Danielle McFadden

Introduction:

Welcome back to Let’s Get Personal with Christella. Today we interview Greater Lowell Chamber President Danielle McFadden. We talk about her 13 years as chamber president, the changes she’s seen, and those that she thinks are coming.

Chris:

Okay. So happy to be joined here on another episode of Let’s Get Personal with Danielle McFadden, president of the Greater Lowell Chamber of Commerce. We’ve done one of these before. Happy to jump in and put you on the other side in the hot seat today.

Danielle:

I’m so excited to be here. Thank you so much for having me. And I know usually I’m on the other side, so hopefully I do. Okay.

Chris:

Yeah, you’re going to do great. So happy to dig into a few things. We were chatting right before this, but we’ll leave some of those exciting nuggets for the end. But one of the things I want to jump in with you is you and I know very well what a Chamber of Commerce is and what it does, but I don’t know that everybody does. A lot of business members are involved. But for the lay person out there, what can you tell ’em about what a Chamber of Commerce is and what your role within that is?

Danielle:

Sure. So we have businesses and nonprofit organizations who become members of the Chamber, and we offer them opportunities through networking events, marketing promotion, advocacy, mixers. So there’s all different ways Education. We’re truly like a connector with our members in the community.

Chris:

And so you’ve been doing it 13 years, is that right? Yes, long time it, it’s A long time. And as president.

Danielle:

13 years. Yes,

Chris:

Which is amazing. How did you get started in that role?

Danielle:

So I had a job as doing marketing for now what’s called Mills 42 Credit Union. It was macom Federal Credit Union at the time. I was in my mid twenties and I said, I want to get really involved in the community. So I had known the previous president of the Chamber. I went to school with her son. So I got involved with the Chamber that way, and I made two goals for myself that year. I want to be on the board of the Chamber and of the young professionals of Greater Lowell, and within a year I was on both. That’s amazing. Just by getting involved and showing up all the time and saying yes to every opportunity that was presented to

Chris:

Me. Wow, that’s incredible. And that’s a good message for a lot of people out there is just go out there and try and do it. You don’t know where it’s going to lead you. So you must’ve seen the Chamber kind of change a lot in the last decade.

Danielle:

Absolutely.

Chris:

What are some of the things you’ve noticed or implemented?

Danielle:

Yeah. Well, when I started, social media was still new to folks, so people were scared to even have a Facebook page. I learned a lot about social media and I actually helped Middlesex Community College develop their social media certificate program taught there, and so I wanted to bring that to the chamber. So we would host seminars on social media. We would do YouTube days where our members would come in and I would film on this little camera and create videos for them and put them on our YouTube page. So we’ve seen that evolve. Right now, everybody knows that you need to be on social media, the relevance and the opportunities that brings, and now I feel like it’s shifting to ai. And so we’re hoping to do something very similar with AI in terms of really getting to know AI as well as you can, changing so quickly.

Chris:

That’s week by week,

Danielle:

And then offering those opportunities for our members to learn more about it and implement AI to help make their businesses more effective.

Chris:

So it sounds like you’re kind of on the cutting edge. You were dealing with videos and social media back when it was starting.

Danielle:

Yes.

Chris:

And now you’re already thinking about how to implement AI and how it could help your businesses. So that’s pretty incredible that you’re kind of at the cusp.

Danielle:

Yeah. I made my list of New Year’s resolutions or things I wanted to do, and it was like learn something new about AI every week, A different tool that we can use. I found a really cool one where you can actually create podcasts so you can put in information, and then two hosts spit out a podcast and they’re talking back and forth. It’s insane the things that

Chris:

It’s Wade who’s here, and we are constantly dealing with stuff with ai, so we try to implement it a lot. But my daughter who’s in college told me that for studying, she could put her notes in and then they create a podcast she can listen to about the different facts of

Danielle:

Unbelievable the

Chris:

Subject matter, and it’s an easier way for her to study. But yeah, there’s so many, and I think we’re just really scratching the surface of where it’s going to go. One of the best things that I heard, well, one of the lines was that because a lot of my staff when I came back saying, Hey, let’s implement some of this AI stuff, everyone was very resistant

Danielle:

Yeah,

Chris:

And everyone thinks, well, we’re going to get replaced by ai, kind of these taglines going around. But I think you’re going to eventually get replaced by someone who uses ai, not by ai, but someone who’s taken the

Danielle:

Time to

Chris:

Embrace it. And so I think it’s really important. You can’t just turn your back on it.

Danielle:

I totally agree. It’s exciting. It’s a little scary, but the opportunities are just going to be incredible.

