our community. Because while we have opportunities to be able to connect businesses to customers and and but we're also finding that you know that that a lot of our businesses are are now their customers may be global. So the old school networking, while it's still very popular here, is great, but as our businesses are kind of changing and their customer bases are changing and how they operate, there may not even be brick and mortar anymore. We have to find out what's important to them and take on and tackle some of those big community initiatives because we w we wanna make sure that they have a strong economy that they can operate in.
34:43.81 Brandon Burton
I think that's a great point. And as you're talking about, you know, world business, you know, businesses that service customers throughout the world, that doesn't mean that those businesses are irr are irrelevant to the chamber. It's just how can the chamber better serve those businesses, whether it's through education or, you know, any other, you know, means to be able to help them to promote their business, grow their business and and be strong in the business community. So great point there. So Lisa, I wanted to thank you for spending time with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast. And I also wanted to thank everybody for listening, tuning in today. The show notes for this episode can be found at Chamberchatpodcast.com slash episode 14. And Lisa, where can listeners connect with you if they have any questions about what was discussed today or about how you're doing things at the McKinney Chamber of Commerce?
35:35.278 Lisa Hermes
Absolutely. so email me. It's L Hermus, it's H E R as a Mary E S at McKinneyChamber dot com. call me at nine seven five four two zero one six three.
35:55.328 Brandon Burton
Right. And we will put those in the show notes as well. We'll also if it's okay with you, Lisa, we'll put some links to both your chamber website and to McKinney Online. So as people listening and want to see the difference between your two different websites and and the communication style, we'll we'll put those in the show notes as well. If you are a chamber professional who's listening, please be sure to subscribe to Chamber Chat Podcast in either Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts. And as you subscribe to the show, when new episodes are released each week, they will automatically show up in your podcast app on your phone. So they're ready to listen to whenever you're ready. If you're finding value in this podcast, please leave us a rating and review in iTunes. And most importantly, please share Chamber Chat Podcast with your colleagues that are in the industry. Hopefully you can take some tips that you learned from Lisa today and apply them as you serve in your chamber. Please tune in again next week as I continue to bring you more great content to help spark ideas. I look forward to chatting with you again next week.

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

Episode 13 — How Small Chambers Can Play Big with Shannan Reid
Clean Speaker-Labeled Transcript
Guest: Shannan Reid
Automated QA: Passed

00:00.086 Shannan Reid
If you can identify what the heartbeat is of your community and then find a way to insert your chamber into making that happen for them, then you have positioned yourself for success.
00:15.646 Brandon Burton
Our guest today is Shannan Reid from the Montgomery Area Chamber of Commerce, and Shannon shares how her small chamber of just two hundred nine members is able to play big by identifying what the heartbeat of their community is and injecting that into their chamber. Stay tuned as we learn from Shannon and from our discussion today. Let's cue the intro. This is the Chamber Chat Podcast. The show dedicated to chamber professionals to spark ideas and to get actionable tips and strategies to better serve your members and community.
00:56.814 Brandon Burton
Welcome to the Chamber Chat Podcast. I'm Brandon Burton, and it is my goal to introduce you to people and ideas so you can better serve your chamber members and your community. Our guest today is Shannan Reid, and Shannon is the director of the Montgomery Area Chamber of Commerce in Montgomery, Texas. Shannon is also a fifth generation Houstonian and a proud graduate of SciFair High School. She holds an associate's degree in fine arts and dance from Tyler Junior College, a bachelor's degree in speech communication from Stephen F. Austin, and a master's degree in educational leadership with the principal certification for secondary schools from Sam Houston State University. After having spent 11 years in the classroom and as a drill team and dance director, Shannon and her family relocated to Montgomery, Texas in 2007. What she can only describe as a God moment, Shannon began her work part-time with the Historic Montgomery Business Association in 2012 as an event coordinator for the organization. In the course of that first year, the Historic Montgomery Business Association made pivotal changes in their scope and reach of the organization. The City of Montgomery took notice of the improvements and invited Shannon to partner with the city part-time as a director of economic development. Since then, Historic Montgomery Business Association evolved officially into the Montgomery Area Chamber of Commerce in 2015. And both roles dynamically increased in influence and importance for the growth of the community. In 2018, the chamber and the city have become independent of one another, but continue to collaborate on issues and efforts of economic development for the community going forward. Shannon now serves full-time as the executive director for the Montgomery Area Chamber, and they are growing by leaps and bounds to fulfill their mission to be the trusted resource for advocacy, education, and engagement for the Montgomery community. Shannon, welcome to the Chamber Chat Podcast. Please say hello to the audience and share something interesting about yourself.
03:17.568 Shannan Reid
Well, hello, Brandon. Thank you so much for giving me this opportunity. This is so fun. What a treat. something fun about myself. Well, in that introduction, you alluded to what I call my God moment for ending up in this spot. And as I get to know chamber directors across the state and the nation, obviously I I haven't met a one yet that's Set out to do this when they were in high school and were dreaming of what they would become when they grow up, right? And so we often have a first career. And mine was obviously in education. So the funny thing about the little bubble between when I moved to Montgomery in 2007, you know, I was well on my way to a master's degree and to principal certification, and I had my sights set on being a high school principal and And all of those things I thought were lined up beautifully. But you know, sometimes God has other plans. And that's exactly what happened to me. About five years into it, of course, it only took me a couple to finish that degree in certification, but I found myself completely unemployed. it did all go as planned. And one day, I will never forget November 1st, 2011. I got a phone call that went like this. I don't know, you don't know me, and I don't even know if you're looking for a job, but I was told to give you a call. And just like that, the rest was history. It wasn't it was an amazing day. It was an amazing day. And I began in January. There's lots of other little pieces to that story, but just in summary, I began with that.
04:55.894 Brandon Burton
Yeah.
05:07.658 Shannan Reid
organization in 2012. And literally new board members, new fresh eyes, new director, and we all did that scary question why? Why are we doing things like we're doing them? And sure enough, that upturned the apple cart, didn't it? So we were able to change our scope and our vision and see the writing on the wall for what was about to happen in Montgomery County. And most people know When they hear, Conroe is the fastest growing city in the nation and Montgomery County is growing by leaps and bounds down here north of Houston. And really we're in the path of that. So when we could see the writing on the wall, we had to stop thinking small. Even though we are small, but we had to think big. Hence the title of what we decided to theme our conversations about today, our chambers in the same boat. We're small, but we have to really think big.
06:04.012 Brandon Burton
That's right. So mentioned being small, give us an idea of the Montgomery area chamber. What what does it look like member wise, budget wise? What what is small to you?
