We have been busy building the ChamberForge software and working with beta users - local chambers of commerce in Northern Virginia - for the last six months. However, when we heard about the upcoming VACCE conference, we thought it was the right time to showcase our product to the greater chamber community in Virginia.
VACCE stands for Virginia Association of Chamber of Commerce Executives and they have annual multi-day conferences and events where they come together and network with other chamber staff and executives to share knowledge and best practices for effectively running the chamber organization. It is organized by Virginia Chamber of Commerce.
This VACCE event took place in Charlottesville, Virginia, and we are very glad that we provided sponsorship and became part of this great community for two days. We met a lot of chamber executives, staff members, as well as other sponsors including Shari Pasi from Strategic Solutions for Growth representing ChamberMaster and William Roy from Immerge, a division of McClung Companies.
We showcased ChamberForge to many chamber executives and staff members and they seemed very intrigued with what we have built. There is no other software to compare with and many of them asked "Well, we have ChamberMaster to manage our website and member engagement - why do we need ChamberForge?" My answer to them was that the ChamberMaster is software used by chamber staff members to manage chamber website and to reach out to members and future members and that the ChamberForge is a tool built for members to engage with each other and to build stronger and greater relationship with each other.
Many executives took the information with them to discuss with their staff and board members.
Surprisingly, we learned that many chambers do not have what's called the "lead sharing group" - ChamberForge was originally built to help lead sharing groups manage their members, guests, and business referrals and has evolved over period of time to be more of a group management and collaboration platform for chambers of commerce.
The next VACCE event will be in June in Harrisonburg, Virginia, and we plan to be there. We will have more data available for other chambers as we continue to use and beta test with local chambers in Northern Virginia.
Here are some pictures from the event.