Notes from #ACCE26 in New Orleans, and what we're building for chambers next

Our team spent July 20 through 22 at the ACCE Annual Convention in New Orleans, in a building with more than a thousand chamber professionals. We went in expecting to talk about job boards. We spent most of the three days talking about workforce data instead.

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The conversation kept landing in the same place. Chamber leaders are being asked to answer two questions with real confidence: what talent do we have in this region, and what are our employers actually hiring for. Almost nobody felt like they could answer either one without hedging.

Every organization in the region holds one piece of the picture

Here is the pattern we heard, in some version, in nearly every conversation.

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The chamber has a read on workforce from its members, usually from a survey or from what came up at the last roundtable. The workforce board has its own numbers, built for its own reporting requirements. The EDO has a version packaged for site selectors. The community college is planning next year's programs against data that was assembled last year. Sometimes a consultant has been through and left a deck behind.

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Every one of those views is partially right. None of them is the whole picture, and they rarely reconcile with each other.

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The cost is not just duplicated effort, though there is plenty of that. The real cost is that programs get designed against assumptions. A training program launches for roles that stopped being posted eight months ago. An attraction campaign targets a talent segment the region already has in surplus. Nobody set out to guess. The data just wasn't current enough to do anything else.

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That gap matters more right now than it did five years ago. Manufacturing investment is moving back onshore. The AI datacenter buildout is creating concentrated, sudden demand for electricians, technicians, and construction trades in places that weren't planning for it. A large share of existing white-collar roles are being rewritten as AI moves into the workflow.

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Regional labor markets are shifting faster than an annual assessment cycle can track.

What good workforce data actually looks like

Workforce data for a region has two halves, and most organizations only have one of them.

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Demand is what employers in the region are hiring for right now. Not 5-year projections. Open roles at named local companies, with titles, skills, and seniority, updated as postings go up and come down. This is the half chambers are best positioned to own, because they already have the employer relationships. Most chambers just have no system collecting it.

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Supply is who is actually here. The professional workforce in the region, with skills, industries, seniority, tenure, and career trajectory. Who is moving in, who is leaving, and where they go when they leave.

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Put those two next to each other and the gap becomes visible instead of debatable. That is the whole point. A chamber that can say "we have 340 people in this region with these skills, our members have 90 open roles that need them, and the pipeline from our two local colleges produces 40 a year" is having a fundamentally different conversation than one presenting survey results.

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The word doing the most work in that sentence is now. A workforce report you buy once a year is a photograph. What regional leaders need is a live feed, because the market moves between reporting cycles and the decisions do too.

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This is also where surveys reach their limit. Response rates skew toward engaged members, the sample is rarely representative of the regional employer base, and by the time results are compiled the picture has aged. Surveys are useful for understanding sentiment. They are a weak instrument for measuring supply and demand.

Why the chamber is the natural convener

ACCE represents roughly 1,300 chambers across the US and Canada, and those organizations collectively represent about 1.2 million businesses. That is an enormous amount of employer relationships already built.

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No other organization in a region has that. Workforce boards have mandates and funding streams. EDOs have site selectors and incentive packages. Colleges have curriculum cycles. The chamber has businesses in the room on a first-name basis across every sector in the region.

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Which means the chamber is the only entity positioned to be the talent insight leader for the whole region. Not the convener of another committee. The organization that can walk into any of those rooms with the actual numbers and connect the dots between what employers need and which local program should be responding to it.

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That is a real shift in standing. It changes what the chamber is for, in the eyes of both its members and its public-sector partners.

From workforce data to talent attraction

Talent attraction, for a region, means getting specific people to move to your region or stay in it, and to take jobs with local employers. That is the outcome. Everything else is a means to it.

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Most regional talent attraction programs run on advertising. Google keywords, paid social, a brand video, a "why live here" microsite. Those things reach people who are already searching for a reason to move. That is a narrow slice of the people who would actually consider it.

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The approach we're bringing to chambers works the other direction. Instead of buying keywords and waiting, you identify real people whose career history and profile suggest they would consider your region. People who grew up there and left. People whose employer just went through a layoff in a higher-cost metro. People whose skills match what your members are hiring for and whose trajectory suggests they're near a move. Then you reach them directly, and where possible through a warm path rather than cold outreach, which converts substantially better.

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Then the campaign has to actually end in a hire, not in awareness. That is what Findem's Intelligent Job Post does: it turns an open role at a member company into an active agent that sources, engages, and pre-screens, and returns candidates who are ready to interview. It was built for exactly three audiences, and EDOs and member organizations are one of them.

Where non-dues revenue comes in

Non-dues revenue is any revenue a chamber generates outside membership fees. Sponsorships, events, advertising, affinity programs. Nearly every chamber leader we talked to in New Orleans described growing it as a survival-level priority, and most described their current sources as flat or declining.

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Talent attraction is a candidate for that column, and an unusual one, because it doesn't require the chamber to invent a new product or sell something adjacent to its mission.

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The mechanics are straightforward. The chamber provides the regional workforce picture and the member relationships. We run attraction campaigns directly with individual member companies on their open roles. Revenue from those engagements is shared back to the chamber.

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So the chamber gets paid for solving the problem its members raise most often. Workforce is not a hard sell to a growing employer. It is usually the first thing they bring up.

How Getro works for a chamber of commerce

Concretely, here is what we can put in place:

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• A live job board across your member companies. Every open role, tracked automatically as postings change. This becomes your demand-side data, and it works as a member benefit at the same time.
• A workforce map of your region. The professional talent in your area, with skills, industries, seniority, and movement patterns, built from Findem's 3D data rather than from a survey.
• Market maps that put supply next to demand. The gap, visible, in a format you can take into a workforce board meeting or a member briefing.
• Talent attraction campaigns. Targeted at real people with a plausible reason to move to or stay in your region, run with individual member companies.
• A revenue share back to the chamber on those campaigns.

On cost: this sits at roughly a tenth of what a comparable purchased workforce report and consulting engagement runs, and it doesn't go stale between refreshes, because it updates continuously rather than on a billing cycle.

Thanks to the ACCE Summit organizers

A lot of what's above came directly out of New Orleans. Thanks to Lindsay Bensko and Ryan Keedy for pushing on the parts of this that weren't clear yet, and to the ACCE team for building a convention where that kind of conversation actually happens instead of getting crowded out by programming.

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Kyle and I came home with a longer list of things to build than we arrived with, which is the right outcome for a conference.

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If you run a chamber or an EDO and want to see what your region's talent map looks like, we'll build one for you.

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Reach out and we'll get you a look at your own data before you decide anything.