Membership based organizations – such as your chamber of commerce, or more specifically, Vail Valley Partnership – are unique in that their customers are also “owners” of the organization. In our case, member businesses – all 820+ of you – are our primary stakeholders and we exist primarily to help you succeed.
Our mission as your community development organization is to take the leadership role to create and manage collaborative programs that encourage economic development and result in increased destination tourism in Eagle County. Collaborative programs, economic development and increased destination tourism directly benefits our business members and helps businesses succeed. It’s about growing the pie and providing more customers for your business.
Many membership organizations sign up a new member and then sit back, breathe a sigh of relief and assume their work is done. That attitude isn’t what we are about and we recognize that our job is to continue to provide meaningful benefits to our members.
As a Chamber of Commerce, the Partnership continues to offer educational & networking events, member savings programs, and marketing & media benefits (among other business tools). New community programs such as our joint partnership with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and our destination lead program are continuously added in an effort to add value to our members.
We continue to promote the Vail Valley in our role as a regional Destination Marketing Organization, spotlighting all our communities and recreational assets via our visitor’s guide, Visit Vail Valley, and group sales efforts. Increasing destination tourism via event recruiting and meetings helps drive sales tax volume to our local municipalities and customers to our member businesses throughout the year.
As a leader in Economic Development, the Partnership is actively implementing the 2014 Eagle County Economic Development Plan. This plan is designed to create new opportunities and jobs within Eagle County by broadening the economic base in existing areas of strength and helping to support developing industries. These efforts will help increase sales tax revenues, grow and retain jobs, provide support for businesses to create year-round availability and create business opportunities for entrepreneurs.
As each of these efforts highlight, our primary reason for existing is to help our members succeed. That’s the common theme woven between chamber events, business resource programs, member savings tools, collaborative programs, efforts aimed at increasing destination tourism and leading the county wide economic development efforts.
We want to hear from you. What do you, the business community and VVP members, want from us? We invite our member businesses, nonprofits and municipal stakeholders to take part in the 2013/2014 membership survey. The survey was last conducted in 2012 and is used to evaluate current membership offerings, networking events, programming, etc. and identify areas of improvement.
Why do a member survey? We hear from our members on a regular, ongoing basis and we’re actively engaged in the community in an effort to better serve our members and to help achieve our mission. Our business community isn’t shy about offering feedback and suggestions about our programing, and because of that, our various program engagement and event attendance continues to grow.
But a sample size of one, two or three, no matter how vocal, generally does not represent the views of the majority of any membership organization. Our membership survey is designed to solicit unbiased feedback from you, our customers (or as a membership group, our “owners”).
As we continue to expand our programing and add new membership benefits, it’s important for us to base our business decisions on objective information. Our member survey helps spotlight reasons your business originally joined VVP and how important each of our benefits are to you moving forward. We want to know how we’ve measured up to your expectations and what events are important to you. It’s important for us to better understand how you utilize our website – or what information you hope to find on our site – and to know who your customers are so we can build marketing programs to help you reach them.
The findings of the survey will help us to provide better service to our members. Please take a few minutes of your time and visit www.vailvalleypartnership.com (you’ll find the survey on the right side of the page) to help us evaluate our programming and better serve our members in the year ahead.
We encourage you to share your feedback with us and to help us continue to improve the organization to continue to add benefits and tools to help our members succeed.
Chris Romer is president & CEO of Vail Valley Partnership.