Somewhere in the US, a chamber professional is planning another breakfast.
Meanwhile, another chamber is sending 400 BASE jumpers off a bridge.
Someone else is organizing a hot air balloon festival. Another is putting on a bacon festival. And in Cabot, Arkansas, people are apparently spitting live crickets for prizes.
Events are big these days. Businesses are noticing they are a way to get people in. While chambers don’t have to follow their members’ lead, the event bar is getting lifted. That’s why many chambers that enjoy hosting events are looking for something out of the ordinary.
There was an interesting post on the Chamber Pros Facebook group last month where pros from around the country shared the coolest events their organizations produce. The responses were a reminder that some of the most memorable chamber programs have very little to do with name badges, buffet lines, or figuring out what to offer for vegetarian lunches.
They also reveal something useful for chambers wondering whether their event calendars need a little life.
But before you start worrying about your budget, know that your events don’t need to be bigger or have top headliners (but hey, if you can, why not?). They just need to be more interesting.
Give your community something to talk about like these chambers have.
Audio Summary
Give People a Story to Tell
Consider the rubber duck race chamber pro Cheryl Viola shared.
You’ve heard of a rubber duck race, right?
Except they didn't have a river or a canal. So they built one temporarily down Main Street.
That's the kind of detail people repeat.
The same is true of Cabotfest, where Gina White Jones says one of the traditions is a live cricket-spitting competition for prizes. They have a sponsor every year that handles the crickets.
But imagine explaining that event to someone who’s never attended:
"What happens at your festival?"
"Well, there's food, entertainment, vendors, and then we spit crickets."
Conversation accomplished and interest sparked. Memorable events often contain one feature that gives people a reason to talk about them before, during, and long after the event.
Instead of sourcing insects, ask: What's the part of our event someone would mention first when telling a friend about it?
If the answer is "the networking," you may have some work to do because that alone just isn’t enough to stand out.
Build Around Something Only Your Community Can Offer
Some of the coolest examples can’t be copied and dropped into another city because they're deeply connected to their communities.
The Great Columbia Crossing 10K, shared by Allen Barber, gives participants the opportunity to run or walk across the Astoria-Megler Bridge on the one day it is open to pedestrian traffic.
That's an experience tied directly to place.
In Pierre, South Dakota, Rooster Rush Week celebrates the opening of pheasant hunting season.
The Santa Maria Valley Chamber hosts its annual Strawberry Industry Recognition Dinner, serving roughly 750 guests and celebrating an industry central to its region.
Oregon Trail Days in Tenino, Washington, dates back to 1967 and recently attracted an estimated 13,000-15,000 attendees over three days.
The Cape Fear Kite Festival turns its beach setting into the star of a three-day event that includes a drone show, illuminated night kite flying, music, glowsticks, and two days at a beachfront state park.
While you might not be able to host those events because they don’t fit your community, you can look around and ask:
What industry shaped our community? What geographic feature do residents take for granted but visitors find fascinating? What history belongs to our town? What tradition already has affection attached to it?
Sometimes the coolest new event idea is hiding in something your community has been doing for 100 years.
Own a Food
We all love a great food experience, particularly if it’s tied to our area and something that sets us apart. Chamber communities celebrate a lot of fan favorites such as:
The Garlic Town USA Festival.
The Indiana Bacon Festival in Delphi with “Bacon, Bands and Brew.”
The Newport Seafood & Wine Festival draws thousands of people in February.
Other chamber professionals mentioned Tacos & Tequila, wine and craft beer festivals, and a Men Who
Cook event, where community leaders serve guests in an event similar to a Taste of the Town.
Food gives an event an immediate identity.
A successful food event can also create layers of participation for members: restaurants, breweries, farms, distributors, retailers, sponsors, musicians, tourism partners, lodging businesses, and nonprofits can all have a role.
And food offers endless opportunities for side events such as eating contests, chef competitions, People's Choice awards, pairings, demonstrations, recipe contests, and specialty merchandise.
If your community has a food it loves, produces, grows, argues about, or claims to make better than anywhere else, there's probably an event hiding in there.
Go Big and Stay Home
Some chamber events operate on an entirely different scale.
Tim Naylor shared that Bridge Day West Virginia, is the state's largest single-day event, with more than 220 vendors, roughly 400 BASE jumpers and rappelers, and visitors from around the world.
Kevin McHugh shared Castle Rock Starlighting, a longstanding Colorado tradition, brought nearly 49,000 attendees downtown in 2025.
Lauren Turcotte’s chamber hosted the IRONMAN 70.3 Maine.
Bill Miller's annual dinner hosts about 1,600 people and has welcomed speakers including Shaquille O'Neal, Serena Williams, and Bradley Cooper, with Kevin Hart slated as a speaker.
These aren't necessarily events any chamber can emulate but they do show that not every chamber event has to be designed with a “members only” lens. Signature events can become tourism drivers, economic development tools, downtown traffic generators, sponsorship platforms, and highly visible demonstrations of what a chamber can convene. A 40,000-person event obviously creates a different economic footprint than a 200-person mixer.
