Does Your Chamber Tell Stories?
How does your chamber show up as a storyteller in your community? What types of stories do you tell? Our current social media environment shows us that people love to consume stories. Infact, some social media platforms are shifting from “social media posts” to “stories”. We often hear how Chambers of Commerce need to be storytellers. This is because we live in a world where facts and benefits about your organization are important but largely overlooked if you don’t have good stories to back up what you offer.
I have seen many chamber websites and membership brochures that list the key benefits of and reasons why a business should become a member of their chamber. While these “lists” have their place, showing the impact and value of your chamber is done much more effectively when done through stories.
Story Platforms
Your storytelling can take place face to face. Stories can be shared in newsletters, emails, or on social media in snippets. Some chambers may have a talented staff member who can shoot and edit video to tell their stories. As you might guess, my preferred method of storytelling is through podcasts.
When thinking of the stories you have to tell, think about who is the ideal audience you want to share the story with. Where are they? Where do they hang out digitally? Do they prefer printed text, pictures, video, or audio? Are your stories better formatted towards a specific media?
Many chambers like to go straight to social media to tell their stories. So do a Facebook Live video. My observation and opinion is that people open their social media apps when they are bored, tired, or stressed. Social media becomes a mindless activity to pass time without truly engaging on any kind of meaningful level. For this reason, I would strongly recommend NOT having social media be your primary medium for telling stories. By all means, use social media to magnify and perpetuate your stories but choose another medium to host and share your stories from. You may choose to repurpose some of your stories on social media as a teaser or an advertisement for the story in its entirety.
For most chambers, this would leave two primary content mediums, video and audio. Of course YouTube is the place to host any video content as viewers can subscribe to your channel to receive any updated content. For audio, podcasts are the place to be. I have a whole podcast course to teach you how to get started with a podcast. Every iPhone comes with a podcast app already preinstalled. This makes it super easy for your audience to listen.
Storytelling Content
Once you know what platform(s) you want to focus on to share your stories, you can then dive into the content for story creation. I have identified eight types of stories you can tell through your podcast or YouTube channel. You can choose as many as you feel are relevant to your community or that would add value to your members or attract new members.
- Member success stories or member spotlight. You can interview your own members and have them share how your chamber has helped their business find success. You can also go a little more generic and have your members tell you about their business or entrepreneurial journey. People love to hear a good original story and it ends up being a great commercial for your member business as well.
- Impact of nonprofits. Identify and interview other local nonprofit organizations in your area to tell the story of the impact they are making. You can make the connection of how your chamber helps to support these nonprofits or ways you have partnered with them.
- Community Partnerships. Community partnerships often need a bit more of an explanation for the general public to understand why the partnership exists and what the combined mission is about. There are often success stories that can go along with partnerships and the impact that is being made in the community.
- Advocacy Efforts. In a very generalized sense, many of your members are still transactional members. They want to know what the chamber can do for them and if they don’t see it on their bottom line, then they don’t see any value. By sharing the stories of your advocacy efforts and the direct impact to each member of your chamber, you may sway some of your transactional members to become transformational members. Promoting your advocacy work also will show your community that the chamber is about business and what is good for business. The chamber is the sane center where both sides of the isle can come together for the good of your community.
- Impact of Events/Initiatives. If you have people in your community who complain about why the city and/or chamber of commerce shuts down traffic each year for a festival that runs the whole weekend, then it might help to share why. Telling of the economic impact, increased sales tax revenue, and hotel occupancy in addition to the other positive outcomes of your events might help your community better understand what the chamber is about.
- Staff Spotlight. Do your members and your community know your staff? Do they understand what the role is of each member of your staff? If they have a need, wouldn’t it be nice if they felt like they knew the person they were reaching out to? Doing regular staff spotlights will lead to building stronger relationships with your members which should help with your retention numbers.
- Why Members Join. You are well aware that there are always businesses in your community who don’t know what a chamber of commerce is or why they should be involved. Collecting and sharing stories of why businesses join your chamber can help to tell a better story or what your chamber has to offer without producing a long list of member benefits. Remember, people have short attention spans and taking time to highlight just one or two reasons businesses join your chamber at each time will have the most impact.
- Testimonials. A while back, I had Shari Pash on the podcast to talk about testimonial strategies. This is actually a very simple way of telling very short stories. Testimonials can be used in many ways. From reading a testimonial on a podcast episode to including a member testimonial in your email signature, you should be gathering and sharing testimonials all the time! Testimonials create credibility, social proof, and help with recruiting and retaining members. Feel free to leave a testimonial or review for Chamber Chat Podcast in Apple Podcasts and see how I might integrate your testimonial into my storytelling strategy. 🙂
You are now equipped with eight strategies for your chamber to be a storyteller. Now, you just need to lean into your medium of choice (audio or video) and then amplify your stories on your social media channels. You may find it beneficial to tell some stories over video while others are better on a podcast. If you utilize this strategy, you can also cross promote your platforms to each other and continue to grow your audiences.
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