Taking your chamber all the way to the ballot box

Chris Romer: The fear of upsetting people, it often cripples chambers and it leads to inaction. What if we offend somebody? What if someone drops their membership? What if? What if? What if? And then it prevents us from doing important things.

We did not lose any members over the ballot initiative that we led. We have lost members because of public policy positions, but we've also gained a lot of members over public policy positions that we've taken. And we did gain members by running and coordinating this transit campaign because there are a number of them who told us some version of we've always known you existed. We didn't know how you benefited us and this benefits us. And if you take leadership positions and running things that benefit us like this, I'm in. I want my membership money to go towards solving community problems.

Ted Wind: Hi, I'm Ted and I build software for chambers of commerce. For the past decade, chamber tools were all built the same way. One clunky system for every chamber. But if I've learned one thing, it's that no two chambers are alike. That's why on this show, we go beyond the ribbon cut with top chamber leaders to share the unique programs, processes, and what makes their chamber work, and to give you new ideas you can take back to your chamber. This is Beyond the Ribbon Cut.

Welcome back to Beyond the Ribbon Cut, the podcast for chamber leaders. I'm your host Ted Wind from Diagonal for Chambers and my guest today is Chris Romer, president and CEO at Vail Valley Partnership in Colorado. Chris, thank you so much for coming on the show today.

So, let's start with the map. What is the Vail Valley Partnership and what does the business community across Eagle County look like?

Chris Romer: For those who are skiers, they know us by the ski mountains, Vail, and Beaver Creek. And we serve as a countywide chamber of commerce, economic development organization, and destination sales and marketing group because those three areas are so intricately connected in our economy in our region. And so we're the chamber, we're the EDO, we're the tourism bureau working with our businesses to create a vibrant community and support our business community.

Ted Wind: I love that. and and with you guys being a chamber, a DMO, and the economic development group all in one, how do those three hats show up in a normal week for you?

Chris Romer: Yeah, it's a great question. Our model probably wouldn't work really well in a traditional metropolitan community or in a really rural community, but it does work really well in a resort oriented community because tourism is a core economic development effort. Our businesses rely on tourism. Our workforce needs the economic development efforts. Our communities as a whole need the different programs and efforts that we focus on from workforce to air service to other initiatives that I'm sure we'll talk about as we go through today. But it works really well because having three different organizations doing those things in our community would be very duplicative. So having one that can do all three of them makes a lot more sense operationally and in terms of organizational efficiencies.

To answer your question directly, how does it work in an average day or a normal week? I would say there is no average day or a normal week. Everything's a little bit different. We're engaged and involved in a lot of different initiatives, but all focused around community vitality, all focused around supporting business, and sometimes that's tourism, sometimes that's economic development, and sometimes it's chamber services.

Ted Wind: And as far as the team there, that's a pretty large team you guys got. How how big is that?

Chris Romer: We have a team of 10. We punch outside of our proverbial weight class a little bit in terms of our programming and our results, but we don't have um a real small team. Uh but also not as big as a lot of chambers in metro areas and things for a resort community. We're pretty big.

Ted Wind: Yeah. Yeah. That's incredible though doing all this with a team of 10, especially across these kind of three different areas from the destination marketing organization, the economic development group, and the chamber. That's some really impressive work from you guys. So, kudos there.

Before we really jump into the meat of the episode, I'd love if we could learn a little bit more about you, Chris. You've been at the helm of the partnership for well over a decade now. You chair the Colorado Mountain College Board. You've chaired WACE in the past. You write a weekly column and you host your own podcast, too. Can you take us through the road that got you here and how many years you've been doing this all now for?

Chris Romer: I appreciate you going through some of those different engagement opportunities and things that I do. I've been at the helm of Vail Valley Partnership now for close to 20 years. We're a very different organization today than we were 20 years ago. I think that took me down this road and some of the different engagement opportunities that you've talked about, be it chairing our college system or now chairing the Colorado Workforce Development Council, serving on community groups like the Judicial Nominating Committee and different components there is that chamber work and community work are one and the same.

I really think that chambers need to be deeply engaged and involved in their community outside of just business because we need to expand our reach beyond business to community. How are we impacting our communities? How are we bettering our communities? We could do that through our chamber work and we must. But we can also do that through local engagement opportunities that expose ourselves as leaders and those that we might work with to the work the chamber does.

And it gives us the opportunity to build advocates, to build awareness, to ensure people know that we're not just your quote grandfather's chamber. We're actually doing things that better not just businesses, but develop deeper community connection and quality of life issues that people don't normally associate with the chamber.

