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Chamber of Commerce: Enhance Your Operations with A Membership Management System

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Running a Chamber of Commerce provides unique challenges you must overcome to succeed in improving and supporting your local business community. You are effectively a bridge between your local businesses and the community. 

You have to balance the interests of a diverse business community and ensure that your members are engaged and getting enough value from their membership, particularly small businesses with limited budgets who need to justify their continued involvement and secure enough funding to continue supporting your Chamber and its operations.

Basically, you have a lot of balls in the air, and you need some excellent systems in place to help you keep everything on track and not just survive your challenges but thrive. 

Over the past couple of years, Member Jungle has started working with several Chambers of Commerce, business Chambers, and various business advocacy groups. During that time, we have learned a lot about how to best help Chambers of Commerce and how our system can best be adapted to help them. 

So, today, we will discuss five ways you can ensure your Chamber gets the most benefit from Member Jungle. Although I will be referring to Member Jungle, it is essential to note that there are other options besides us. This article will still be useful to you regardless of which system you choose, so long as you ensure that the system you choose can perform the three essential functions we cover today.

1. Integrate Your Chamber Of Commerce’s Business Directory With Your Membership List

Business directories are an effective way to list all the businesses that are members of your Chamber of Commerce. They provide a convenient and easy-to-navigate platform to showcase all of your businesses and their details. Business directories are one of the most essential aspects of your website, enabling you to advertise and promote all the local businesses in your Chamber. 

By providing an easy way for the public and members to find reputable businesses in their area and driving more customers to your members' businesses, you are adding significant value to your Chamber. 

Getting advertised on a Chamber of Commerce's business directory can be a pretty compelling selling point for businesses considering becoming members.

Below is an example of a business directory in practice from the Rockingham Kwinana Chamber of Commerce. 

 

Integrate Your Chamber Of Commerce’s Business Directory With Your Membership List

 

The key part here is ensuring you get a system that allows you to have a functional and customisable business directory, and, crucially, that business directory allows your members to update and maintain their own listings.

Take Rockingham Kwinana Chamber of Commerce’s business directory, for example. It has over 200 businesses listed. Each one can be clicked on, and a new page with even more information about it will open, as you can see below. 

 

Rockingham Kwinana Chamber of Commerce’s business directory

 

You need to integrate a business directory with your membership list, allowing your members to update and maintain their own listings. This will not only make the work of your team easier but also give members more control over how they use their listings. If they control their own listings, it would actually be practical for them to update them each time they have something to promote to other local businesses.

If your administration team needs to manually update each business listing every time a member wants to edit their listing. Whether changing a listed email or phone number or mentioning that they want to add a promotion, you are looking at a lot of extra time and effort that a team member needs to put in. 

Of course, the Member Jungle system still gives you override control over the listings, just in case someone writes something they shouldn’t, plus you are also alerted by email anytime a member changes their listing..  

2. Adding Secondary Members To Your Memberships To Make Your Chamber Of Commerce More Money 

Chambers of Commerce can significantly benefit from implementing corporate memberships in their organisation. Unlike standard memberships that grant access to only one person, corporate memberships allow multiple staff members and secondary members to access different membership levels for an additional fee. By offering corporate memberships, Chambers of Commerce can increase their membership revenue and expand the pool of potential event attendees, merchandise purchasers, and overall contributors to the association.

Basically, instead of having just the CEO or owner as a member of your Chamber, you can have multiple people from that business as members. This gives that business more value for its membership and gives you more money and more marketing contacts. 

Corporate memberships simplify membership management and provide added value to members by allowing businesses to have multiple employees under a single membership. 

You can decide how many secondary members you want your members to be able to have. You can set up multiple membership products, all with a different number of included secondary members, and sell them at a price that works for you. So, one business may sign up for a standard membership; one may pay more for a corporate membership with two secondary members, and one may pay more still for a corporate membership with ten secondary members. Whatever makes the most sense for your Chamber and your members. 

You should also ensure that whichever system you choose allows your primary members to add and manage their own secondary members. You don’t want your admins stuck managing and adding all of the secondary members for your members, as that will add a lot of unnecessary tasks to their already busy workflow. Making it a simple part of the signup process and something members can do themselves will add value to your membership. 

Doing all this will allow you to market your products, services, and event tickets to all corporate members, giving you many more opportunities to make money. 

This is just a brief overview of corporate memberships' benefits. For more information, please read How To Make Extra Money With Corporate Memberships.

3. A Flexible Event Management System For Your Chamber Of Commerce

Chambers of commerce support local businesses and drive economic growth. However, organising events and networking is complex and time-consuming. This is where an event management system can help. A good event management system can streamline event planning processes, allowing you to focus on delivering value to your members and community.

Most event management systems allow you to streamline and simplify the running of events by offering the following features:

  • Easy creation of event tickets
  • Online ticket sales and registration 
  • Personalise ticket options
  • Collect attendee information
  • Manage and monitor ticket sales

These features help ensure an efficient and time-saving event organisation and registration process. A good event management system can make running your Chamber of Commerce much easier. 

Most event management systems also have built-in email communication tools to automate the promotion of the event, remind people that it’s on, and thank them for coming afterwards. These communication tools will allow you to easily communicate event updates and invitations to your members and the wider business community. This added visibility will help increase event attendance, the profile of your Chamber of Commerce and your membership number

Member Jungle is one service that offers an event management system, though, of course, we are not the only option available. Member Jungle comes with a free integrated mobile app that comes in handy to promote the event by push notification, which allows members to register and pay from their phones. Plus it also helps on the day of the event, as you can use it to scan members' digital event tickets or digital membership cards to admit them into your event. That data will then be stored in your system, making tracking event attendance and analytics easy. 

For more information on how Member Jungle compares to other event management services, please read Trybooking vs Eventbrite vs Member Jungle

Running events smoother and easier is just half of the picture, however. The other half is that between the time saved organising events and Member Jungle's powerful and helpful email campaign module and marketing tools, you will be able to devote a lot more time to promoting your Chamber and its events. 

Communication and Feedback Tools

The communication tools offered by most membership management systems allow you to communicate more effectively with your members. These prove especially useful when it comes to promoting your events and getting a better turnout for the events you’re running. 

These communication tools include:

  • Push Notifications directly to members' phones
  • Email marketing 
  • SMS marketing
  • Group chats

Once the event is over, you can use engagement tracking like that offered by Member Jungle to gain valuable insights into how attendees interacted with your event. You can also use communication tools to directly gauge how members felt events went. 

How many members attended your event, did everyone who purchased tickets turn up, how much merchandise was purchased, and who bought what merchandise? A good membership/event management system can answer all of those questions

Some of the tools that are commonly offered that allow you to monitor how members interact with your Chamber of Commerce and your events include: 

  • Event attendance tracking 
  • Member polls
  • Member feedback surveys 
  • Member Engagement Tracking

All this feedback can be super helpful in identifying areas for improvement and planning future events that better cater to the needs and preferences of your members and the community.

A Better Way To Run Your Chamber Of Commerce

Those are just three ways a membership management system like Member Jungle can help your Chamber of Commerce, though they are far from the only ways. 

So, if you want to find out more about how Member Jungle can help your Chamber of Commerce, please read 4 Ways You Can Improve Your Chamber Of Commerce.

If you want to see all this in practice and hear what an actual Chamber of Commerce had to say about using Member Jungle, check out Customer Story - Rockingham Kwinana Chamber of Commerce.

 

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