Chris:

Something like social media, which you’ve already done and the videos, and now you’re looking at ai, how do you implement that and bring that to your members? Is that through different seminars or what’s the way that you roll?

Danielle:

E for All is a partner of the chambers, and we have Soan Smith, who’s their executive director on our board. We’re going to be working on a series for businesses and entrepreneurs, and hopefully we’ll have you as one of our speakers just on topics that are relevant to businesses and startups.

Chris:

We just spoke at a law school on AI because we’ve really tried to make our office more productive utilizing it, and we’d love to chat on that or anything else. You

Danielle:

Would love that. And that’s a great segue because we’re also, we started an AI roundtable. We have our first one with Ian from eru at the end of January, but we want to do those at least every other month where we bring in somebody who can speak to ai. So we would love to do that as well.

Chris:

Yeah, I mean, I could spend a whole segment, and actually we have spent a whole segment on AI because it’s literally, I’ve gone to a couple trainings and seminars on them, and we’ve tried to implement as much as possible, but the guy that was conducting the seminar that I was at literally updated his slides the night before because of how often things were changing. I

Chris:

Believe it.

Chris:

There’s so many uses for it that I think so many people just are staying away from it because they’re too intimidated by it. And then some people when, as I’m sure you’ve seen, whether you’re using Chap GBT or Clawed AI or there’s so many things out there, but once you use it, you’re like, oh my God, this is amazing.

Danielle:

How did I live without it?

Chris:

Yeah, but it’s also, you don’t get the right now, to me, it’s a massive time saver, huge. Whether you’re just drafting a document, a letter, an email, it does it better.

Danielle:

Yeah

Chris:

Can put it in this tone, do it as if a fifth grader’s writing it, do it if a college person’s writing it. It’s certainly a lot of things to be concerned about in education, everything else where people are using it, and we’re maybe not going to develop the same skills that we were, but I think we can safeguard but still develop and utilize it to maximize our efficiencies. And I think we’re really going to maybe things that were bottlenecks in our office, Wade and I use it for everything. I mean, we send welcome letters out to new referral partners. We send welcome boxes out to our clients and we help using it draft a lot of our marketing products. So you still need people to review and edit.

Danielle:

Absolutely.

Chris:

But man, you get through a lot of content a lot faster than if you were creating it all yourself.

Danielle:

And once you start plugging it in, then it starts getting to know your tone and your voice and what you’re looking for, and it’s that much more efficient and effective and really kind of nails the voice of your company.

Chris:

Yeah, a hundred percent. There’s actually even, which Wade has begun doing, not to pull the curtain back too much for us, but he’s created a voice that sounds eerily similar to mine. So we can use it for different educational videos in our marketing where it’s literally we write a script, we approve it, and then he’ll have somebody through ai, voice my voice. I don’t even have to do anything.

Danielle:

It’s incredible.

Chris:

And then read, edit and approve and make sure that it’s what we want to put out there. But it’s kind of scary in some ways.

Danielle:

Yeah,

Chris:

It’s

Chris:

Really close.

Chris:

Yeah, it’s getting, but we can’t stop it.

Danielle:

No.

Chris:

So we might as

Chris:

Well embrace it.

Chris:

You got to embrace it because your competitors are going to be using it. And quite frankly, it’s taking away a lot of the mundane tasks that we don’t want to do.

Danielle:

It really is. I mean, there’ll be so many times I even put three sentences in an email and then I copy and paste and write this better and it writes it better.

Chris:

It’s so true. So when I actually write my own email, they’re going to be like, who is this?

Danielle:

Or social media captions. I’m like, write a social media caption for this, include this, and damn it’s done.

Chris:

Viral hashtags and things that are trending. And anyway, we could spend a whole, we

Danielle:

Could, although I heard that now with X, they don’t, Elon Musk does not like hashtags. I heard. So he was like, don’t use hashtags.

Danielle:

Heard that last week. Don’t quote me on it. But

Chris:

Everything’s changing so quickly, and I’m sure that’s going to continue to happen. I’m surprised we haven’t had real new platform on the social media front. I know he took Twitter over and made it X, but still kind of the same platform. But every once in a while when we were growing up, they had MySpace and these things that come and go, and Facebook’s been there forever, but they do. It’s interesting how we’re very cognizant of it, whether you’re marketing on Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn, they’re very different audiences and they look for different content and you need to market to them differently.

Danielle:

Absolutely.

Chris:

And they have different demographics and it’s so, I love the business aspect of my business and we’ve really enjoyed that component.

Danielle:

I always say Facebook is a party and LinkedIn is a business network, and you wear a tie to LinkedIn, unbutton your shirt, the top button on Facebook. You have to have those different tones. It’s so true.