I've been at the helm for about 20 years. We've added economic development. We've built a very robust government affairs and advocacy program. We've built apprenticeships and workforce pipeline programs. And really proud and happy of the work that our team has done.

Ted Wind: I love that. I think that is so crucial and part of the reason why I'm so excited to have you on the show today is not being your grandfather's chamber, right? And really going above and beyond, especially when it comes to doing new and exciting things and innovative things with the chamber, especially as it relates to involving your community.

Now, for folks who've listened to the pod for a little while, we had Justin Groenert from the Evansville Chamber on the show a few episodes ago to talk about advocacy. And I really think if you're listening to this one, you should go back and check out that episode because it's a great introduction to what we'll be talking about today.

One of the things that's so impressive about what you've done, Chris, is going above and beyond just lobbying and more baseline advocacy work to actually convening and running a campaign for a regional solution. You've done this with the Vail Valley Partnership and and actually won, which is just incredible. For chambers at home, why should a chamber be willing to go all the way to the ballot box and where do you draw the line there?

Chris Romer: Yeah. So, first of all, Justin is amazing. I would encourage everyone to go and listen to Justin's podcast because any opportunity you have to listen to Justin is time well spent.

That said, yeah, it's I think that the question that we ask ourselves is this mission aligned and if it's mission aligned, is someone else doing it? Is someone else leading the initiative? At which point, maybe we just need to be at the table. But if it's mission aligned and no one else is doing it, then if not us, who? And if it's mission aligned and it's important and we don't do it and no one else is doing it, it won't get done. So it really is almost that simple. That's our decision-making process of is it mission aligned? Is it important to the community? Is anyone else doing it? And if it is mission aligned, if it is important to the community, if no one else is doing it, we will step into a leadership standpoint for that.

You mentioned the transit campaign that we won. If you don't mind, I'll give you a little bit of history and share a little context for your listeners. So, we were hearing from our businesses, our members through roundtables and community forums and economic development meetings and business retention and expansion visits and all the things we do in group settings, in one-on-one meetings, in board meetings. And we were hearing this theme of the need for improved and better coordinated transit throughout our valley.

And for folks who don't know our area, we're about a 40 mile long by two mile wide linear corridor. We're in the mountains. So we have Bureau of Land Management National Forest land on both sides and about a 40 mile stretch along the Interstate 70 corridor that all of our population and businesses and activity happens. So we're rather unique and that was set up or that is set up to be really conducive to mass transit.

We did not have a outside of local municipal efforts, we didn't have a coordinated transit authority across all of those. So we listened to our businesses saying they needed this. We convened our government partners and transit authority partners and had a meeting and said what could be how could this work? What might this look like?

We spent 3 years building the process exploring governance models, exploring funding, exploring how the current transit authorities could work with the new transit authority. Long and short of it is after that three years with multiple subcommittees of operators and businesses and community members, we determined that we needed to go to the ballot to both set up a governance structure and to fund the effort. And we made the determination to do one ballot question that asked for the permission to create a new authority and to fund the new authority at the same time. Rather than asking to build it and then going back and asking to fund it, we did it all at once. And we can explore a little more, but that's the genesis of how it happens.

We listened, which I think chambers do really well. I think most every chamber does a really good job of listening. Where I think we as an industry fall short, is taking the action steps after we hear what the problems are. If you have transit problems, if you have workforce problems, if your community has homelessness problems or early childhood problems, what are you doing about it? Right? We do a great job of listening. we don't do as good a job of solving at the partnership. We really want to be a community problem solver, right? And so sometimes that requires you to go to the ballot, right? And so that's the genesis of the Eagle Valley Transit Authority and how we kind of came to the decision on whether or not to lead that initiative.

Ted Wind: I love that. And I think one piece of that that might be a little bit scary for chambers listening when they're thinking about that next step of taking action, as you said, chambers do a great job listing, but that taking action piece is difficult. This measure had to pass in eight separate jurisdictions, towns, the county, the resort communities. How did you actually go about building a coalition across all of these towns, the resorts, the government, especially when those groups definitely don't always agree?

Chris Romer: It's a heavy lift. It's a heavy lift. And we had, as you said, we were across multiple different jurisdictions. We were able to get them to agree to a coordinated ballot, which meant the exact same ballot language in each of those municipalities or county level entities with the only difference being their jurisdiction. So one same sales tax, same language, same everything except town of Gypsum, town of Eagle, town of Avon, town of Vail, etc.

