Business Wairarapa (Chamber of Commerce)

As enthusiastic members of the Wairarapa Chamber of Commerce, we wanted to give something back and show off our Chamber in the best possible light.

One of the biggest benefits of Chamber membership is access to other members. A Business Directory lists all members with details of their organisation. Members use the Directory to contact other members directly, using controlled access to contact information. The Business Directory was also used to provide a public-facing view (without the member details). This platform delivered an effective advertising channel which proved very popular with the public.

The substantial amount of administrative support is required to run a busy Chamber and there never seems to be enough hours in the day. We could see how important it was to reduce that administrative burden by automating the membership subscription facility. Instead of handling membership subscriptions manually, we set up a Business Automation workflow on the website. Members completed a form with the necessary information, and an integration with Stripe’s payment platform automatically processed the resulting credit card payment. We also built an integration with Xero so that invoices and receipts were sent out automatically.

Another area that required a large amount of manual support was looking after the bookings for the many Chamber events. Every month, it was necessary to co-ordinate hundreds of invitations, responses and payments. We set up an Event Calendar with online bookings and payments to further reduce the load on the scarce administrative resources.

The Chamber continued to grow and embraced the idea of sub-regions to manage the business associations that were developing around the Wairarapa. We modified the website to incorporate web pages for each Sub-region. We also modified the membership subscription mechanism to cope with the variety of membership levels for each sub-region.