06:15.98 Shannan Reid
Right, yes. Okay. So we are right now at two hundred and nine members strong. We are on year number five. I I don't sneeze at those numbers because I've gotta say it's just been gangbusters here and some days I feel like we're just fishing in a barrel because it's such a a rich, fertile soil to find people wanting to connect. So we're a little over two hundred on our fifth year and Fortunately for us, we had come across from a business association where we already had some established big events, if you would say. So our non-duce revenue represents 70% of our, or maybe more, about 75% of our annual revenue. So we're sitting pretty strong with a 25% member. Dues. Most new startup chambers would experience, you know, the weight of membership dues. One of the things that I like to do is find ways to get that non dues revenue that isn't a burden to my current members, but turn around and take that revenue and invest in growing the strength of our members in education and advocacy and engagement. So
07:34.572 Brandon Burton
Yes, that is perfect. Great great explanation. So I know you take a lot of pride in the big things that you're able to do there at the Montgomery area chamber because you are small. can you explain how your small chamber is able to play big?
07:51.704 Shannan Reid
Well yes, so one of the things that I like to brag about us is and I gave you this word the other day, agility ability. When you're small, you're agile. And you can do it any way you want. So we're really free of any binding traditions. Now I personally love traditions. I there's nothing wrong with that. And we want to establish some of our own. But the nice thing is we entered The stream of progress later in the game when lots of things are already evolved. Take technology, for example. Back in the day, old chambers were operating, you know, on Excel spreadsheets or whatever. Or worse, doing it manual. And we get to step in with the latest version of whatever it is. We use Chambermaster, there's a million options, but
08:38.292 Brandon Burton
Or or worse, right?
08:51.026 Shannan Reid
But we get to step in and utilize the latest technology to make things very relevant and accessible to our membership. So we have a lot of benefits in that regard. And speaking of traditions, there are a lot of things that get rooted into an organization that have a hard time going away because people have an endearment, you know, a heart set on those things. But if they're no longer serving your membership. I'm a firm believer everything deserves a sunset review and you've got to be able to justify those things. So we when we start the organization from square one, knowing that we're gonna sunset everything, it really helps us to stay relevant. So that's the fun part about being small and new.
09:40.032 Brandon Burton
I love that the the term agility, ability. You know, any any smaller chambers that are listening, yeah, I would look at that as a strength, you know, with your size to be able to be agile, to be able to listen to what the needs are of your members and be able to pivot and make those changes and and like you're you know, mentioning, to create some new traditions, some things that will benefit those members instead of looking back to how things have always been done and Yeah, a agility, ability. That that's a a great phrase there.
10:14.062 Shannan Reid
I don't know. But yes, it works for us. It really does. Now don't don't get me wrong, we didn't try to be completely over here on the side separate from everyone else. We we went to some some patriarchs and and just some really solid people in the industry of chamber world to help us build our first year. we also spent a great deal of time and thought and energy into Designing our brand. So when we stepped off the very first day of twenty fifteen as a chamber, our desire was that people would think we've always been here. We've always been here. I didn't want them to doubt our
11:01.582 Brandon Burton
Credibility or anything like that.
11:04.556 Shannan Reid
Right. We needed to dis establish credibility right away. So it was the best decision our board ever made. And of course, really going out and finding the cream of the crop of the business community to do this with has been amazing. I've learned so much from all of them.
11:22.466 Brandon Burton
That is fantastic. you had mentioned maybe you know, wanting to create some traditions going forward with your chamber. Have there been any that are kind of starting to form or anything that you kind of have your eyes set towards?
11:36.802 Shannan Reid
Yes, well, a couple of fun ones that that we have enjoyed. take ambassadors for an example. Obviously we have a policy making board of directors and they're a working board. They are the leaders over my different divisions and committees or whatever. But we really needed those heartfelt champions who love to sell the chamber. In every breath, they've got chamber connected to. That comes with a type of person. I mean, it's just really a personality. And so in that ambassador role, there are lots of patterns and chambers across the state for how cham for how ambassadors look. Some of them have sport coat blazers and they take pictures at ribbon cuttings in their very traditional sense of ambassador or diplomat. then there are some nurturing groups and organizations. So what we've come to understand about who we are, and I'll insert this, pause for a second and I'll insert this. You really need every chamber big and small needs to spend time on a SWOT analysis at your board retreat, strategic planning, no matter the size, is vital because then you set the course for which every decision from there on hinges. And so when we knew who we were, As a Montgomery community, and we define by our SWOT analysis, our strategic plan, what the needs are, then we can shape and form every program we have to be falling right lockstep with that. And so when we built our ambassador program, it's unique to any other that I've met because it fits us. And that's the best part is it fits us, it fits our personality. One of the things that I say about Montgomery. the community is that we are relationship builders and we're incredibly loyal. Once we know you, we're gonna stick by you. We're gonna keep our business local. We're gonna rally around one another. Incredibly loyal. And that is a driving factor for people to understand when they come into our chamber. Well the neat thing about that is we've created that nurturing kind of atmosphere
14:01.94 Shannan Reid
around our ambassador program, right? So then they are nurturing our businesses to quickly understand this loyalty and engagement. So that's kind of one of the traditions is seeing how our ambassadors will shape our organization.
14:21.566 Brandon Burton
I'd like that example with the ambassadors. And you mentioned that the way that you're using the ambassador program fits you. It fits the needs of your members. And with any of these programs that you're establishing as a a newer, smaller chamber, you're able to really see the needs of your members and develop programs around that. Can you give us some examples of how you are able to find out the needs of your members, how you're interacting with them and and really finding out what what it is that they need from the chamber.
14:55.66 Shannan Reid
Well, yes. So we've incorporated several layers to determine the needs. And then I'm gonna even touch on, don't let me forget this. I wanna touch on how the members are telling you through their participation also. But right up front, right up front in our application for membership, we had gone the route of, you know, ask them everything, including their mother's maiden name. We went that route at first. once you get it all in the system. Then there was little need for that follow-up in the onboard process, and and you could easily assume that they're just getting your emails and getting your communications. We sp we just pulled all of that back and asked five quick questions. You know, we want their name, their phone number, email. But the last question just to register for being a member is why are you coming to be a part of the chamber? And as soon as we started asking that from the get-go, the moment that they are thinking most about it, we want to know what's their driving factor. Do you know that 95% of my responses was, I need to be engaged in this community for my business to work? So at that moment, they actually have a thought. And I didn't pre-fill the answer. They had to write it from scratch. They're all thinking along the lines of, I get it. This community is loyal, they're a relationship community, and I need to be plugged in in order to make my business work here. I'm like, man, those are the right people to be a part of this chamber. It's it's been pretty enlightening.
16:32.19 Brandon Burton
So engagement means something different to everybody though too. So how are you finding what what are you finding engagement to mean to these members?
16:42.37 Shannan Reid
That's a great question. don't let me forget to go back to those other things. So engagement definitely is when they need to know and be known in this community to create that credibility so that they're a trusted business. we do that in several ways. Obviously, we have monthly regular opportunities for them to show their face, but we also have ways for them through social media to stay in the know. and create engagement and connection to the chamber through social media avenues. And I have some that can't come to a meeting, but they stay very active online and keep their connection involved that way. Or maybe it is through a sponsorship if they're a larger corporation and they maybe can't physically come, but they can get their name and their face through the avenues that we offer. so that's th so everybody takes a little bit different route there.