And it comes down to relationship capital, right? I mentioned that this was a three-year process to get to the ballot. We leveraged a lot of our relationship capital. We were a trusted entity. We've been around for 60 years. We've done big things before. We had all of these stakeholders at the table from day one. So they were invested in writing the plan. Once you're invested in writing the plan, you're invested in building the plan.

We didn't come to them to say, "Look at this great idea we have." We came to them saying, "Look at this great idea that you helped build, that you helped inform, that you had a voice in from the start." So they were bought in and being able to go to their local town councils or county commissions and ask them to put on the ballot was one of the easier parts of it because we had them at the table from the beginning and had been talking about it at public meetings, had been keeping them updated at their town board meetings, had their own representatives on our committees that could then report back to them at the meetings we were not attending. It was a communication challenge and keeping people on top of the talking point challenge much more than it was a getting them to agree challenge.

Ted Wind: And obviously we touched on the staff time that it takes to pull something like this off. As you said, this is a three-year process. This wasn't something that just came together overnight. We touched a little bit on communication and how much work that is to bring these groups together. But what else does it actually take for a chamber to run a ballot campaign? What is the legal guard rails that are a part of that? What about the money aspect as well?

Chris Romer: The laws are going to be a little bit different. I imagine in every state in Colorado, there's a process there. You have to register with the secretary of state for your issues campaign. It's a short-term registration, right? You need a registered agent. I was the registered agent. Chris Romer, not Vail Valley Partnership. me as an individual. We set up the structure through the state. Again, every state might be a little different. So, I would encourage everyone to talk to their own local attorneys and others to understand how you do this in Oregon or Missouri or Ohio versus Colorado.

But we registered it with the Secretary of State, had to set up our own bank account, had to do the fundraising. So I would call our major partners that had been at the table, explain the process, explain the fundraising, how much we think we would need. We received some contributions from some big partners to help fund polling to help fund campaign strategists, marketing and messaging folks, communication folks. So the fundraising is a big big part of running the campaign.

Once you take care of the legal aspect of registering and having the registered agent and doing the fundraising, you need to do the public polling, you need to understand the demographics of your community. And by doing the phone polls, we knew we could slice and dice our demographics. A 30-year-old female unaffiliated voter, what their likelihood to support was, what the strongest messaging points that resonated, what didn't resonate with them. a 60-year-old Hispanic male single father, what resonates with them, a retiree and by community because we had eight different ballot initiatives we needed to run.

So, we were able to cross tab all of the demographics and be able to prepare messaging for the things we know resonated with them and for the things we know didn't resonate with them. So, we would then target our marketing and our communication to specific audiences. And you can do this on social channels relatively easier than you can in mass communications of a newspaper or radio or other components. But we specifically targeted micro segments of our demographics. We use text messaging service to hit frequent voters and again targeting the exact message points that we knew message well with their demographics.

And we have a robust local newspaper as well. So, we knew we would receive letters to the editor and we had responses drafted. We had 60 different responses drafted of letters to the editor for every point that we thought people would come up with. And we knew that because we knew the demographics and the study of what demographic category might oppose for what reasons. So we had someone else from that demographic from our committee who we ghost wrote our letters to the editor in response to these issues on behalf of our business owners and others. And when the opposition letter hit, we had three of them sent back. So our goal was for every one opposition letter that we would have three proponent letters with different talking points knowing who the audience was.

So there's a lot of kind of campaign, tactical campaign and strategic campaign efforts that go in, but it's all about being data driven and it's all about having the resource which comes from the fundraising to target the information.

You know, there's a quote and I I don't know who it's originally generated with or if it's even real. It's probably not. But the idea was if you're given an hour to plan, you spend 50 minutes understanding the issue and 10 minutes planning the issue. And that's how we approached it. We spent 50 minutes studying, researching, understanding the fundraising needs and the community demographics by segment, by town, and then 10 minutes executing the plan. We really wanted to make sure that we were as dialed in as we could be.

And we were fortunate. We passed pretty overwhelmingly when all was said and done to create what is now a $27 million tax-funded operation that has free transit throughout our valley and that supports air service development efforts as well to bring in new air service to our airport. So, a really good success, but it's 90% of the success was done before we even had a ballot there because we had done all the homework and planning and understood our demographics and had a really robust campaign to make sure we reached as many likely voters as we could.

Ted Wind: Exactly. And especially it's not just the processes and things you had prepped there when it comes to the campaign, but also as you alluded to earlier, the relationships that you'd already built with these stakeholders that had to get involved to even make this possible. So, you know, it's obviously a much longer process than just even the 3 years that we talked about there.

