Trust: Are You a Key Broker in Your Community?

Is your chamber viewed as a trusted entity in your community’s health and well being?

As stated in the Association of Chamber of Commerce Executives Horizon Initiative: Chambers 2025, the chamber can play the key role as the convener of business community, the public and local government.

As chambers, our role is to advocate on behalf or our small business members and what all small business members want is a thriving community where all can prosper and grow.

When a community (businesses, public and government) all work together to improve the lives of all is a place I’d want to live, wouldn’t you?

Part of being that convener is having the trust of the community and to be able to play the role of identifying the issues that need to be addressed in a factual and non controversial way.

I’ll finish with the word relevance!

We talk a lot about this in the chamber space.  Are you relevant?  Well, what better way to be relevant than to be the “trusted” leader in the community that gets a seat at the table whenever an issue needs to be addressed.

For a copy of the Horizon Initiative: Chambers 2025 go HERE.

Until next time!

Who Are The Leaders in Your Community?

Are you new to your chamber job?

If you're not from the area, how should you go about identifying the leaders in your "new" community?

At the very least, the following exercise will give you a chance to identify who the community leaders are on your terms, not just from a sheet of paper someone at the chamber gave you in your CEO orientation packet.

Here's a place to start:

• Identify board members of the other local business and community groups;
• Identify business sectors and size (retail, manufacturing, health care, etc); and
• Finally, meet with the leaders of those sectors (i.e., hospital CEO, plant manager of the biggest manufacturing plant in town, etc.).

Once you've collected this information see where the lists overlap. That's a great place to start.

From that list, meet with them individually and ask them questions about the community.  Find out who is in their inner circle of friends by asking them if there is someone they know that you should meet.

Sound familiar, we have a circle of friends in the social media space.

This time meet face-to-face with these folks. You might find that some of these individuals are not current members of your new chamber.

Ask why?

Let them know you're the new leader of the chamber and invite them to join or rejoin.

For a previous blog post on a new chamber CEO's first hundred days go HERE.