Chris:

Yeah. Well, they just go to these platforms for very different

Chris:

Reasons,

Chris:

But literally that’s how people are consuming these

Chris:

Days. And it’s going to be very interesting to see. I mean, a lot of businesses are using TikTok and obviously that had just gone up. Trump has asked for them to hold off on making a decision on terminating it or banning it until he can make a decision. But a lot of people are utilizing that to put out videos about their restaurants. And I mean, have you seen that chamber members are using that yet? I know that’s

Danielle:

A little newer, just a little bit Instagram finally over the past couple of years, I feel like people are using that more, but not too much TikTok.

Chris:

Yeah. Yeah, definitely. We’ve seen an increase in it, and it’s a great place to house little snippets of your obviously.

Chris:

But yeah, you can fly through content really quickly there, but you can get a little bit of sense of who people are. And I feel like Instagram is really, Instagram reels has really tried to mimic what some of TikTok is

Danielle:

Doing. I agree.

Chris:

But it’s another, if you could be out in as many spaces as available to let people know what you do. That’s what we’re trying to be omnipresent.

Danielle:

Oh, you do such a great job in even repurposing your content.

Chris:

Yeah, thank you.

Danielle:

If you do something, you might as well repurpose it for the different sites and reuse it and take the pieces out and do whatever you can to maximize.

Chris:

Oh, a hundred percent. I mean, we try to do different email campaigns where we’re sending things out to former clients and business partners so that they know what we’re doing. But you can use to your point, that same clip that maybe we’re using here today and put it out on four different platforms. You can use an email you, there’s just so many different ways to get the most out of it,

But that’s why these seminars and learning from other business owners is so important. One of the things I’ve done in my practice and Chamber’s been great for this is you get introduced to so many different vendors or different business members within the community. And I always take a meeting. So if anybody’s trying to sell me something or teach me something, it may not be something I need right away, but just to be aware of what’s going on and the different techniques that people are using, at some point you find a way to integrate it. And I feel like I’m at least in touch with what’s current.

Danielle:

Yeah. Oh, you sure are. And I think sometimes people will go to a networking event and say, well, I don’t want to talk to this person because they sell solar panels on a roof. I don’t need those. Well, you never know who that person knows. So I mean, it’s such a missed opportunity if you’re not willing to have that

Chris:

Conversation and how they market. I mean, we’re all selling products and how a solar panel company, I mean, I know a lot of ’em do door to door, which is not what we do in this practice.

Danielle:

You’re not going to go do door-to-door, be like, Hey, do you need

Chris:

Me? But I mean, there’s so many unique ways nowadays to market to people, which is changing so much month to month. And I am a constant student loving to learn from people roll that out.

Danielle:

I mean, for social media, we’re still kind of scratching the surface, like you said, with ai. But for social media, it was doing seminars, doing webinars, doing the YouTube days, actually sitting down with our members and helping them set up their pages. I remember, so back when I started, I was doing some social media consulting and teaching at Middlesex, and I had somebody call me frantically. I was on vacation, and she was an older woman, and she’s like, someone just called and they can do our social media for us, but it’s $500 a week, but I have to do it now. And she felt this such sense of urgency, and I thought to myself, you can do this yourself with the right tools and with the education. If you want to outsource it, great. But you should know that you do have the capability of doing it. So I think that’s just so important. Empowering businesses and organizations.

Chris:

Well, it’s a great resource that you’re providing because one of the things I’ve learned practicing for 20 years is that having a trusted partner, when someone calls you, they’ve worked with you, they know you, so your opinion carries a lot of weight versus the person that’s trying to take advantage and just sell them a product, get ’em signed up, and then probably not even deliver on what they’ve done. But we’ve worked with a lot of SEO and people on all types of marketing, and a lot of times they don’t fulfill what they’re supposed to. Or I could have gotten from a resource like the Chamber for a fraction. So it’s great that they can turn to somebody like your organization for that,

Danielle:

Or even our members, we know our members.

Danielle:

So if you’re looking for something, and even so if you’re watching or listening and you’re just a community member, you don’t own a business or an organization, run an organization, but you’re looking for somebody, call your chamber. We know people we’re connectors. We can be a resource to find Whatever product or service you’re looking for.

Chris:

So is the Chamber always looking for new members or is

Danielle:

It Yes, we are.

Chris:

So how do you actively do that? Is it word of mouth? Is it just chamber meetings and they mentioned it to somebody else they see in the business world?

