April 11, 2008

Arlington Wins All Around
The Chamber’s just launched membership recruitment program is my new favorite example of collaboration.

The concept for this started this winter when Florence Tambone of Tambone Associates suggested that the Chamber ask its own members to help recruit new members. How could we thank them for their efforts? Florence thought of a certificate for a dinner out, which led to Shop Arlington First certificates.

The next step was bringing the idea to the Board which enthusiastically endorsed it, with a caveatPublish Post. Neither Board members nor I would be eligible for the “thank you” gifts as that is part of our responsibility. (Dang!) However, anyone who recruits a new member will be promoted on the new webpage we would create.

Now, what to call this new program? We kept coming up on empty and didn’t want to roll it out till we had a way to promote it. Arlington Women’s Network (AWN), one of the Chamber’s affinity groups to the rescue. During last month’s “begging and bragging” session I asked everyone to help me solve this dilemma at the April meeting.

April came and in the last 15 minutes of our meeting on Wednesday, so did the ideas from the members who were there that day: Julie Horvath of Century 21 Adams, Jan Whitted of ARTBEAT The Creativity Store, Denise Dolan of The Arlington Shopper, Linda Shoemaker of the Arlington Center for the Arts, Linda Varone of Nurturing Spaces. We came up with the language, we came up with the name,w e came up with a symbol and the Chamber persuaded Denise to lend her design magic to turn our ideas into a logo.

I asked Denise if it was realistic to have something for this week’s ezine because we had a new Chamber member recruited in just this way and I wanted to take advantage of this opportunity.

Logos from Round 1 appeared on Thursday morning and were routed around by email to everyone, including Lorraine and Sue Orr. We sent our feedback to Denise, who tweaked the logo. Voila! Here it is!

I worked on a new webpage for the website which will feature Chamber members who participate in Arlington Wins All Around. I wish I could say “voila!” to that too, except getting the page to appear on the website is a task I have not learned how to do yet in Contribute. Voila! will have to wait until Patricia Carney of Walden WebWorks can teach me how to do it.

The Win:Win:Win:Win Deal
For each new member YOU bring in to the Chamber:

• Win #1: Your friend wins Chamber benefits and connections
  PLUS Chamber members gain new connections
• Win #2: You win a $25 Shop Arlington 1st certificate.
• Win #3: Arlington businesses thrive.
• Win #4: For each new member, you win a raffle ticket entered
  to win $500 in SA1st certificates. The winner will be drawn at the
  Achievement Awards Banquet in November.
  

The Chamber's first Chamber member to appear on the Arlington Wins All Around Award webpage will be Dr. Maureen Gormley of Gormley Chiropractic who recruited Glen Tauber of The Drum Connection to the Chamber. Next week, when I figure out how to link the new webpage so you can see it, you will see yet another win: every time you recruit a new member it will be posted on the new webpage with links to your website and that of the new member's.

Collaboration is grand, don’t you think?