What Eugene’s Chamber of the Year win teaches every chamber about proving value
The best story to come out of the ACCE 2026 Annual Convention was not on the agenda. It was a four-year redemption arc that ended on the awards stage in New Orleans — and it carries a lesson for every chamber that has ever struggled to answer “what do I get for my dues?”
By Ted Wind · GM, Chamber of Commerce Solutions at Diagonal
· 6 min read
Finalist — and a hard loss
Eugene makes the Chamber of the Year finals but comes up short. The feedback: they could not show data proving their programs actually worked.
The data-first rebuild
The chamber rebuilds its flagship work around evidence-based initiatives with measurable targets, multi-year funding, and named partners.
Chamber of the Year
Eugene wins the national award at ACCE 2026 in New Orleans, on the strength of programs it can now prove are working.
The loss that set up the win
In 2022, the Eugene (OR) Area Chamber of Commerce made it all the way to the Chamber of the Year finals — the top recognition in the industry, given out each year at the ACCE Annual Convention — and lost. The sting was not the loss itself. It was the reason: the judges’ feedback was that Eugene could not show data proving its programs worked. The chamber was doing real work in its community; it just could not demonstrate the impact.
Most organizations file that kind of feedback away and move on. Eugene rebuilt around it.
A rebuild designed around evidence
The programs that carried Eugene to the 2026 award look different from typical chamber initiatives in one specific way: they were designed from day one to be measured. Elevate 2028 is a five-year economic development strategy with a concrete target — it is projected to generate 3,800 new jobs in Lane County. A.C.T. Now Lane, the chamber’s homelessness initiative, coordinates more than 50 partner organizations across housing, job training, and community awareness.
Four years after the finalist loss, Eugene won 2026 Chamber of the Year at the convention in New Orleans, a win covered proudly back home. CEO Brittany Quick-Warner told KLCC the award validates that on the long, hard days, her staff can know “we are making a difference.” The work had not fundamentally changed between 2022 and 2026 — the chamber’s ability to prove it had.
The same rule decides your renewals
Here is why this story matters beyond the awards stage. What the Chamber of the Year judges did to Eugene in 2022 is exactly what every member does to their chamber at renewal time: they ask for proof. Not a newsletter recapping how busy the year was — a concrete answer to what this membership did for their business. The referrals passed, the events attended, the introductions made, the advocacy wins that touched their industry.
At our booth at ACCE 2026, we heard the same pattern over and over: the chambers winning renewals are the ones that can put that answer in front of each member, member by member. The chambers struggling with retention are rarely doing less valuable work — they just cannot show it. Proving value is not a nice-to-have anymore; with non-dues sources now generating about 62% of chamber revenue, every program, sponsor, and event has a stakeholder who wants receipts too.
Start smaller than Eugene did
You do not need a five-year strategy to apply the lesson. Pick the three things your chamber already does that members value most — say referrals, events, and advocacy — and start tracking them per member, this quarter. Then put the numbers in front of members before they ask: a one-page “what you got this year” at renewal time beats a testimonial every time. The habit matters more than the tooling; Eugene’s edge was deciding that nothing counts until it can be counted.
This is, honestly, a big part of why we built Diagonal for chambers. Diagonal is a modern member-management platform built for chambers — memberships and renewals, events, invoicing, communications, and an AI layer that keeps member records up to date on its own. When the record-keeping happens automatically, the “prove it” conversation stops being a scramble through spreadsheets and starts being a report you already have.
More from ACCE 2026
Eugene’s win was one of three big themes we brought home from New Orleans. Our full convention recap covers the other two — revenue diversification and the AI conversation happening in every chamber right now. And on Beyond the Ribbon Cut, we talk with chamber leaders about how this work actually gets done.
Details of the Eugene Area Chamber’s award and programs are drawn from public reporting by KLCC and Lookout Eugene-Springfield, and ACCE’s published research.