Gina Jones and Membership Director Rachel Abbott explained that events are a big part of what they do to engage the community and get members together. Social media plays a large role in their outreach as well.

Gina said, “We do a local lunch once a month at a member restaurant. Each month we draw for the next month to see who the location will be. We host a monthly Morning Brew, which is a coffee get-together. There’s a different group of people there than the ones who attend in the evening. Without a morning event, you might not see them. We host a Bowling for Business where we invite our members to come and play. We rent out the entire bowling alley in Cabot—32 lanes. Guests come in a team of five. The 1st round they play with their group. The second one is the networking round, and we mix and match players. It’s so much fun and we sold out within 24 hours. We also have a great time at our golf tournament.

One of our biggest events is the Christmas Open House. We host it on Sunday before Thanksgiving. Our member businesses sign up to participate. Any type of business can be a part of it, but they must be open on Sunday. We take care of all the adverts and tickets. Just for showing up at these businesses you get a ticket (for the raffle). For each additional $20 spent at a participating business, shoppers get another ticket. All participating businesses donate an item to our raffle. Last year, we were able to give away a prize basket valued at over $1,750 dollars. We also do Facebook Lives throughout the day to build on the excitement of the event.

You don’t even have to sell anything that day. We have a financial institution here that serves cookies. Most of the restaurants will have some type of table and some refreshments like cookies and hot chocolate. There's a couple of them that are basically there to introduce themselves (not sell products). Some of our restaurants and venues invited non-brick-and-mortar businesses to have tables in their location so they could participate too. That was a great way for us to spread the love and engage nonmembers and let them see what they're missing out on.

The event brings awareness and attention to where businesses are located. Each participant gets a ticket just for going into a participating business. That additional entry encourages them to get (another) entry into the grand prize drawing.

When we do our advertising for that event, we always list businesses’ addresses. We get comments every year like, ‘I didn't even know they were there.’ That's the whole point of this. It's to bring awareness to these businesses.

We also buy gift cards from every one of the participating businesses (if possible). And we catch people shopping at other places along the route. We surprise them with a gift card to another business to encourage more purchases and strolling around. Everybody gets really excited about it. We had several businesses tell us that this is their busiest and biggest sale day of the entire year. It’s a free event for the community.

We also do an ice cream social. Businesses set up and bring their branded canopies/tents. Several of them get creative with decorating. We have a theme and make homemade ice cream. Judges come in and decide winners in different categories. We invite our fire and police to come out and they have a meet-and-greet. This event is open to our members and their families.

Our school district is one of the largest in the state. We host a New Teacher Luncheon and Business Expo each year. It introduces our new people to local businesses too. Our businesses sponsor tables. Two people from that business can come and sit at the table and meet the new teachers.
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