The chamber announced these plans earlier this month at its 10th annual Icebreaker event, attended by around 850 people including business and community leaders.
In an interview yesterday, Chamber President Zach Brandon said the new resources are related to last year’s announcement of an “umbrella brand” around marketing, talent recruitment and economic development called “Be Madison.”
“A group of entrepreneurs created this hashtag called Be Madison, and the idea was to show Madison to the world through the eyes of the people who live here … and so we’re building on what they started and expanding that,” he said.
Brandon says the BeMadison.com website will serve as an online hub for much of what the chamber is rolling out this summer, with a launch date tentatively planned for June. That includes a new service called the Madison Pitch, giving certain companies access to the chamber’s slides and data used to recruit companies and talent to the greater Madison area.
“They can sort of pick and choose what they need for tailor-made promotion, whether that’s you’re recruiting companies or talent, or investors, and then they can download that and have custom-made decks,” he said.
The chamber is also creating a new video that companies seeking talent can embed in their websites, which will offer tracking services “to identify who’s coming to their site, where are they coming from, and how long to they stay” along with more precise engagement metrics.
And the chamber is planning another site called Make Madison focused on fostering a sense of belonging and boosting its diversity, equity and inclusion work.
“We have multiple video vignettes that are coming out where we’re asking both entrepreneurs of color and senior executives, why Madison? And so people hear validators with authentic voices, who have made Madison the place to make a life, make a career, make a difference,” Brandon said.
Meanwhile, the latest iteration of the chamber’s virtual reality is “all but complete,” Brandon noted. It’s currently being tested by UW-Madison’s football program for recruiting, and the chamber plans to allow more companies to use version 2.0 of the VR platform once it’s officially launched. The original version of the system was mainly used by large employers in the region, such as Exact Sciences, American Family Insurance, Land’s End, Madison Gas & Electric and others.
“We have elevated the technology, all developed here in Wisconsin … to a level that is mind-blowing,” he said, adding the chamber wants to be “on the cutting edge of how talent recruitment of the future will look like.”
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