But anytime a chamber takes action, I think there's always this fear that how is this going to upset my members, right? And obviously in your case, I can imagine that a ballot initiative that raises taxes on members regardless of the goals of it can definitely upset some members. I think it would be really insightful if you could share a little bit about did you lose any members over this and how did you handle the ones who were maybe angry about the chamber getting involved with this?

Chris Romer: It's a great question because I think the fear of upsetting people, it often cripples chambers and it it leads to inaction. What if we offend somebody? What if someone drops their membership? What if what if what if and then it prevents us from doing important things?

We did not lose any members over the ballot initiative that we led. We have lost members because of public policy positions we have taken. But we've also gained a lot of members over public policy positions that we've taken. And we did gain members by running and coordinating this transit campaign because there are a number of them that I can think of who told us some version of we've always known you existed. We didn't know how you benefited us and this benefits us and if you take leadership positions and running things that benefit us like this, I'm in. I want my membership money to go towards solving community problems.

So, it becomes a little bit of a brand challenge there. And like I said, we've lost members. I think that we have a general guiding principle that we want to solve community problems. We want to be that community problem solver. I've said it a few times on this podcast, but here's how that manifests in in reality. Not everyone needs to be a chamber member. Not everyone deserves to be a chamber member.

It's okay if a business decides that they don't want to be involved with the chamber because of our public policy positions, our advocacy positions, or leading ballot initiatives that they might not like. That's okay. We can agree to disagree. We can do it in a civil manner. We're okay with that. And we're not tacos. Not everyone's going to love us all the time. And we're perfectly fine not being tacos that everyone adores and loves. We don't strive to be that. We strive to solve community problems, understanding that everyone might not like that and being okay with it. We're okay with it.

We accept and acknowledge that we're not for everybody and our board is comfortable with that. They charge us and challenge us to be provocative in our messaging. We have a lot of things that we do that live up to that that make people say, "Wow, I can't believe the partnership does that." But it's always with good intent. It's always on brand and on message and we never do it at someone's expense, right? Our messaging, our efforts are never done at someone's expense. They're always done on behalf of the message. So, we have a very positive message and we move forward that way.

Ted Wind: I love that. And you brought up the board there in that answer. Again, I'm repeating it over and over again. Communication is so important with this entire process, especially when it's such a slow process. How do you measure these kinds of initiatives and specifically what do you tell your board or the member who asks you know what their dues did for them this year?

Chris Romer: Yeah, it's a great question and we again we maybe are a little different than many chambers in that our member recruiting is based on retention, right? So we're not chasing every new member, every new business that opens their doors. In fact, we send a welcome to new businesses, but we don't recruit or invite them to membership until they've been open for 2 years. Right? So, we know that those new businesses are so busy making payroll, understanding human resources, driving customers that they don't probably have time to engage and invest in the chamber in a way that they'll see the return immediately.

What do our most engaged and successful businesses look like? And we target businesses like them. We tell people when they join that we expect and want them to be members for a minimum of 10 years. And if they're not ready to make that commitment, it's probably not. They're not ready to join the chamber. Now, do we accept 10 years of dues? No. It's an annual renewing dues. But we set the stage for them to invest because of the mission, which is to lead collaboration. Our mission is not to drive customers to your business. Our mission is now we have all of that support mechanisms and marketing benefits and networking events and eggs, but we really try to set the stage from the beginning that people know what they're getting when they join the partnership.

And in our member survey, the number one benefit is advocacy. Our members tell us the number one benefit of membership is advocacy. So, we tell new members the number one benefit is advocacy. This is what our members tell us. If you're not understanding of that, maybe don't join. maybe don't join until you're ready to understand what our mission is and how we go about it.

Now, we have all the stuff. We have all the engagement opportunities and educational events and golden handcuff member benefits and networking events. We do all of that stuff, but we don't lead with it. We lead with the mission. We lead with the government affairs and advocacy. We lead with the workforce and economic development. And we follow up with the ways they can engage and find that tangible benefit. So the value as it's positioned is around community impact and the benefit is around the engagement opportunities. We don't lead with the benefits, we lead with the features.

Ted Wind: I love that. I love that. That focus on advocacy first. I think it's something that so many chambers get so caught up in the networking events and we have to have our big annual gala and all this that sometimes advocacy work can really fall to the wayside. But I think what you've shown today on this episode about the importance of that work and about the impact that work can have especially when it comes to retaining and growing members is really really powerful.

