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Mooresville Chamber outlines business outreach, membership and pandemic-era support in council briefing
Summary
Kirk Ballard, president of the Mooresville Chamber of Commerce, presented membership metrics, outreach activities, and services the chamber provides to businesses including marketing, events, certificates of origin and workforce support; council members expressed interest in deeper small-business engagement.
Kirk Ballard, president of the Mooresville Chamber of Commerce, presented to the council on Oct. 1 about the chamber’s services, membership and outreach, and asked the council to consider continued funding of outside agencies. Trisha Hills, assistant town manager, introduced the presentation.
Ballard told the council the chamber maintains a business database of roughly 5,000 businesses (the chamber reported about 1,000 paying members), sends email blasts to that database twice weekly, and operates a chamber website and member directory that the chamber says averages thousands of visits daily. He described how the chamber promotes ribbon cuttings, networking events, podcasts and social-media posts; Ballard cited examples of high social engagement on recent ribbon-cutting posts and other promotions.
Ballard highlighted several operational services the chamber provides to businesses: certificate-of-origin services for manufactured goods (he said the chamber issued about 9,400 certificates last year), job-posting promotion on chamber platforms, and free or discounted social-media postings to support members during COVID. He said the chamber did not drop members during the pandemic and posted several thousand free ads to help businesses stay open.
Councillors thanked Ballard and said they would follow up on ways to better coordinate with the chamber on small-business outreach and workforce needs. Ballard also described the chamber’s community events — including a business expo, First Responder appreciation feeding event, signature award events, and the longstanding Ray City Festival — and noted the chamber rents town-owned facilities for many events.
No formal council action was recorded on Oct. 1 related to the chamber presentation in the excerpt provided.
Ballard closed by thanking council members and praising Mooresville’s attractiveness to new businesses, citing local schools and downtown appeal as recurring reasons businesses choose to locate in the town.