17:45.614 Brandon Burton
And I think that's I guess what I was getting to is you know, some people want to be there in person and really say, Here's who I am, here's what our business does. And then other people want to be able to receive information and be able to see what's going on in the community. So then they know how to react and how to, you know, kind of cater towards the community. So I can I see engagement going both ways, you know, the give and take. So okay. Sorry to interrupt you.
18:11.244 Shannan Reid
No, that's okay. So but but back to finding out what our membership needs, you know, one of the things in that relationship building that our ambassador team does in the onboarding stages that we have for that first year member, we really want to ask them, Well, hey, what is it? What is it that you're after? What is it that you need? and I shared this recently with my ambassador team. There's a chamber director in another state that I'd heard of, and I and I haven't met him personally. I would love to, but I've heard what he says about his role as a chamber in his community, and he calls it a kick-ass problem solver. Excuse my phrase there, that's his, but I thought about that and I was completely impressed with if we could not be in business for Keeping ourselves like self-preservation as a chamber and focus on how can I solve the problem that my members have, whatever it is, whatever niche, whatever large or small, how much more value then have you brought to that community by problem solving, whatever that is? I just loved it. I was inspired. So big or small, you can be a kick-ass problem solver, right?
19:28.46 Brandon Burton
That's right. Absolutely. Everybody's got problems. And if the chamber can be that source to be able to help them answer those problems, then then that's the key. That's the that's the answer right there. So and part of that is is becoming the trusted resource for the community. People know to come to the chamber to get their problems solved, to be able to know what direction to turn towards. And I think that's a a key role for a chamber to you know, not only to stay relevant, but again, to help engage their members with everything going on in the community and and at the chamber for sure.
20:03.746 Shannan Reid
Well, you just said my favorite words, trusted resource. And so we've incorporated that into our elevator speech here for our chamber. And I gotta say, being small, a lot of the burden does fall on me. I don't have a large team or staff, but I leverage every relationship I've built to give me the information I need. to be make sure that we are the trusted resource, right? Whether it's me personally who provides it or if I can connect one person to another, right? but by being the trusted res resource, the first thing I tell my members or even when I'm prospective, you know, talking to a prospective member, I say, you need me in your speed dial. That's our funny way of saying if I don't know the answer, I know who does and I can get it for you. So the first i if your businesses aren't looking to call you first, then you've missed an opportunity.
21:05.772 Brandon Burton
That's right. I love that tagline. You need me in your speed dial. And that way they're thinking about you. That's right. Especially you know, a lot of the well as the as your chamber continues to grow and the the growth in your community in general, a lot of these new businesses are gonna be new businesses, you know, just opening and and they really do need to have you have have the chamber on their speed dial so they can get answers and have that trusted resource at their fingertips, literally. To be able to point point them in the right direction.
21:39.476 Shannan Reid
Okay, so I'll take it even a step further. In larger chambers, I imagine it would be difficult to do this. And there is an old school now. This goes back to the grandfather's chamber mindset of business, but that the executive director or the CEO is a bit above the rest. He's a bit untouchable. She's a bit untouchable. So if you take that mindset of I know everyone in this community, whether I do or not, we won't tell them that. But that I should know everyone in this community and that I have the latest and hottest, freshest resource understanding of what's happening. So if I then cut aside all of the hierarchy and I say to my new member that has just joined, here is my cell phone. Plug it into your phone right now. Put my name on it. It's my cell phone directly to me. Then I have them send me a text with their name and I plug it into my phone and I've got them in there and it's all I'm talking for all 209 members and their reps, I don't mind. But if their name comes up with their business on my phone, I will answer it and I will get them the information they need. Now, how much further does my credibility then or ours as a chamber then leverage the value? Right? Whether they use that phone number or not, they've got it.
23:08.524 Brandon Burton
That's right. Yeah. That that's right. And I I like, you know, you mentioned for these big chambers where the executive, the CEO seems untouchable. We're in a a digital world now too. So I would say, you know, utilize your social media and make sure your members are engaging in that way too, to see you, you know, to see the chamber CEO on Facebook or Instagram or whatever it is. And they can kind of feel like they've got a relationship there to some degree, even if, you know, they can't necessarily be on the speed dial because there's two thousand members. You know, I but and that may still be a great option to be able to give your cell phone number out and let people know that you are reachable. And you also have great competent staff that can help them as well. So if you get the call, you know, you can direct the right person to give them the best answers they're looking for.
24:04.948 Shannan Reid
Exactly. When you do that the first time, you've got a fan right away. You do it the you do it twice, you're they're you're in for life, right?
24:14.454 Brandon Burton
That's right. Absolutely. So I'm curious for any smaller chambers that may be listening right now, what is what's one action item that they can do to start playing big in their chamber?
24:32.494 Shannan Reid
Well, one of your previous podcasts talked about relevance. And I gotta say, if you can with the board have a set aside your regular minutes, financials, whatever, and hone in on your one thing that makes your community tick, that makes that makes your businesses survive or thrive. So in some locations that may be very corporate based in some locations like Montgomery, we're a touristy place, birthplace of the Texas flag, all of that. We're we've got that element to it. If you can identify what the heartbeat is of your community and then find a way to insert your chamber into making that happen for them, then you have positioned yourself for success. Now Big or small events along those lines are are not the point. But when you can insert yourself into the storyline of your community and make yourself a piece that can't be done without, you know what I'm saying? Then you are set for success. Now that's gonna look different for different places. When we first started the chamber and I was learning what a chamber's role was, remember I'm from education, I was a dance teacher. So, you know, I'm off gallivanting to New York City and Broadway and whatnot, but all of a sudden I'm having a learning curve and I s and I hear from so many. And some get very passionate that the chamber's role should be about government affairs and leveraging, you know, the ear of your elected officials. Others, on the other hand, feel like the civic side of things where you're hosting events and so forth. I've really determined that every community, if you can get to the heartbeat. What your community thrives off of, and insert yourself in the middle of that, then you're gonna be okay. And it doesn't matter what your neighbor's chamber is doing, because we have six chambers in Montgomery County, and every one of us are different. And that's wonderful because there are times when we come together as a county of chambers, and someone else is carrying the torch, and we're there cheering them on, and we're we're supporting.
26:51.096 Shannan Reid
But we don't have to be the front runner. And so by doing the thing that's best for you, you're going to increase your credibility, you're going to increase your awareness and your and your membership base just from that.
27:05.194 Brandon Burton
I love that. Great advice. And you had mentioned inserting whatever that is in your community. And I'm gonna add amplify. Yeah, insert and amplify whatever that is for your community to to your chamber and and that's where the success will come through.
27:20.802 Shannan Reid
Right. And it's okay to let other things fall away. That's why I say sunset review is good. and this is the thing I wanted to come back to. And it's on this same line. We recently had an event that I loved. I just thought it was brilliant. I'm not gonna lie. I thought it was so brilliant. And within two years it dwindled to nothing and we had to cancel it. And I thought, how did I miss that so much? Well, what each year brings has you have to pay attention. So by my membership not engaging and participating in that particular event, it actually in turn tells me that's not where their focus is right now. You need to see where their focus is and get with that. Because if you stay over here and try to, you know, keep yourself going, you know, yourself perpetuating, then then that's not serving them and their needs. So we have to sunset that.