I want to bring it back just a little bit more tactical for the chamber leader that's listening at home. Put yourself in the shoes of of them. Chamber director small town. They've got a transit or housing measure that's being kicked around town hall. it kind of fulfills these initial stages that you talked about, right? It's an issue in your community. Nobody else is really working on it. Where is the first thing they should start with when they're thinking about, okay, maybe we as a chamber should be tackling this issue?

Chris Romer: The first place to start is with your board. Make sure your board is aware and engaged and on board. No pun intended. Make sure your board is on board with whatever direction you're going to take.

I think a mistake that many chamber leaders and chamber executives make is getting three steps ahead of their board. So you want your board to be bought in. Make sure they're aware of what the issue is that is being talked about that they then can say this is something the chamber needs to be engaged in. This is something the chamber needs to be aware of. So the step one is getting your board on board.

I think step two is then listening to your community, whatever that means, be it member surveys, focus groups, committee structures, however that looks, and everyone's going to be a little different in how they do that. But as I mentioned earlier, chambers do a really good job of listening. So, we need to then pose back, hey, the city, the town, the council, the county is exploring X. What do you think? How does this impact your business? So step one is your board, step two is your membership.

And if your board's on board and your membership has identified it as a challenge and a problem to their operations and to their business, then it's something that you evaluate. Do we have the staff bandwidth? Is anyone else doing this? And get down into the weeds of the nitty-gritty of what does it mean from a staff time standpoint? What does it mean from a resource standpoint? And determine if it's something you're going to do.

And even if it's on mission, even if it's on brand, there are times where you might say, "We don't have the resources right now." Or the opportunity cost of not doing this other thing prevents us from doing this thing. So it might just then be a testimony or a letter saying, "We support this initiative. We oppose this initiative, but we don't have the time to back this initiative." And I think we need to be comfortable understanding that we can't do everything all the time, and we need to even when things line up. I would hope that most of the time when things line up that we can take action. Sometimes we don't have the resources or the bandwidth and it's okay to do that and not spread yourself too thin.

Ted Wind: I love that you brought up the staff bandwidth piece. One of our customers is out in Medford, Massachusetts, Laura O'Neal, and she runs a small chamber staff of one person, but she still is able to put together letters, like you said, take positions on these advocacy policies. even when she herself doesn't have the resources or the time to go all out there, she's still able to make an impact on some of these policy decisions and show that the chamber has a voice in this stuff even if the staff bandwidth isn't completely there. So, I really appreciate you brought that up as well, Chris.

Chris Romer: Yeah, of course it's a big issue and really regardless of the size of your chamber, but especially for smaller chambers. If you have one staff in your example or three or four staff or even a group like ours with 10 staff, it makes a big difference of like we have the question all the time on capacity of if we do this, we can't do this and making sure that we're doing the right things that move the ball forward towards our mission and building a better, more vibrant community.

Ted Wind: 100% 100%. Now, it's time for the last question of every episode. Chris, I think you know what's coming. What's one piece of advice you'd give to the other chamber leaders at home listening in?

Chris Romer: One piece of advice is to not live in fear. Don't make decisions based on fear. Make decisions based on your mission and on doing big things.

I think a lot of times we live in this fear space of who am I going to offend? Who won't like this? What if someone drops? We alluded to this a little bit earlier, but chambers, we see this in the ACCE Horizon Initiative. We see this again and again in the Edelman Trust Barometer and things that folks like Sheree Anne Kelly and folks like Suzanne Clark at the US Chamber share on a regular basis.

But for me, don't live in fear. That's my biggest piece of advice. Like don't be afraid to take big steps, take big swings. Sometimes you strike out. Like I've struck out. I've got some epic failures on my record. And that's okay. Your community will respect that you took a swing, but you'll also sometimes hit a stand-up double and sometimes occasionally you'll hit a home run. But you can't be afraid. You can't be afraid to get in the batter's box. Sorry for the sports analogy for those non-sports fans out there.

Ted Wind: 100% Chris, I couldn't agree more. And honestly, I mean, that's partly where the name of this podcast comes from is a lot of what we talked about today. Chambers going beyond just the ribbon cut, beyond just the things that chambers have been doing historically and really taking that leap, doing something different, bringing new initiatives to the table. And again, I just love what you said in the beginning. you know, we're not your grandfather's chamber. And that is so so true. And I think why in particular the Vail Valley Partnership has been so successful thanks to that and of course your leadership.

So if you want to learn more about Chris and the incredible work that the Vail Valley Partnership is doing, all the links to their socials, their website are in the description below.

And to everyone listening in, thank you so much for tuning in to Beyond the Ribbon Cut. We'll catch you on the next episode.