February is new member month at the Bath-Brunswick Regional Chamber, and our team has been out meeting with perspective members and telling them about what our chamber of commerce does. One of the critical questions people ask is “What do I get with membership?”

It’s a great question, and honestly, it’s a relatively new question considering how long chambers of commerce have been around. For the better part of the first 100 years of chambers of commerce (the U.S. Chamber of Commerce was founded in 1912, but many municipal chambers go back even further, including colonial America; the first chamber of commerce in the world was formed in Marseilles in 1599), many businesses joined the chamber because “it was the right thing to do” or because being part of the chamber was a “stamp of approval.” However, since the turn of this century, and perhaps even back to the mid-90s, businesses began to ask about the return on investment.

Now, the typical chamber answer for “What do I get with membership?” is some pre-packaged metaphoric response that includes “Chamber membership is like a gym membership — you get back what you put in” or “Chamber membership is about getting the keys to get your business rolling, but you have to put the key in the ignition and drive the vehicle.” While those are not untrue, this is beginning to be a less effective answer for business leaders as they are habitually understaffed, overstretched and don’t have the available time to engage that they once did.

This brings me the long way around the barn to the point of this week’s column, which is no matter if you are a chamber of commerce, a downtown program, a trade association or any other business group, you need to begin to showcase member benefits with the changing landscape of availability that businesses now have. To that end, three years ago, Claire Papell was our chamber coordinator and had asked “What do I tell a business about membership if they have no time to attend events?” That led to us creating a three-tier member benefit sheet that was sorted by engagement levels rather than by benefit category.

This is best illustrated by using a grounded example, so I’ll explain the tiered benefit sheet that we use at the chamber. However, I strongly encourage all nonprofits to use this template to frame your conversations with businesses and sponsors. The engagement tiers are as follows: Zero Engagement, With Engagement and Engagement Plus.

The Zero Engagement level is where I’d say at least one-third of our membership finds themselves. They are so busy with workload or understaffed that they don’t have time to be on a committee or attend a networking event or email about advocacy help they need. However, they want to be members because they feel membership authenticates them as a reputable company or because they think it’s the right thing to do, they want to support the work the chamber does or they want to get the marketing benefits and business updates the chamber creates.

Though it could be a combination of all those reasons, that last point is the one we emphasize in speaking with perspective members. If you cannot engage by attending or even sharing your business updates with the BBRC, you will still get listed in the guide book, listed on our website, receive the weekly e-newsletter with regional business and advocacy updates, get invitations to events on the chance you can attend, become a first referral when inquiries come in about your industry, and new members get an introductory posting in our well-read e-newsletter, too. For many businesses, we will drive at least your dues amount and, typically, multiple times your dues amount to your doorstep every year just through these simple benefits. Membership for most businesses (meaning 20 employees or less) is less than you would pay for nearly any single print ad run twice per year — or, put another way, less than $1.50 per day.

The With Engagement tier is the typical chamber of commerce benefits we often laud, including: attending our monthly networking events, teaching or attending chamber workshops, sending us business updates to run in the e-newsletter and on our social media, sponsoring/participating in chamber annual events, becoming a Cornerstone member, participating in the Chamber Works 2030 workforce programs, getting guidance or assistance with policy/advocacy initiatives, and so much more. This is the typical level of benefits that every organization can espouse about what it is that your organization is known for.

Finally, Engagement Plus is not greater than the second tier, it just goes beyond the other tiers to explain what the chamber does for the greater region. If a rising tide raises all ships, then what the chamber does to help all, by the transitive property of community growth, helps your business. Thus, Engagement Plus focuses on the broader impacts of the chamber with welcoming and recruiting new businesses and citizens, working on regional tourism projects to bring more people to the area, annual surveys to help businesses understand what their stakeholders want, creating new workforce solutions and connections, and being first responders in times of crisis or celebration in the communities we serve.

I hope you can see the difference there and that for a relatively small price of membership you get these benefits for an entire year. That cost is more of an investment, and even without engagement, you can still gain so much from both the Zero Engagement and Engagement Plus tiers.

Every organization can tell their story through this format, and I hope they do. This is not a competition. Every organization in the communities we serve has a purpose and a role in serving the greater good, and I hope by sharing the framework we use they can tell their story even better to the business leaders in our region. We’re all in this together.

Cory King is executive director of the Bath-Brunswick Regional Chamber of Commerce.

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