By the board of the Mad River Valley Chamber of Commerce
Next week will be Susan Klein's final week as the Mad River Valley Chamber of Commerce's executive director. She is off to take on a fourth career at The Essex in Essex, Vermont.
Under her 18 years as director of the chamber, she moved the chamber from around 40 business members to well over 200 this year. Susan expanded the chamber purview to include those valleywide matters not managed by local governing bodies including strategic development, destination marketing and even providing financial and marketing support for event incubation.
Susan brought together business owners of all sorts and helped usher in new ways of communicating to members, Valley residents and visitors. She nurtured and grew an extremely popular Mad River Valley Facebook presence, ushered in destination packaging that now includes Ski the Valley+ Passport and Vermont Bed & Brew and has grown the online presence through economic ups and downs.
Most recently, she worked with the chamber marketing committee and dozens of residents to develop the Almost There film – currently at 22,000 viewings and growing. As she departs, the MadRiverValley.com website, which has grown another 40 percent year over year, will be responsive and easier to use on mobile devices and will fuel four pilot iPad kiosks being installed in the Waterbury Visitor Center, Mad River Valley Visitor Center, The Warren Store and Paradise Deli.
She's never been afraid of hard work and managed to bring calm to contentious issues. She skillfully balanced the mission of the chamber with local business owner concerns, all the while maintaining a visitor center ready for questions from visitors and residents alike. This last decade found the chamber modernizing stakeholder dues and event funding, organizing the Warren Fourth of July and coordinating legislative and local government cooperation. Equally important has been utilizing technology to market the Mad River Valley quality of life we all cherish to the rest of the state, country and world.
We wouldn't be where we are now without her and wish her much ongoing success and enjoyment in her future "up north." Thank you from the bottom of our hearts (and bottom lines of our businesses).
2013/2014 Board of Directors of the Mad River Valley Chamber of Commerce:
Steve Butcher, Michele Eid, Peter Hans, Lisa Loomis, Peter MacLaren, Tom Mehuron, Roger Nishi, Vicki Walluck, Jim Westhelle, Rose Marie White and Lorien Wroten.
{loadnavigation}