But even a much smaller event can be designed with the same thinking: How could this bring people into our community, introduce them to local businesses, extend their stay, or give sponsors access to an audience they want to reach?
Create Spectacle and Community
Here are some events people attend because something interesting (outside of networking) is happening.
• Hot air balloons
• Giant kites illuminated at night
• Aircraft and classic cars
• Monster trucks crushing cars
Chamber pro Amber Holle brought back her community's Hot Air Balloon Festival after a 20-year hiatus. On a cautionary side, she also noted that weather-dependent events take years off her life expectancy, proving once again that the prettiest event photos often conceal a chamber pro checking radar every minute the day of.
Linda Price shared Wings & Wheels, an event built around military history with static aircraft displays, a car show, vendors, entertainment, and more.
Tammi Coleman's chamber’s Sauces & Shows: Wings & Wheels piles on the spectacle with a car show, monster trucks, car crushing, Hot Wheels racing, a hot-wing eating contest, side-by-side show, bands, and food trucks.
When creating this type of event think about giving attendees something to look at, experience, try, photograph, taste, hear, or participate in. It helps in marketing.
Think about the difference between telling members:
"Come to our downtown event."
and
"Come watch 2,000 illuminated kites fill the night sky."
Let an Event Stand for Something
Cool doesn't always mean quirky. There were some great feel-good recognition events too such as:
• Teacher & Staff Appreciation
• Non-Profit Appreciation Banquet
• Galveston’s women's conference featuring prominent keynote speakers
• The Strawberry Industry Recognition Dinner
A strong recognition event can strengthen relationships with groups that matter to the local economy while showing the community what the chamber cares about.
That creates another useful event-planning question:
Who deserves a spotlight in your community but rarely gets one?
• Teachers?
• Healthcare workers?
• Manufacturing employees?
• Hospitality workers?
• Young entrepreneurs?
• Family-owned businesses?
• First responders?
• Nonprofit leaders?
• Skilled tradespeople?
An event designed around appreciation can become much bigger than an awards ceremony when the audience cares about the people being honored.
Turn Familiar Events Into Better Experiences
Angie Woker Hibben mentioned that her chamber's golf outing has become especially fun because hole sponsors have “really stepped up their game.”
A golf outing can become an experience if hole sponsors create challenges, tastings, games, contests, themes, giveaways, photo opportunities, or ridiculous competitions.
A business expo can become interactive. A dinner can become theatrical. A fundraiser can have an irresistible theme.
Heather Harter offered perhaps the finest evidence of the power of naming: Whiskey, Lies and Alibis, a fundraiser for her chamber's Government Affairs Committee. She described it as, “We created a speakeasy-themed storytelling competition featuring eight well-known, well-liked community members, each given 90 seconds to tell their best story. Guests received a whiskey flight, food and a ballot, but the real fun and fundraising came from buying extra votes, stuffing the ballot box, purchasing “scandals” against the storytellers or running campaign ads that were read throughout the night. Each storyteller had a campaign manager, and our “fake news” reporters delivered updates from the precincts as the voting unfolded. We made money from both ticket sales and all the playful election-night extras, while a local venue gave us a generous discount, exclusive use of the space and the perfect speakeasy atmosphere.”
Give People Something to Anticipate
Some examples have been running for decades such as:
• The Oxford Wine & Craft Beer Festival is approaching its 20th year.
• The Route 11 Yard Crawl is in its 21st.
• Garlic Town USA has been around for more than 30 years.
• Castle Rock has been lighting its star for 90 years, with the associated event spanning decades.
Long-running events become part of a community's calendar and identity. It’s something you might want to consider if you’re thinking about changing the event simply because staff members have grown tired of producing it.
Before retiring a longstanding event, look at attendance, sponsorship, member participation, economic impact, community sentiment, and whether there are ways to refresh the experience without losing the tradition. If you simply don’t have the bandwidth, perhaps there’s an organization your chamber can pass the torch to.
Steal the Thinking, Not the Event
The point of looking at cool chamber events isn't to return to your next staff meeting and announce that your community urgently needs BASE jumping.
Instead, study why these ideas work. They give people stories. They connect to place and celebrate local identity. These events offer something visual or experiential. That creates sponsorship opportunities.
Maybe they involve businesses and attract people who might never attend a traditional chamber function.
But perhaps most importantly, they're easy to explain. That's an underrated test for any event idea.
Try describing your event in one sentence to someone who isn't involved with the chamber.
If their response is, “That sounds fun,” you're onto something.
If you need four paragraphs to explain the concept and eyes are glazing over, return to the drawing board.
While no chamber needs to make membership or programming entirely about events, they are a great way to build community and get people talking and interested. That’s because the best chamber events become part of the stories communities tell about themselves. Sometimes that story involves economic leadership or local history. Sometimes it involves 49,000 people gathering downtown to watch a star light up.
But no matter what those stories are, they get people talking and that’s memorable.
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