Meeting Minutes: January 8, 2015
January 13, 2015
Jane Cozad called the meeting to order on Janury 8th at 8 am at the Rockford Village Hall.
Jane thanked the chamber for their past support in the last 3 years. We have accomplished some good things and there is more to come ! Jane introduced Marie Miller the 2015 Chamber President, Jackie Abercrombie as Vice President and Lisa Kuhn as the secretary / treasurer. We had a changing of the guard !
Lisa read the minutes from December. Norm made motion. Bob 2nd . All approved.
The financial report was read. Bob made Motion. Norm 2nd. All approved.
Congratulations to Frankie Jo’s – the January Business of the Month.
Bob Maurer thanked the Chamber for the December Business of the Month honor for the Rockford Library. He also thanked the chamber for the levy support and advertising. Our levy passed with the highest margin in the state as far as library levies. This shows how much the community appreciates our local library.
We will wait until March to decide if we will continue the Facebook Marketing for businesses classes.
We are rolling out a new (NO COST) member benefit – Save local Now. SAVE LOCAL NOW is a “BUY LOCAL” initiative supporting our chamber members with a digital marketing platform equipped with tools to better promote businesses. Includes FREE services such as email marketing, event publishing, and more.
We will try to schedule Rockford’s Best Mix 101.3 WRKD to the February 12th Meeting. And Save Local Now to the March 12th meeting.
At this time we have 40 Chamber members. 2 are new businesses – Rockford’s Best Mix and Nana J’s BBQ. We will be scheduling ribbon cuttings at a later date. Membership deadline is March 1st.
We are looking to have members work on committees this year. Several will be on the marketing committee, event planning committee so that we don’t have 2 or 3 people doing all the leg work.
The Chamber was contacted about the Santa House and if it is for sale. Discussions on if / and / or anything should be done with it. Lisa will bring more information to the next meeting.
The Chamber gave out business directories along with RADC’s Candy Canes at the 4-way stop in December. We gave out 500 directories and candy canes. Took about 1 hour. Was a fun way to wish people a Merry Christmas as they were driving through Rockford. We had someone contact us via the web site stating they appreciated the gesture.
We are looking at the idea of re-printing the directory once all the memberships are in BY MARCH 1ST !! We will contact the Village, RADC, and the Historical Society to see if they can help with expenses. The Chamber took on the full expense for the 1st go around – ($2,300). Basically has taken all our general fund as you can see by the financial report. It’s a valuable resource and we are pleased with results. We have approx.. 600 copies left of the original 2,000 ! We are thinking of adding some RADC info to the directory.
We are still taking donations of Christmas decorations and ice cream buckets with the lids for next years Christmas event.
Social media stats – We currently have 345 likes on the Chamber Facebook page. The most visited area on the web site is the meeting minutes.
Please take some time to like and share our local business information !
We have been asked about doing some financial underwriting for the radio station. We will see what we can do once all the memberships are in.
The next bicentennial meeting is January 19th at 7 pm. Committees will be established. Please join us to help plan our 200th birthday celebration.
The Chamber would like to purchase the 4th Rockford Welcome sign in the next
Year or 2 so it’s done by 2020. The Chamber will also be sponsoring the 200th birthday banners.
Motion Dan. Bob and Norm 2nd to close the meeting.
