The Fairfield Chamber can help

Written by Bill Bittar
Friday, 30 October 2009 17:01

Student discounts, gift certificates and street banners are a few of the marketing programs the Chamber of Commerce offers its members, but simply joining is not enough. Members are often asked to volunteer their time and to chip in for advertising to make the programs work.

“The more you put into it, the more you get out of it,” Fairfield Chamber of Commerce President Patricia Ritchie said.

Some programs are more successful than others and generate considerable support from members. No matter how successful or challenging, the chamber keeps on working to keep the good ones and improve the rest.

For instance, Ritchie said the Lucky Shopper program, in which shoppers win a $1,000 gift certificate for local businesses, was a big hit with more than 3,000 applications before the planning committee was disbanded due to a lack of members.

The chamber tried in the past to encourage retailers to keep later hours during the two weeks before Christmas to compete with shopping malls that were getting all of the late-night shoppers.

“We tried two years ago and could not get them to agree,” Ritchie said.

Some store owners pointed out that business was too slow after a certain hour to make staying open worth it for them, but Ritchie believes that if stores in the downtown area consistently stayed open till a certain time during the holidays, shoppers would get used to it and would frequent town shops more.

In many instances, merchants are on the same page as the chamber, enabling programs to thrive. The student discount is among them.

“Fairfield and Sacred Heart universities were made aware of who is on the list,” Ritchie said of participating businesses. “A Fairfield University student can go to Eastern Mountain Sports and show her Stag card and get a discount — how much is up to the merchant.”

Another popular program was briefly discontinued after an out-of-state company that ran it filed for Chapter 11.

“For seven, eight years Chamber Bucks worked and pumped money back into the economy,” Ritchie said. “It’s our hope the public will support it and the merchants again.”

The chamber sold $70,000 worth of Chamber Bucks, which shoppers used as cash at participating stores, annually for two years running. That was before CertifiChecks Inc., an Ohio firm handling the program, fell on hard financial times.

“We had 65 merchants locally,” Ritchie said. “One day we received an e-mail that CertifiChecks filed for Chapter 11, and everything evaporated into thin air. We lost the money. The chamber, unfortunately, got mud on its face. We didn’t have the money to reimburse merchants or people who received a gift certificate and had not used it yet.”

In all, Ritchie said the company was running gift certificate programs for 140 chambers of commerce and 60,000 merchants nationally.

This year, Chamber Bucks is back, but with significant changes.

The last time, a Florida bank was used. This time, Ritchie said, Patriot National Bank in Fairfield has the account. Rather than outsourcing the program to a company like CertifiChecks, the Chamber Bucks program runs out of the Fairfield Chamber of Commerce office on Post Road.

“It is 100 percent safe,” Ritchie said. “The Chamber Bucks program is a phenomenal program if you’re a retailer, but you have to be a member.”

Programs aside, Ritchie encourages residents to support local businesses.

“Everybody knows your name when you shop locally and are a regular customer,” she said, “and the local businesses give back to the community. Your small business people are the engine of growth for this country.”

For information on the Fairfield Chamber of Commerce or to become a member, call 255-1011 or visit fairfieldctchamber.com.