Published in the July 8-21, 2015 issue of Morgan Hill Life
It’s been a fast paced two years since John Horner, president of the Chamber of Commerce, and I both joined the organization. When I took the position of membership director, I knew things could pick up, but I couldn’t imagine how fast we’d make things happen. Just last month the Silicon Valley Business Journal ranked us the 4th largest Chamber of Commerce in Santa Clara County, far outpacing much larger cities such as Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Campbell, Palo Alto, Los Gatos and more.
With the work of John Horner and Janis McDonald, director of operations, we looked at what the chamber does well and what we could do much better. We set out some aggressive plans to let the businesses of Morgan Hill know what we do and how we can best help them. If you’re one of the few we haven’t reached yet, we’d like to tell you how the chamber promotes the businesses and economy of Morgan Hill. We are not the city of Morgan Hill and we don’t get any tax dollars. We are here to help businesses grow.
We built a new website, putting in an entirely different database system to track sales, leads and communication to members. We talked to our members and found out what they liked and how we could improve, searched other best practices in the industry and weren’t afraid to borrow good ideas from other chambers. We re-did our marketing materials, put out a new business directory, reformatted our monthly newsletter. Our pamphlets recommend Morgan Hill Chamber businesses to tourists and visitors. These pamphlets are also available on our website at www.morganhill.org and available to more than half a million people who visit our city each year.
We cut expenses where we could and events that weren’t profitable such as the No Bull Barbecue Cookoff, but put more of our time into projects such as the Friday Night Music Series that has now doubled and even tripled in size and popularity. We’ve put more energy into our volunteers and ambassadors, led by local Realtor Leonette Stafford. Our volunteers for Friday Night Music Series, Celebrate Morgan Hill and Taste of Morgan Hill come from throughout Morgan Hill’s community. We offer our members free booths at the Friday Night Music Series and in addition to monthly breakfasts and mixers, set up weekly lunches that rotate through our member restaurants for even more networking opportunities.
We finally got the pieces into place and we are thriving.
Let’s not forget those people most important to us, our members. We have almost 530 member businesses who are the heart and soul of the Morgan Hill Chamber of Commerce. If they aren’t happy, we can’t exist. In the past three months we have added 41 businesses and lost just five. In the past two years, we have added more than 200 new businesses to the chamber.
Our hard work has paid off. We are proud of our growth and the hard work it took us to get here. We promise to keep it up. Please join us in the future at one or more of the events that we put on for this wonderful community. If you are a business of any size and are interested in growing with us and being a part of the fast-paced Morgan Hill Chamber of Commerce, call me at (408) 779-9444 or e-mail me at [email protected]. Together we will continue to grow and benefit the business community and our economy here in Morgan Hill.
Erin Machado is the director of membership for the Morgan Hill Chamber of Commerce. She wrote this for Morgan Hill Life.
