When I joined my first chamber I thought everyone who had a business joined their local chamber. So I was quite surprised when I discovered less than half of businesses join a chamber and less than 25% that join are active in the community.
I have to say my involvement in the various chambers helped me discover how to become more involved in the community and develop great relationships with other business owners.
I joined a leads group and became an ambassador. It gave me a great excuse to get into local businesses and ask if they were involved in the chamber. I had a check list of about the reasons why they should be involved in the chamber and it was a great way to start a conversation.
I eventually marched up and down the main streets of town and began to ask store owners what they needed and always got an ear full. It’s funny how everyone always has a story about their business. I thoroughly enjoyed being able to have an excuse to talk with the store owners.
One of the things that I did that made a difference was to talk the downtown business owners into fighting with the downtown association to get the craft booths in the street fairs to place their booths back-to-back so everyone could actually see their stores.