28:21.634 Brandon Burton
Well, and that's gonna create a lot more work for you too, if you don't have the support behind it and it all falls on your shoulders to make it happen, rather than having a group that's excited about it and helping to, you know, pitch in and and make it come through. It it it it is important to self evaluate and see, you know, are the members getting the engagement out of this that that they should. And if not, you know, let's revisit that and and sunset it if needs be. I know that that's controversial for a lot of a lot of people. You know, talk about putting a program to bed. It's you really gotta take that strong, hard look at some of these things.
28:59.96 Shannan Reid
Well, and if you go into it always with the mindset that it isn't forever. You know, we have a hard time with that as human beings. We don't like things that go away because we get comfortable in them. But honestly w each year brings a different theme. I've noticed twenty nineteen to be very hard hitting. Have you the calendars are full, the the work is big, the the pressures are strong. And my members are focusing on learning something new. And it's so funny that I happened to do a little pep talk, if you will, in January about learning something new. And I'll just bridge it to this. Back, you know, 30, 40, 50 years ago, when we would say learn something new, it was probably historically speaking, we were expanding our knowledge from behind us. But today You have to learn something new because the entire landscape with which you are doing business is changing every day. And their learning means make it or don't make it. They're gonna survive if they learn new, right? Whether it's in in new currencies or new ways to get money or new ways to reach clients or new so many new things that didn't even exist five years ago. They have to learn. So education has been what twenty nineteen has really focused us on. That's why my other little event, which wasn't about education at all, went away.
30:35.99 Brandon Burton
Well, I love it the whole idea of learn something new. And when you think of the day and age that we live in, it used to be that you needed to find a book on whatever the topic is and learn it, or sit through formal education. And nowadays with the internet and you know, different resources out there, that's why I love the format of a podcast so much is we with the idea of being able to learn something new every day, whether it's this podcast, the chamber chat podcast, or any other podcast. I mean you could check out ones on social media, being an influencer that way, or just marketing in general, or business in general. There's every different type of topic out there with podcasts. And you don't need to sit and be dedicated reading a book. You can listen while you're driving or going for a walk or, you know, whatever you're doing in life, but you're able to incorporate learning something new every day, which I think is so vital. So thank you for bringing that up.
31:31.956 Shannan Reid
It is. Well, along those lines, you know, being small, one of the things that we've identified right away was our geography, our target audience for for membership in the mature version of ourselves. And we our city is about four square miles, city of Montgomery. It's about thirty percent developed. So the bulk of our audience is not inside the city, but our retail trade area established It's similar to our school district. It's about 256 square miles and about 53,000 plus people residents. As opposed to our little city who barely broke a thousand this year. Woohoo! so fifty-three thousand in this lake area, very affluent community north of Houston, resort style residences. So one of the things that we realized is our membership.
32:15.903 Brandon Burton
huh.
32:31.128 Shannan Reid
To come engage, I'm threading all of our thoughts here together now, but to get engaged and come show up to something is not a quick five minutes down the road and they jump in on a lunch and leave and get back to work and it just, you know, takes an hour of their day. Instead, you've got to stop what you're doing, you've got to drive an hour to wherever you're going, get all situated, do the event, turn around, and by the time you've done. Just for a little lunch, you've lost more than half your day. So for a solopreneur for a very small business, this isn't something they can just drop and do two, three times a month. It's not feasible to them. But in the Learn Something New category, it's hard out here in the northwest corner of Montgomery County to get access to education physically to drive somewhere. or or to attend classes or workshops. So they are reliant, as you said, online to hear a lot of this stuff. But a lot of our businesses are busy doing the thing right in front of them. Right? The thing right in front of them. And they don't have time to research where to get a class online, where to find it. But if I'm that trusted resource and I'm in their speed dial, if if I've built that kind of relationship, Come let me supply and be that kick-ass problem solver for you. Then what we're after this year is when we host a training or a workshop, we're now recording them and we're uplinking them into our member base. So once they log in, they have access to all this training. And we're continuing to build our library so that we can get them those resources so they don't have to figure out all of the places they can get training from. Now, if we can provide some of that, then they'll have the wide or variety of trainings they need. You know, most small businesses, they go into business for the thing they love. And then they quickly realize they also have to be an expert at marketing and at payroll. Yeah. And and at whatever, you know, and it's daunting. It really is. And if they were just a hobbyist enjoying, you know,
34:52.015 Shannan Reid
some cute little pottery but now all of a sudden they want to make that a business, they've got a learning curve to make up for. And so we're gonna be trying to connect all of our leveraging, like Small Business Development Center, Lawnstar College, all of the expertise within our own membership to provide all these workshop trainings. And if they can't make it and we record it, then they can get it anytime or go back and listen to it again.
35:20.514 Brandon Burton
I love that. That is a excellent summary of everything that we've talked about. Just all wrapped up and put a a pretty bow on it. That's I mean, make the education opportunities available. Make it evergreen, you know, for your for your members. So they if they are not able to be at the event, make it available and and make sure they know where to find it. Be that trusted resource. I love it. So Shannon, I know we need to start wrapping things up here, but I wanted to ask the question that I ask everybody. Is as we look to the future, how do you view chambers of commerce and their purpose?
35:56.014 Shannan Reid
That is a great question. I've been asking myself that since we started this whole thing. Because honestly, I don't want to go into this to do the same old thing when we have the opportunity with our agility ability to be right up at the front, right? And to be a
36:14.434 Brandon Burton
You have a neat you have a unique perspective coming at it as a newer chamber, kind of planning for the future as you're in the beginning.
36:22.562 Shannan Reid
I do. So, you know, I see the shape of business that we need to evermore be available in membership before they ever put a foot through the door. We have to provide value on the front end. And I say that in relationship to what they get online right now. So understand this. If I go online and I'm shopping for something. I want to experience the benefit of whatever I want out of the product or service immediately. I want it to download immediately. I want to access it immediately. I don't want to have to wait to go to something to get it. We need to, as chambers, stop saying, well, you get out of it what you put into it, and expect them to come go away from their business that they have to stay at to keep alive. We can't continue to say that. We need to be able to provide benefit the moment they hit submit on membership.
37:25.032 Brandon Burton
I like that. I I haven't heard that perspective before, but becoming more of an on demand resource is what I what I get out of that.
37:33.442 Shannan Reid
There you go. That's a great way to see that. I like it. So how can we get away from the traditional version and get our benefits right at their fingertips from the moment they say yes?