Danielle:

Yeah, it’s a little bit of everything. I mean, nothing’s more powerful than word of mouth, but with the online, the internet, social media, it’s world of mouth too. So we can utilize social media, our website, podcast to get the word out there, but there’s nothing like Chris going up to somebody and saying, Hey, have you heard of them? you need to join. That’s just incredibly powerful.

Chris:

Yeah. Well, it’s still the old fashioned way, just like you found your way into it to start. It’s nice to have a trusted source to direct you. What do you see the next 10 years looking like at the Chamber?

Danielle:

Yeah, I think it’s just continuing to be that connector for the community. You mentioned people being scared by ai. I mean, there’s nothing that replaces the personal touch going to an event, shaking somebody’s hand. So continuing to do that, but evolve because I’ve always said, we’re not your grandfather’s chamber. It’s not just these stuffy meetings. We like to have fun and be innovative, and hopefully that culture kind of translates to anybody that checks out our chamber, whether it be through going to our Facebook page or attending an event or watching this.

Chris:

When I first started, I went to a lot of business networking groups, and a lot of them are kind of stuffy, but reading your background and then reading how you’ve worked with different companies, doing marketing to bring that real world experience to the members is something that I thought that’s a great asset that I don’t think every organization is able to provide.

Danielle:

One thing that we’re really proud of is that we’ll have people come to an event for the first time and they’ll come up to me and say, wow, everybody was so friendly. I think sometimes you think about going to a networking event, and it can be extremely overwhelming if you’re walking into a room full of people that you don’t know. But to know that my members are going up to other potential members and other businesses and organizations and being friendly and introducing them around, it just makes me feel really good. But

Chris:

I think that really trickles down from you because you’re very approachable, and I think that’s probably what you’re getting your members to spread the word the same way you would to them initially. Thank you. So me. So obviously the Chamber’s very busy, but you have some other things that you’re involved in. So are you on some boards as well?

Danielle:

I’m very involved. Yeah. I sit on a lot of boards. I’m proudly the vice president of the Merrimack Valley Food Bank Board, so I’ve been on that board since I started working. So over 15 years I’ve been on that board and I’m very proud of that organization. I’m also the current chair of the workforce board in Lowell, so the greater mass hire, greater Lowell Workforce Board, and then involved in a lot of different committees and some other boards as well.

Chris:

So obviously you’re doing a lot in the community outside of the chamber.

Chris:

Yes.

Chris:

Does the Chamber do much outside of a business, B2B type of thing with the community, or is it just business to business?

Danielle:

We’re very involved. So we have a great relationship with the city of Lowell. I help co-chair the Mill City Festival fund, which helps bring in all the money that support Winter Fest, 4th of July, and City of Lights Parade. So we do that. We’re a partner in the Lowell Folk Festival. And then we have great relationships with the surrounding communities as well. So we’re always trying to do stuff within the community.

Chris:

So you don’t sleep much, sounds

Danielle:

Like? I don’t think you do either.

Chris:

You have some young kids, you’re busy nonstop. And a little birdie told me that you might be running for

Danielle:

Office. Yes. Yeah, I’m going to be running for a Lowell School committee. Amazing. So the election’s in November, I’m very

Chris:

Excited. So tell me a little bit about how you made that decision.

Danielle:

So I’ve been interested in politics and getting more involved on that level. I have kids in the school system. There’s not anybody on the school committee currently that has any children in the school system. And I just think to have that parent voice is extremely important. And I’ve also seen how families have struggled with things like mental health resources. I have parents come up to me all the time and ask me about, when’s basketball tryouts? When are signups for this? How can I get these resources? And I think just having somebody that can help give that information and be a voice of everybody in the Lowell Public Schools is really important. I hope to be that person.

Chris:

Yeah. Well, I think it’s immensely valuable. I have three kids, as you know, and they’re one in college, two in high school. But the whole world of education has changed a little bit as we went through the pandemic and now we’re out the other side and trying to get back to some sense of normalcy. But I think having a parent that has gone through it that understands kind of how it’s impacted these kids, the resources they need, which are different from probably what they needed before. Absolutely. I think that’s very important to have that voice. Thank

Danielle:

You.

Chris:

I applaud you. As we talked about before, running for office. I’ve done it many, many moons ago, and it is not for the faint of heart, but also very rewarding. I think if you do it for the right reasons, you’re doing it. I think it’s immensely rewarding, but it’s work. It’s even just running, knocking on doors. So this is for the next election, a year from now. So is there any place that somebody can, if they’re interested in your campaign, they can donate, they can reach out to you. How do they get ahold of you?

