DELAWARE — Only four months into her new role as president of the Delaware Area Chamber of Commerce, Susie Bibler is already making progress on her goals for the organization.
Bibler took over the position in March from Holly Quaine, who served as president of the chamber for 18 years before passing the baton.
However, Bibler said she didn’t come into this role to make changes for the sake of making changes — everything she does as chamber president is to improve the services for members.
“I want to listen to what people have enjoyed about being a part of the chamber and areas where I can improve,” she said.
A lot of what Bibler’s done in her first few months is just that — relationship building and learning all the chamber offers to its members.
“I’m a very relationship-driven person with my previous history being in fundraising. I’m lucky that I did have those previous positions because I brought in my network in the whole county, really, over the last 26 years,” she said.
Prior to her role at the chamber, she served as the development director at the Delaware County Foundation for nearly four years.
Before that she was executive director of Main Street Delaware for nearly six years, where she established the Downtown Delaware Welcome Center and created the summer concerts series.
She also worked as the director of donor engagement at United Way of Delaware County.
That experience brings with it well-established relations with city, county and other nonprofit leaders, so Bibler is honing in on chamber members, other chambers in the state and higher education entities.
She also sees ways the chamber could work more with other important organizations, including the Delaware Area Transit and the Delaware Municipal Airport.
Future Chamber endeavors
Instead of major sweeping changes, Bibler has put all her effort into listening to what members want and finding gaps in chamber programs.
She’s already found a big one: a lack of programming for young professionals.
“Young professionals are a growing population in our county. And I think that the chamber should be the organization in the community that helps bring a young professionals group to life,” she said.
She is still in the early stages of researching what a program will look like, but she already has people interested to lead that group in the future.
“I want people to get established here. And I want them to call Delaware home. I fell in love with the community 26 years ago, and I want others to feel that too,” she said.
Another area of improvement for Bibler is the chamber newsletter.
The previous, once-monthly newsletter was 25 pages long, and Bibler is changing the format to a once-weekly, shorter newsletter that will still contain much of the same important information.
It’s something Bibler wanted to do herself, but also something members said they wanted in a survey.
“What our members want is the most important thing in this position,” Bibler said.
She also plans to push for more members. There are already 500, but Bibler said with the chamber having a county-wide and beyond reach, there should be more.
“With the county growing as much as it is, we should have two or three times more than that,” she said.