37:47.084 Brandon Burton
That is awesome. I love that. It this is so neat having this this perspective that you have, building a new chamber right now and planning for the future along the same line you know at the same time. Yeah. Really, you know, gives sheds some new light on on how things can be looked at. Shannon, I wanted to thank you so much for spending time with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast. And also wanna thank everybody who's listening. We'll have show notes for this episode at Chamberchat Podcast dot com slash episode thirteen. And Shannon, if if listeners wanted to get in contact with you about any questions or anything that was discussed today or how their small chamber can play big, how can they reach out to you?
38:35.894 Shannan Reid
Absolutely. It's been so much fun, Brandon. I would love to visit with other chamber directors who have questions. first of all, our website, go check it out and see what you think about what we're doing. It's Montgomery Area Chamber.com. And then our office number, nine three six five nine seven. Five zero zero four. You can reach us up here at the office. And because I already put myself out there, I'm gonna give you my cell number. Nine three six five two four two four eight four. And if you text me, which is always better for a quick introduction, just say, Hey, I got this from the podcast, and then I'll I'll be able to catch it. But My email address directly is admin admin at MontgomeryareaCamber dot com.
39:33.886 Brandon Burton
That is perfect. And we'll put all those the all that contact information on the show notes. So anybody that can if you're driving, you don't need to try to write it all down. Just go to chamber chatpodcast.com slash episode thirteen and all of Shannon's contact information will be in there. if you're a chamber professional listening, please subscribe to Chamber Chat Podcast and either Apple Podcast or Google Podcast. And as you subscribe to the show I actually had to explain this to my dad this last week. There's no cost to subscribe to the show. It's all free. So what it means to subscribe is it it gives permission for the each new episode to automatically download to your podcast app whenever they become available. So then you're ready to listen to it. They're there whenever you're ready. So if you're finding value in this podcast, please go on to iTunes and leave us a rating and review that'll help other chamber professionals to be able to find this podcast as well. But hopefully you can all take some tips and things that we've learned from Shannon today and apply them as you serve in your chamber. And please tune in again next week as I continue to bring you more great content to help you spark ideas. I look forward to chatting with you again next week.

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

Episode 12 — How a Chamber Fits in After a Disaster with Diane Probst
Clean Speaker-Labeled Transcript
Guest: Diane Probst
Automated QA: Passed

00:05.368 Diane Probst
Hello everybody, this is George Strait, and I've traveled all over, yet there's no place I'd rather be than right here in Texas. One of my favorite places is the Rockport Fulham area on the coast. Every time I cross over the Copanova Bridge and see that beautiful bay, it feels like home. I hope you find yourself in Rockport, Texas soon.
00:13.292 Brandon Burton
One of my rock tonight every time I bridge and
00:29.622 Brandon Burton
You may be wondering why George Strait is opening this episode for us. Stay tuned as we find out how the Rockport Fulton Chamber of Commerce was able to get the voice of George Strait to help bring back tourism to their area after Hurricane Harvey. Let's cue the intro. This is the Chamber Chat Podcast, the show dedicated to chamber professionals to spark ideas and to get actionable tips and strategies to better serve your members and community.
01:02.03 Brandon Burton
Welcome to the Chamber Chat Podcast. I'm Brandon Burton, and it is my goal to introduce you to people and ideas so you can better serve your Chamber members and your community. This episode marks our tenth interview that we've had here on Chamber Chat Podcast. And I wanted to thank all of you who have been listening from episode one. And if this is your first time listening, you can find previous episodes in your podcast app. By searching Chamber Chat Podcast, or you can find them at Chamberchatpodcast.com/slash episodes. Our guest today is Diane Propse. She's the president and CEO of the Rockport Fulton Chamber of Commerce and the Rockport Fulton Chamber Foundation. She joined the team in 1990 and has not slowed since. Through promotion, through promotion, leadership, advocacy. Networking and economic growth, she has taken the chamber to new heights while leading a nationally accredited organization for more than twenty nine years. Under her leadership, the Rockport Fulton Chamber was the third chamber in Texas to receive a five star accreditation. Her education began at Texas AM University and College Station, where she earned her degree in marketing. She continually seeks opportunities to keep learning, building and revitalizing. programs for the Rockport Fulton community by attending additional industry certifications, attaining rather additional industry certifications. She's a graduate of the U.S. Chamber Institute for Organizational Management and a certified chamber executive from the American Chamber of Commerce Executives. She also completed the economic development course at Texas AM University and the University of Oklahoma Center for Chamber of Commerce Excellence Program. She was a past chairman of the Texas Chamber of Commerce Executives in 2008. She's a proud recipient of the 2012 Marvin Hurley Award, that organization's highest award. A big part of why she loves the industry is being able to help share with her team across the country tips, tricks, and lessons learned along the way. Along with speaking opportunities, board training facilitation, and business blogging, she launched her book.
03:26.414 Brandon Burton
Titled Chamberology in 2014. She is currently working on a second book titled When the Storm Comes that will be co-authored with her daughter. She takes pride in inspiring a chamber professional's potential for building and maintaining a five-star organization. What really keeps her going is her husband Mike and their two grown daughters, Alyssa and her husband Doug, and Ashley and her husband Cody. They have four grandchildren. Ben, Connor, Campbell, and Archie, and a fifth grandchild Paige is on the way due in April. Diane, please say hello to the Chamber Chat Podcast audience and share something interesting about yourself, beyond your books and your grandchildren and all the other great things that you have going on.
04:14.51 Diane Probst
Well, good morning, Brandon. that was interesting to hear you read back my bio. Lispara's something interesting about me, I think it's unique and interesting that a person would start at the age of thirty working for a chamber of commerce and as they pr approach their sixtieth birthday, still be at the same chamber, same location, and The same organization. That's truly, I think, incredible.
04:49.198 Brandon Burton
You must like it there or else you just don't have any other options. I don't know. I'm just kidding.
04:55.222 Diane Probst
Well, you know, it it's it's just a truly I guess each and every day is truly unique and I approach it with an enthusiastic approach. it fulfills or it's extremely gratific gratifying to me to be part of the chamber world and what it can do for the community and what it can inspire and grow and develop for communities.
05:23.478 Brandon Burton
That's great. It sounds like you found your niche and your place right here in the chamber industry. So great job. Thank you. can you share with us a little bit about the size of the Rockport Fulton Chamber so we can all relate to the chamber to your chamber a little bit better, maybe like membership, budget size, staff, things like that.
05:41.592 Diane Probst
Sure. our chamber currently has around seven hundred members. Our county's population is twenty-five thousand. We serve the cities in the county of Rockport and Fulton. So a very small county. In fact, i as far as Texas are one of the smallest counties. so that seven hundred members generates about two hundred thousand dollars in membership dues. And that's out of a but total budget of right at a million dollars. So the community here is very tourism oriented. We're right on the coast, right above Corpus Christi. And the imp the impetus is to bring tourists to the area. It's not to bring industry to the area. So that's how we are able to keep the chamber afloat is through tourism, whether it be events, tourism dollars, what have you.