Danielle:

So I have a Facebook page in Instagram right now. They’re both Danielle McFadden for Lowell. And then my email address for the campaign is Danielle McFadden for lowell@gmail.com. And we’ll be doing a fundraiser coming up in a couple of months, hopefully bringing families in because I think we’re, I’d be representing the students. So having them there is going to be really important, but we’re active on social media and we’ll continue to do so.

Chris:

Yet another place that your marketing background, this kind of folds right into that to help you get the word out because obviously you’re very known in the community, but obviously nice for the new people to learn who you are.

Danielle:

Thank you. That

Danielle:

Don’t know you already.

Danielle:

Yeah. And I really want to do a good job at letting people know who I am and learning more about me and my family and having that transparency. You want to have somebody represent you that and trust. So I’m going to hopefully work hard to earn a lot of votes.

Chris:

Excellent. Well, I think that, I know we’ve kind of gone back and forth a couple times. We’ve been playing a little bit of tag, but I’m happy to get this sit down

Danielle:

Me too,

Chris:

In a little while. But I’m so happy you joined us today. Anything else that’s on your mind about the Chamber, any upcoming events or things that we can share with prospective members or ways that we can sell new members on joining?

Danielle:

Thank you. Yeah, we have a ton of stuff coming up. Lindsay former, our member engagement coordinator has been working really hard on filling up our calendar so you can check out. We have a ton of mixers coming up, but we also have some great events like our Community Connections breakfast in March, which features the city manager of Lowell and all the town managers of the surrounding communities, which are Rikka, Chelmsford, Tewkesbury, Kingsboro, Westford, and Drake. And then we have our Distinguished Young Professional Awards in June. And right now, nominations are open right now. So if you know a young professional 40 and under who lives or works or goes to school in the greater little area, we’re looking for nominations for those. And that’s,

Chris:

And this is a non-member? You can

Danielle:

Any young professional. Okay. Yeah. And that’s honestly my favorite event of the year. We usually have, so what happens is the community would nominate somebody, and then once you get nominated, you get an application that you fill out. And then we have a committee of board members and young professionals committee members come together and select them. We don’t have a specific number in mind. We usually end up around 15 or 16 young professionals that we honor at this luncheon in June. And it’s so exciting and inspiring to hear about the backgrounds of everybody receiving awards. And it just makes that we’re in good hands as some of us age out, there’s some really great people that are going to kind of pick up the pieces and help bring our communities forward.

Chris:

Well, it is nice also to recognize people because a lot of times you always hear, you need to do more, you need to do this, you need to do that. So if you can actually get some people that can actually point out some of the people that are doing it right or going the extra mile or really giving back in ways that is unique, that’s nice to recognize them.

Danielle:

Yeah. I think young professionals in many cases, think that they don’t have enough experience or they don’t, people don’t want them to have a seat at the table, but it’s quite the opposite. I always found people were always embracing me and bringing me into the fold. And if you say yes to these opportunities and get involved, you’ll find that people that are older than you are very receptive to bringing you into their organizations, their businesses. Once you start saying yes to things, you’re going to get a phone call from a lot of people. People will, right.

Chris:

You’re right. It’s very, you make that one pledge or goal, say yes to everything that comes up for

Danielle:

Yeah.

Chris:

And you’d be surprised by that Leads You

Danielle:

Absolutely.

Speaker 1 :

Anything else coming up in the chamber? So you guys have months planned out, or how does

Danielle:

Oh yeah. We’re already, we have stuff on the calendar, I think through November already. We’re still adding. But yeah, we do stuff in the mornings, afternoons, evenings, a variety of different things. We want to really appeal to a broad range of businesses and organizations and also accommodate people’s schedules. So we try to do a little bit of everything.

Chris:

So if somebody’s like, Hey, I listened to this. It’s interesting. I’m starting my own business, or I’m already in the community, and they’re interested, but they don’t know for sure and they want to just learn more. Do they just reach out to you, email you? Is there stuff to read online?

Danielle:

Both. And we’re actually going to be in the process of revamping our website. So we should have something new out, I think by the end of February, which is exciting. But there’s a ton of info on there. And obviously reach out to me directly and I’m always happy to have a conversation.

Chris:

And you have a ton of great podcasts out there already, which is some great feedback. So that’s great. So everybody should go check out the website, the Chamber of Commerce, and also keep an eye out for this rising political

Danielle:

Style. Thank you. Well, I appreciate this opportunity. This was so much fun.

Chris:

You’re welcome. Thank you for

Danielle:

Coming. Thank you

Chris:

As always. Thanks for joining. Let’s get personal. If you know someone who might like this episode, please share it with them and review us on iTunes as it really helps us to get the word out. And don’t forget to like and subscribe to, let’s get personal with Chris Debella on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever fine podcasts are downloaded. I.