Two Actions

Friday, March 13 feels like a year ago based on the sheer volume of work that's been done in just over a week at the Indy Chamber. But it was the catalyst for a series of events we'll look back on someday as a fundamental shift in the way we operate.

Rewind to the previous Thursday, when our President and CEO Michael Huber mentioned that he'd like to pull a group together at the Hi-Fi in Fountain Square to talk about how we can be responsive and effective for the needs of our small business community, which had just begun to feel the economic impact of the COVID-19 coronavirus. This group would include small business owners, Chamber board members, and senior staff. In his phone invitation, Michael couldn't shake the image of displaced service workers from his brain.

Fast forward to Friday's group discussion, which included confusion, frustration, and creativity. The consensus of this conversation can be boiled down to two main actions: inform and promote. These words feel simple when I write them, but couldn't be more complex.

To inform is to notify, listen, and respond accordingly. I'm not sure I had a full appreciation of this until Tuesday afternoon, when we launched a new website that didn't exist the day before and immediately started fielding questions from business owners on everything from financial assistance to workplace safety.

The Rapid Response Hub is admittedly a simple idea: a collection of answers to common questions and a mechanism to ask more specific ones. Its sophistication resides in the network of staff and partners that connect businesses with the knowledge they need to make informed decisions. Many of our staff members working on this triage team, who normally operate behind the scenes, are taking a central role in the livelihood of small businesses and their employees. They've responded to everything from hair salons weighing the pros-and-cons of staying open, to mental health professionals adapting in-person consultations to a virtual world. Partners like the IU Kelley School of Business at IUPUI, the Indianapolis Bar Association, Vox Global, and Level Up Development raised their hands right away, unprompted, to lend their expertise to create a better service offering.

Before these last eight days, I would have said it would take weeks to put together a structure to adequately facilitate these inquiries. I would have been wrong.

To promote is to advance and amplify. I'm a marketer by trade, so this definition isn't lost on me. Many small businesses are changing their business models to adapt to an economy largely working in the digital realm, and this transition isn't an easy one. We're currently working on a campaign local businesses can use to highlight these changes and help bring dollars in the door. Partners from Hirons, CVR, Top Shot Aerial Photography, and more have offered their services and expertise to make this possible.

In the interim, we've started #IndyCares, a gathering place to capture people helping people in the Indy region. This ranges from a Google Doc with Venmo handles allowing the public to tip their favorite service worker, to the gathering of care packages for frontline health workers by local music promoters. These stories offer light in a dark room, hope in the midst of crisis.

Before these last eight days, I would have said this sort of a promotional engine would take weeks to build. I would have been wrong.

Those businesses that sponsor little league teams and donate food for our events never think twice about supporting the community they love. Now is our opportunity to do the same for them.