South Fairfax Chamber is a Virtual Success

The South County Chamber of Commerce is an Internet-age success story.

Unlike Chambers of Commerce of decades past, when business leaders in dark suits gathered around a table in high-priced office space smoking cigars for their monthly meeting, this Chamber is fully modern.

For starters, smoking is prohibited in most offices. Secondly, meeting space has become less and less formal—in fact, some Chambers do not have any official meeting space at all.

It is in this regard that the South Fairfax County Chamber of Commerce (SFCC) is a trendsetter. In fact, it is the only Chamber of Commerce in the country that is completely virtual.

In 2008, despite the country's deep recession, local business leaders could not help but notice that towns like Lorton, Burke and others in the South County area were growing quicky. Many in the business community found that their needs were not being met by their membership in the traditional Chambers in Springfield and Alexandria. 

"There was nothing really wrong with the other Chambers a lot of us were a part of. And many of our members have kept their membership in those Chambers," Peter Weyland, Vice Chairman of the SFCC, says. "But we feel like we have a unique community here and not all of our needs were being served. "

Recognizing that we live in an increasingly wired society, the need to gather at a specific place was tabled in favor of creating an online Chamber. This new type of Chamber could use its members' engagement with the Internet to deliver the marketing and networking services that they had come to expect in an offline Chamber.

The cost benefits of an online Chamber were obvious. Without having to pay rent and maintain office space, membership fees are a fraction of what one would pay to belong to an old-style Chamber.

Being fully online means less meetings, however. According to Weyland, that is not necessarily a bad thing.

"There's such a thing as having too many meetings and sometimes they aren't very productive. When we get together we want to make sure it's very beneficial," he says.

When a meeting is called it is often in the service of living up to the Chamber's motto: "Benefiting Commerce and Community."

This means that the SFCC works closely with the Lorton Community Action Center to raise money for its various outreach programs. Or, as was the case last winter, it partners with a real estate firm for a charity Monopoly game to benefit Habitat for Humanity.

The SFCC's keystone event is this Sunday where it's the title sponsor for a 10k run at South County Secondary School. Proceeds will benefit the school's sports programs.

Fully wired and fully engaged, the SFCC also shows that the narrow focus of chambers that only worked for the business rather than the whole community are rapidly becoming thing of the past.