Chamber making changes focusing on membership

JASON LAWRENCE/DAILY FORUM
The Greater Maryville Chamber of Commerce officially took ownership of its first-ever building, located at 408 N. Market St., Tuesday morning. For the last 25-plus years, the Chamber has rented a building located at 423 N. Market. Pictured front row, from left: Meredith Ross, Chamber Past President Sean Sheil, Executive Director Jordyn Swalley, Director-at-Large Kaity Holtman, Administrative Assistant Shanda Keirsey and Director Brandon Stanley; second: Scott Ross, Director-at-Large Chris Wiltfong, President Jeff Bram, Director-at-Large Harold Spire, Director-at-Large Rachael Martin and Director Teresa Hayes.

Change is oftentimes a good thing. Changes that save money, cater to the customer and keep the focus on bettering communities definitely fall into that category.

With the Greater Maryville Chamber of Commerce’s purchase of the former Ross & Thomson Law Office building, located at 408 N. Market Street — essentially across the street from the Chamber’s current 423 N. Market location — and the recent launch of a new website, the Chamber is keeping its focus where it needs to be: on its members.

“The Chamber obviously isn’t going anywhere,” Greater Maryville Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Jordyn Swalley said. “I think it’s important that we put our money better toward our members and make new programs with that money.”

Swalley said with the rising cost of rent at the Chamber’s current location, which is also home to the Maryville License Bureau and Nodaway County Economic Development, it made financial sense to look into buying the first building in the Greater Maryville Chamber of Commerce’s 108-year history.

While the Chamber has been renting its current location for more than 25 years, Swalley said she asked a simple question when the five-year lease came up for renewal — at a higher cost.

“I asked (Administrative Assistant) Shanda (Keirsey) once we got the new lease agreement, ‘Have we ever considered purchasing a building?’” Swalley said. “And we just never had the opportunity to find something where we needed to be.”

One of the board members — Teresa Hayes, realtor at United Country Twaddle Realty, who recused herself from voting on such matters — had the former law office come available for sale, and pitched the idea to Swalley, who in turn crunched the numbers, talked to the board and found now was a good time to make the move and finally have something the Chamber can call its own.

“It’s really exciting,” Swalley said. “We’re spending all of this money on rent and we have nothing to show for it. When we actually did the number crunching, if we were to sign another five-year lease and pay what we are paying right now, we’d have over half of that building already paid for. We’d only have two more years to go.

“I think it just really makes a stamp on (the fact that) we’re not going anywhere. We’re here to stay, we’re here to invest in the community. We want to use our money the way that it should be used.”

The move won’t be made until September — their current lease is up Oct. 1 — but Swalley said there is still some work to be done on the new building before the move can be made. Swalley said she planned to draw up a couple designs for how the interior could look to present to the nine-member board to vote on before inviting local contractors out on July 14 and 15 to look over the plans.

Swalley said Tuesday morning after the Chamber took ownership of the new building that she planned for both afternoon (July 14) and morning sessions (July 15) to give all interested bidders a chance to examine the building before allowing two weeks to get bids back for the remaining work to help make the move possible for not only the Chamber, but also the License Bureau and NCED.

“We are on a quick timeline because we do have to be out of here by October and paying for two different places is going to be a little rough for us,” Swalley said, “so we want to get in there as soon as possible. Basically, we’re just inviting all the contractors and telling them what we want done and give them an opportunity to bid and see how fast we can transition over there.”

The Chamber’s new website, which went live June 15, also has a larger emphasis on its membership, which is more than 250 strong. Swalley said it took her at least 45 minutes to make any changes to the old site, which required HTML knowledge to update, but the new site allows members to post things about their businesses on their own.

“When I got here in November and was looking at the website, I learned that I had to change everything in HTML code. I am not the tech-savvy person. We just really needed a revamp,” Swalley said. “We needed to come with the times. Our site wasn’t phone-friendly, tablet-friendly at all. Every single change that one of our members had … it would take me 45 minutes to even change it. It was just a very complicated process, and that’s what made this happen.

There are also new features, which make the site more user friendly and cater to the multitude of platforms now used to access the Internet. Swalley said the Chamber’s goal with the improved website is to “become the resource center-point for Maryville.”

“We’ll have everything there is to know about the Chamber. We have stuff about Maryville and Nodaway County in general,” she said. “We have an event calendar that people can submit events to. If our businesses want to put ads up, they can put ads on the pages. They can post job opportunities. They can post news about their company. There’s just a lot of different things that are beneficial to the actual Chamber member and anyone going to our website in general.”

Fifteen days into the new adventure, and Swalley said she’s already seeing results.

“We had around 1,300 visitors a month on our website, and it wasn’t cohesive to the user,” Swalley said while looking at a page full of statistics on her computer screen. “Now, people go on there and it gives them a lot more information about who we are, what we’re doing in the community. It gives more information about our members.

“Looking at these statistics, we’ve only been live for about 15 days and we’ve had over 1,300 views. You can tell that there’s a lot more access points to it.”

Swalley said none of the progress the Chamber has made in her eight months at the helm would have been possible without the board of directors.

“The board is being really progressive, they’ve given me feedback on everything I’ve done,” she said. “My goal was not to come in here and be a tornado and change everything up. Any ideas that I have thrown out there, they’re really gung-ho about.”