At its most fundamental, your chamber of commerce is a tool for you to 1) market your company, and 2) affect issues that impact the local economy.
To those broad ends, the Fort Collins Area Chamber of Commerce annually conducts the Moving Fort Collins Forward! campaign. The number goals for this year’s campaign are 100 new members and $550,000 of financial support.
More specifically, there are 21 programs up for sponsorship in this year’s campaign. Many of them great avenues for marketing your company. You can find information about them here.
Then there are three big initiatives focused on impacting the local economy. The first is the Fix North I-25 Initiative. I-25 is a mess and is getting rapidly worse. It will take a big, sustained lobbying effort to secure the $965M necessary to widen the interstate to three lanes between Highway 14 and Highway 66. Learn more here.
The second big initiative is Strong Economy Initiative. The key program here is the Fort Collins Works program. While it’s great to be Northern Colorado and especially Fort Collins, we still rank 7th in the nation in under-employment. Even so, some politicians are calling for less support of economic development. Learn more here.
The third big initiative is the Stand Up for Business Initiative. The quality of government matters, as does the quality of elected officials making decisions. This initiative is about keeping a strong lobbying and political program in place to represent the business perspective. Learn more here.
The final thing I wanted to mention is re-growing the Chamber’s membership base. The Great Recession hurt all membership-based associations. The Chamber has replaced many of the lost memberships but we’d like to re-grow the membership to over 1200 members. We’re at 1087 today and the campaign goal of 100 gets us close. If you know of someone who should be a member, send them here or have them contact Joe Anderson on our team at [email protected] or at (970) 482-3746.