06:41.538 Brandon Burton
That's great. So that's interesting too to look at you know one fifth of the budget about is is coming from dues, where the rest is, you know, basic four fifths coming from non-dues, you know, other other options out there. So that's fantastic. Yeah. so our our topic of discussion today that that we'll be going over is how a chamber fits in after a disaster. As we discuss this topic, I want to point out and and I'm sure everybody listening can think of examples in their region or their area, their their community where different potential for disasters might exist. some areas, like we'll be talking about today, you know, hurricanes are a very real threat. Other areas maybe tornadoes or earthquakes, wildfires, disease, terrorism, you know, it could be any number of different types of disaster. So just wanted to kind of plant that seed, keep that in mind as we have our discussion today. And Diane is gonna share with us some things that she's learned through recent disaster that can be applied, you know, to other chambers too, to to be able to have a plan of action maybe and some kind of preparedness for when disaster does happen. So Diane, I know this topic is near and dear to your heart. Can you please share with the with the audience why it's so important to you?
08:08.76 Diane Probst
Sure, absolutely. So as far as a hurricane hitting our area, we have not been touched by a hurricane in a drastic way since 1970. So we had dodged the bullet for all those years. And my tenure here at the chamber, annually we get together, we do mock drills, we have an evacuation plan, we go to conferences, we have a crisis. plan we our EOC emergency operations center meets anytime there's a disaster we start meeting at the ten, four and ten hours going over the disaster as soon as we're going over the situation and as soon as we're cleared, we usually end those meetings. But this time when Hurricane Harvey struck us on August the twenty fifth, two thousand and seventeen We began meeting that Wednesday prior to the storm hitting on that Friday night. Wednesday morning at ten o'clock, I did not know that the storm was hitting our area. I remember staff telling staff at the time, it's just a tropical storm. we'll be fine. And then Thursday morning, same meeting at ten o'clock, the tides had turned. The we were given twenty hours to get out of our peninsula. Now you keep in mind we're a peninsula where you to get out of the peninsula you have to go over bridges to to leave here. So we need to evacuate first and fast. So the community really pulled together and everybody was in mo the mode to take care of themselves, take care of their business, and head out of town. Well about forty percent of those of the people stayed. and you can imagine the horror stories there. But I was going to be the hero of the community. I had worked my way into the EOC in the sense of protecting the businesses. And I would give reports as far as how many businesses, what was happening, whether it be w who had what ice, what was this, what was that. I had my finger on the pulse of and of that aspect of the community. So what I'm trying to say is within that EOC
10:33.964 Diane Probst
I established a need for the chamber to be there. And eventually worked my way at each of those meetings where I had a a seat designated for the chamber. And I think that's first and foremost. Do that now with your emergency management teams wherever you are. Have a seat at the table. And then during the preparations for the storm, I was going to be the hero and I even to Thursday night prior to the storm hitting. At that ten o'clock meeting, I noticed where the crowd wasn't seventy, seventy-five, one hundred people anymore in those meetings. It was fifteen. And I was one of those fifteen. So you start to realize you weren't pressured in any way to be there. It wasn't it wasn't put upon you that that you must stay. But when the National Weather Service was on the line saying that we were going to be ground zero. And a they could give us the hours, the speed of the wind, the amount of rain, the conditions, the tide conditions, every single thing about us. They they they were giving us exact information. It was incredible. I knew at that time when they said, Okay, and th this amount of hours you're gonna not have toilets, tele electricity, internet. And pretty much when they got to internet, that it was about ten o'clock at night, that's when I decided, you know, that's my connection to the community, that's my connection to the members. That I'm an information gatherer, I'm a source for people to listen to, and I can't communicate. So we need to get out of town. So we headed in the middle of the night, Thursday night, about three hours inland, and set up at one of our relatives' kitchen tables and we had all everything we needed was all web based. So we kept our chamber running at the kitchen table. And during the hurricane all through that we were getting fa Facebook messages and chat messages and Instagram messages and emails like you would not believe. incredible from the just incredible amounts of information. You are a reliable source, you're a trusted source.
12:58.438 Diane Probst
in your community and they wanted to hear from you. So we started about three or four hours into the storm, we started getting dings as far as how can we help? How can we give? What do y'all need? We'll be there for you. All of those sorts of things. So I had to get our millennial daughters to help me. Go to the website, craft this message, go to the Facebook response deal, say this 'cause you're gonna you need someone fast and quick that can help you. And so just keep that in mind. And as we were able to establish links, we noticed that we needed a donation link. So we quickly formed a GoFundMe account. Well I had already formed that for another event a three to four minutes months prior to that. So just things were just falling into place.
13:58.668 Brandon Burton
Yeah.
14:02.584 Diane Probst
So things were falling into place for us just incredibly. And the GoFundMe link ended up being we ended up being the repository for all humanitarian funds and that fund grew to one point four million dollars for the community. Wow. Because I acted quickly, I stepped up and and took leadership took a leadership role and started making things happen. And so your chamber had I would I would have never thought of a of being the recipient of so many dollars here, but I knew we could do it and I knew we were the organization most equipped to handle that volume of donations.
14:50.136 Brandon Burton
That's right. Wow, that is impressive. I mean you guys kind of had the advantage, I guess, of seeing the storm coming. You know, being able to make some preparations or some kind of you know, scramble of a plan. after the storm hit, how did you see the chamber kind of settling in? You you mentioned the GoFundMe and everything, but how did you deploy to start helping the community after the storm hit?
15:18.126 Diane Probst
Well, everybody fell into their roles and it's amazing of the emergency management system. Those that can handle a difficult situation will rise to the top. Leaders will rise to the top. Leaders within your chamber will rise to the top and can and qu be quick on their feet and handle things. There will be people that step back and cannot. All they can do in a time of crisis is follow. So keep that in mind. what we found is information was a huge problem. social media was going crazy. There were groups being formed right and left in terms of a group for handling insurance needs, a group for handling food donations, a group for just all sorts of groups were but they were giving out misinformation, wrong information. So we became the trusted source for information along with our newspaper and other sources. What we did is we formed a team and we worked together to get on top of the information that was needed very quickly. So the chamber would develop an email and we would be very clear and concise in our email and broadcast that about every two hours. So no matter where you were, you were getting our emails. That same email link was then placed on social media at all this all the different platforms. And then that our mayor was able to develop a link and we were passing that link out daily. The chamber was at each of those meetings. we were meeting three times a day. So the chamber would get the information and push it out to the community. So I guess the information area was tremendous. If I could do it differently, I would develop a social media team and I would have several people just data mining, you know, just grabbing the information that was out there and charting it for you so that you could handle that because it was massive the amount of information that was coming through and the amount of information that was needed. It started slipping on us as far as being able to keep track of all of that. Right.
17:35.512 Brandon Burton
So at what point sorry, at what point did the lines of communication start to open up again? Now you mentioned sending the emails and stuff out, but when internet was down for a while and power and things like that, what kind of turnaround did you see before people could start accessing those lines of communication?
