What we've been up to during May

The Chamber Committee have had an extremely busy month. There's still only 4 volunteers in the committee but despite that we've done plenty. Here's a quick roundup:

Printing and delivery of Whitley Bay Gift Voucher marketing materials

Since we relaunched the vouchers initiative, we've wanted to update the marketing merchandise for some time. Our Chairperson, Scott, was responsible for creating the graphics and spent a morning delivering as many of the packs as possible to a number of our participating businesses in the town.

So you should soon start seeing our rebranded voucher posters and window stickers in some of your favourite local businesses.

Photo opportunities with businesses

Debra, our Social Media Manager, came up with a great idea to help promote the gift vouchers across the town. She worked with one of our members Mark at Dept. of Design & Creativity to design a whopping great voucher which our business owners could pose with.

As soon as the voucher was printed, Debra spent the day visiting many of our members and took photographs of them with it, which will be promoted across our social media channels.

With around 80 businesses currently involved, getting around everyone who said they were available was quite the challenge and Debra's step counter no doubt showed an impressive result after all of that walking.

Look out for the photos soon!

First Aid Training for members

A really useful benefit for our members is the opportunity to attend specially arranged training sessions which they might benefit from, at a reduced rate.

Our committee member Maggie arranged a First Aid session which was swiftly snapped up by many of our businesses and their staff. This includes the use of defibrillators, which we have a number of around the town and surrounding area, as well as a really in-depth course on how to deal with some common scenarios which we may all experience during our working and personal lives.

Website updates

A very long ongoing project for our team is the development of a Members Only section here on our website. This will replace our current membership system which is hosted externally. The new area will give all of our members access to their benefits, news, updates, forums and more without them having to log in somewhere else.

The good news is that this 2 year long project, headed by our Chairperson Scott, is approaching completion and the final finishing touches are currently being tested.

Social Media marketing

Whoever would have thought even 10 years ago that social media would form such a large part of our daily lives? That's why we need Debra who looks after all of our social pages. She spends hours every week researching information about our members and the town so that posts and updates can be scheduled in at appropriate times during the day. Not only does Debra look after the Chamber pages, but also the Our Whitley Bay ones.

With thousands of followers, social media marketing and management is a full time task but Debra manages to do it in a fraction of that time due to her many years of experience.

May has been a particularly busy month for our socials, and this shows no signs of slowing down.

Policing and Crime Prevention

Whitley Bay has recently seen a change in key personnel who look after policing our streets. We're long overdue for a general catch-up with our members and the local police so we're arranging a special crime prevention meeting so that everyone can meet each other, and we're also hoping to have the Shopwatch/Pubwatch scheme owners in attendance too. Members should look out for communications on that very soon.

General Administration

Day-to-day tasks including membership renewals and accounting formed a busy month for our Treasurer June. We're hoping to streamline some of these processes in the future to make it less of a mammoth task.

We also received a large volume of email enquiries from members and prospective members - all of which were dealt with by our small team.

That rounds up our May activity! Sometimes you might not be able to physically see what we're up to as a lot goes on behind the scenes to keep things ticking. If you're interested in joining the committee team, we would really love to hear from you.