17:52.806 Diane Probst
it it was j varied per individual or per business. So when the power's out, so many people didn't have the internet. They relied on cell towers. Well, when the the cell towers were down, it I would say it took at least two weeks for our power to come back on. Our electric power company AEP was outstanding. when we we heard the They were coming, we had no idea they would send five thousand five hundred white pickup trucks to our area. We quickly established our local airport as their staging area. So that was a extremely strategic move for us. And we quickly got them food. different connections, chambers across Texas called us, what can we do? We said we need 400 sandwiches in two hours. know, just just incredible things like that that you would never think of. But you as a chamber have access to so many people and things and places that you have a real part in that emergency management team picture. You can make things happen for your community. So we really singled into the information area and that was for about three months getting the right information out. The amount of donations, the the the different people that were coming into town to volunteer, all of that kind of settled into its places and roles. We were just able to get the information out. So since then we've formed with chambers in the region and are looking at solar paneled kiosks as a very good thing for chambers in in disasters that could be web based and we could feed information to those kiosks and y and be able to bring internet to those kiosks so that it would be an automatic draw at the time of the disaster. You knew where those kiosks are and you can come and get the internet at that time. Or finding internet hotspots all over town on bridges and things like that until they could
20:04.823 Brandon Burton
That's a great idea.
20:11.922 Diane Probst
get so that they could get information. They were just starving for information.
20:15.958 Brandon Burton
Yeah. I I love that idea of the solar kiosk. That's great.
20:20.236 Diane Probst
Yeah. And then the ne the last area that we fell into was rebuild of the economy. We realized that events were like magnets. We had to get the c economy circulating, the money circulating within the community. So within six weeks we set the example for the community and held our annual fundraiser. It's a forty five year old festival and we were able to create that that event against everyone. There were so many people, so much backlash for us stepping up and leading and doing that event. But we knew we had to. We had to we had to get convinced people that think norm the normal normalcy was near us. We had to, you know, establish that. And once the music started playing and the people started walking through the gates and the everybody understood why we did it. But until we did that, we received about Fifty percent of the people here were negative against the chamber. Why is the chamber doing this? We're broken, we're miserable, we've got a lot of difficulties. I cannot believe this is happening. And then the other half were saying, Go, Chamber, we need you. Thanks for being our leader, you know. So it was a real try situation. But that set the example. So then the next month the film festival was held here. And then the next month another outfit came here. So it it's it it was the impetus to start many, many events. People started to understand how they would bring be magnets for our community and bring people to our community.
21:57.202 Brandon Burton
And being able to take advantage of that, of being a magnet and being able to say, Okay, now we're we're rebuilt and we're are e even still in the process, but you know, things are gonna be okay and we're moving forward.
22:08.578 Diane Probst
And this the world is wonderful. They will respond to you in so many ways when you're in in a disaster. the when we held that event, it was the sixth best ever. that's pretty tremendous after being hit by a category four hurricane and in six weeks' time had the sixth best seafare ever. That was it was pretty awesome. And then we fell right into a comeback campaign.
22:32.632 Brandon Burton
It's great.
22:36.812 Diane Probst
where we were able to get the voice of George George Strait on our commercials. So it was really really, really tremendous. We had another pro bono individual who came forward and said Don't worry I will help y'all and he was able to d develop a brand for us that was very colorful, exciting, and then he helped us get George Strait lined up.
23:04.839 Brandon Burton
I was gonna say so how did that happen with George Strait? 'Cause that doesn't just happen. Somebody knew somebody or pulled some
23:10.72 Diane Probst
Right, and he has a second, third, fourth home here in in Rockport on the water here. And he comes here every month or so for a nice, quiet getaway. So he he co he came here and the governor actually brought him here and he c just couldn't believe what all we were going through and he said, I can help and and we ask him to we'll record this and he said, Absolutely. And so I'd love to for you to include that link at the end of this podcast if you could.
23:43.756 Brandon Burton
Yeah, we can do that and or have a link in the show notes. But yes, definitely. we'll we'll get that included so everybody can hear that. That's great.
23:51.476 Diane Probst
And another thing that we did was small business grants. We were able to raise almost a half million dollars through foundations, through donations, through events to raise money for small businesses. And then we established a very simple form on Google Forms to for people to fill out an application establishing their need and and their amount that they need and we were able to contribute to the community through cat through checks. nearly a a half million dollars.
24:24.544 Brandon Burton
That's awesome. What a blessing to these businesses to try to get back on their feet. Yeah.
24:29.294 Diane Probst
Yes. So building the economy was an area and still is an area where we're just really focused on our EDC, our our all of our businesses, and I'll ha very proud to say that ninety three percent of the businesses are open.
24:49.07 Brandon Burton
That is great.
24:51.17 Diane Probst
Great. It's great. It's still a difficult time. I don't wanna paint a beautiful picture. It's a difficult time. These businesses were surveying them and they're they're reporting falling sales, in need for workers, you know, there are issues, but we're they're open and we're so proud of them for being open.
25:10.68 Brandon Burton
So I wanted to maybe step back just a a second. earlier you had mentioned you know, after the storm you're working remotely, you know, from a kitchen table about three hours inland. and that you had you said if you were to do it over again, you'd establish a social media, you know, platform to or not platform, but a presence to get information out. Were there other things that you learned, you know, looking back in hindsight that maybe you'd want to do differently or just seeing it firsthand? To think, you know, if there is a next time we w we're gonna be prepared by doing, you know, XYZ.
25:47.02 Diane Probst
Yes, absolutely. First thing is get out and visit with other communities and what they did and go larger than your community because they're gonna ar have things established that you can establish on your level that are just gonna be so great. So I went to Houston and the Houston emergency management team had a twelve member social media team and they had a couple of videographers, they had a couple of data miners and then it it interviewers, just different people on their twelve person team that were key to tackling this social media issue. people were in Houston, I know if you remember, it was a flood there. So they were posting on social media, come help us. So they had to respond to it in terms of an emergency. Well, ours is was mostly afterwards. We had n only one death here. We're very grateful for that. and we didn't have the emergency issue, but afterwards we had the information issue with getting the correct information out to the community.
27:03.022 Brandon Burton
Wow. so overall, how would you say, you know, getting through this disaster, this hurricane, how has it changed the community as a whole?
27:15.142 Diane Probst
it's been a tremendous amount of first thing I'll say is is changing the spirit of the community, making us more of a less competitive community into a more giving and heartfelt community. So that's been good. Teamwork among the elected officials versus pitting against each other. We had to be one voice, we had to give out all give out the same information and all get on one page or it was going to be a disaster. So we did that very well. we had a strong mayor, he's a two star general and he did an extremely good job of controlling the public information and giving out accurate information. So that's key. another area that I've seen our community change is the silver lining. We have had The federal government, the state agencies, philanthropic efforts just have their eye on Rockport Fulton. So right now we have thirteen projects underway. We're getting a new b gym built by Ellen DeGeneres and the Lowe's team. We're getting a new convention center on our harbor along with a new pier where Yeti Corporation is contributing toward that. We're getting a new Rockport Center for the Arts performing an event center where Rebuild Texas, the Stillwater Foundation, and Rebuild Texas is contributing toward that along with the federal government. That is starting the projects along the harbor, such as a marina project, an education center project. We're getting a new courthouse and a new city hall through that. that city hall and courthouse, those organis or those two entities don't normally work together really well or they're building a common facility because that's the only way we can make it happen. And they're taking the dollars that were generated through the storm and using those or through the federal government because of the storm and using those to leverage other organizations and to do a thirty million dollar project together.
29:42.902 Diane Probst
So that's going to be a we call we're calling it the downtown anchor project. And that's going to be the impetus for a lot for our downtown area. So silver lining and a lot of building projects that normally you build one or two a year, where this is 13, all happening in the year 2020, 2021, and 2020.
30:03.406 Brandon Burton
That's amazing. That definitely is a silver lining. I mean you'd hate to go through what you had to get through to to get the silver lining, but wow, that's gonna really help the community and the jobs and you know everything else that's going on there that and you know, becoming more of a destination than you already were, you know, where you're a tourism driven chamber. Right. That that's great. Now how about individually? How did I'm curious how this this whole experience has affected you as a person.
30:32.77 Diane Probst
Well gosh, unbelievably we were our doors were open as far as the chamber that Monday after the storm. The building behind us was the courthouse fully destroyed by a tornado. The building to the right of us was a strip center, fully destroyed by a tornado. Our building just stood tall and we were able to op open up. And I think Personally, our house, a few shingles, the fence, the ceiling fans on the outdoor patio, you know, just small things we were able to repair really quickly. my and same thing with my husband's business. And I'm I have no kids living here, so personally we poured ourselves into working for the community. we didn't have We we just focused everything on the community. So for us, we were able to really do good for the community. But imagine if our the chamber and my husband's business were destroyed. If that were to happen, we would have been things would have been a lot different.
31:41.57 Brandon Burton
For sure. Wow. That is it it's hard to imagine if if things went just a little bit differently. Wow. Yes.
31:51.528 Diane Probst
And you know, just in our community we lost every apartment complex, we lost every condominium complex. All of our hotels were non-operational for at least months. we're on we're at fifty-three percent operational right now with our hotels. So the potential of what that could have been if this chamber would have been destroyed. you know, we would have gone to another building and opened up but it just the difficulty of that. We walked into our desks on Monday and they were they were fine. It was amazing. It was just amazing. Very mu very grateful. Very, very grateful.
32:30.52 Brandon Burton
Yeah.
32:38.318 Brandon Burton
So I wanted to ask w what's one maybe action item that listeners can do at their chamber to be better prepared to be able to react to any disaster that may come their way?
32:52.226 Diane Probst
Let's see, I guess a crisis plan is important. Although I didn't come that Monday morning and go pull up my plan and look that's right what the to do list was in the plan. But I knew the plan because I had done the plan ahead of time. We're a five star chamber, so you're required to have that crisis management plan together. So by doing it, I knew what to do. And if you're not gonna step up and be the leader, if that's not you, then step out of the way and find someone who will be that leader and get out there and champion the effort for your community because chambers are strong. Chambers are are are important to the community. And so find your role, establish your role, and be involved with your emergency management center.
33:47.318 Brandon Burton
I think that's great advice. so kind of a a variation of a question that I ask to everybody that's on the show. you've shared some great examples today of the purpose of your chamber there in your community. But as we look to the future, how do you view chambers of commerce and their purpose?
34:07.692 Diane Probst
think chambers will you know very focused chambers will focus on the business community and the innovation innovative aspects of the business community and we've got to be very innovative since so much is going online. So I I've noticed also where information and giving information informing the public with newspapers having difficulties educating the community, covering all of the information in those government meetings. Advocacy is gonna be extremely important. watching a watchdog for your governments, making sure that the checks and balances are there, I think it's gonna be an important role of the chamber in establishing public policy.
34:57.696 Brandon Burton
I think that's words of wisdom right there. so Diane, I I also wanted to to give you a chance. you know, the the audience for this show is other chamber professionals. I know as we mentioned in the intro, you've got your book, Chamberology. You wanna just tell people that may not have heard about your book what it's about, and and maybe if you want to give a preview about your upcoming book as well.
35:26.542 Diane Probst
Sure. So chamberology was just my way. I've I get asked to do a lot of board retreats and how did I do this or how did I do that? And chamberology just captures all of that. one of my favorite chapters in the books is ideas for chamber luncheons, just things to provoke thought. the most favorite chapter in the book is a carrot to cope. Make sure that you have things out there in terms of travel if you enjoy travel or some sort of fun activity as a carrot after while you're creating some sort of huge activity for your chamber. Put your carrot carrots to cope in place so you've got something to look forward to. And then the my second book When the Storm Comes, my daughter and I became very close even closer during the storm because I had to have her help with that young mind to capture everything with the storm. And we're writing a book with lessons learned. So we present the chapter and then we establish lessons learned and we're providing reference links for all of that information w of where we got different aspects of information. There's a lot of help out there, but you won't you won't get you won't use the help immediately, but what this book what I'm thinking is that you can read it and it'll it'll be one of those mind provoking things but when you need it you'll remember.
37:09.098 Brandon Burton
Yeah. So when when would you anticipate the the second book, when the storm comes, when that
37:14.238 Diane Probst
It's gonna be ready at the first of July.
37:17.166 Brandon Burton
Okay. well we'll put a a link to cham chamberology in the show notes here. So if people would like to check it out, it probably the easiest way is just we'll probably put a link on Amazon for it. I assume it's there. And then if you want to even shoot me an email once you're once when the storm comes and we can update the show notes and and put a link for that in there as well. Just so people can can reference that. You bet. well I I wanted to to thank you, Diane, for spending time with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast. I wanted to thank everybody who's listening for sticking around here. show notes for this episode can be found at Chamberchat Podcast dot com slash episode twelve. Diane, where can listeners connect with you if they have any questions about what was discussed today or how you're doing other things there at the Rockport Fulton Chamber?
38:14.444 Diane Probst
Sure, contact me at email president at one rockport dot org or cell phone three hundred six one four six three one five eight five or hook up on Facebook Rockport Fulton Chamber or Diane Probst.
38:34.114 Brandon Burton
That's perfect. Thank you very much. We'll we'll put those all in the show notes as well so people can can find you there. now if you'd listening, if you are a chamber professional, please subscribe to ChamberTap Podcast in either Apple Podcast or iTunes or in Google Podcasts or Google Play. And as you subscribe to the show each week when new episodes are released, they'll automatically show up in your podcast app so they're ready for you whenever whenever you're ready. If you are finding value in this podcast, I'd ask you to please leave us a rating and a review in iTunes. It helps more people be able to find the show. But most importantly, please share Chamber Chat Podcast with your colleagues that are in the industry. Hopefully you can take some of the tips that you learned from Diane today and apply them as you serve in your chamber. Please tune in again next week as I continue to bring you more great content to help you spark ideas. I look forward to chatting with you again next week.

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

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

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