How Hampton Roads Chamber Takes Member Communications to a New Level with FlippingBook

The Hampton Roads Chamber is a chamber of commerce located in Hampton Roads, Virginia. Being the largest chamber in the state of Virginia, the Hampton Roads Chamber serves a bustling community of 1.8 million people, helping businesses thrive through a variety of educational programs, events, and advocacy.

The Hampton Roads Chamber’s mission is to stand as the voice of business for the region, advocating, leading, and convening to ensure the optimal conditions for business success.

Challenge

As the voice for businesses across such a large region, the Hampton Roads Chamber invests heavily in effective communication—both internally and with its members. To ensure everyone has access to accurate, up-to-date information, the team creates and distributes several key documents.

One of the most important ones is a welcome packet: an introductory guide that walks a new member through everything they need to know. With 250+ new members joining the Hampton Roads Chamber each year, making sure they’re fully informed about their membership privileges and benefits is no small task.

Here’s how Lauren Roberts Carter, Vice President of Marketing & Communications at the Hampton Roads Chamber, explains:

We are a large and complex organization, so being able to walk our members through something step-by-step that they can refer to later is incredibly important.

Another essential resource is an annual guide: a 20–25 page document listing chamber staff, top-tier investors, trustee members, and general information about the Chamber, demonstrating the organization’s commitment to openness and transparency.

In addition, the team produces travel guides, advertising kits, and member spotlights—comprehensive, high-value materials that help keep members and partners connected and informed. 

With such a variety of documents and such a large membership, the challenge was to deliver the documents on time while ensuring they were accurate, professional, and engaging. And that’s where FlippingBook came in.

Search for a Solution

Prior to discovering FlippingBook, the Hampton Roads Chamber used a lot of print and plain PDFs that the team sent out as email attachments. The problem with printing their documents was that it was quite costly, and worse, they had to be reprinted quite frequently to keep up with changing content.

PDFs, on the other hand, were much easier to create and distribute but lacked the professional feel and ease of use that the Hampton Roads Chamber was looking for. Additionally, when the documents were updated, the marketing team had to resend the materials or change the link to them on the website, which made the maintenance process for the materials inefficient and time-consuming.

The Hampton Roads Chamber team decided to look for alternatives, and soon they found FlippingBook.

Solution

Almost immediately, Lauren realized FlippingBook was exactly what the Hampton Roads Chamber needed.

One of the biggest improvements it brought to the Chamber’s materials was interactivity. Not only did the documents look better—with branding, matching backgrounds, and a realistic page flip effect—they were also much more engaging thanks to various added content. Videos embedded in the pages and links to external resources, easy to find and click, turned the organization’s materials into actionable tools.

We're able to embed videos, link all our social media channels, and link staff emails. When new members open the flipbook, they can easily find all the information they need for their new membership.

On top of that, switching to digital flipbooks allowed the Hampton Roads Chamber to move away from print, saving thousands of dollars yearly on printing and reprinting costs.

Normally, we spent about $5,000 to print the annual guide, but we’ve been able to cut that in half, about $2,500 in savings, by pushing more of the digital version instead of printing copies for everyone.

Maintaining the materials became much easier, too.

One of the things I like the most about FlippingBook is that if we have a staff change, we can easily update the information and reupload the document into FlippingBook. All the previously added links are kept, so I'm not wasting time adding them again. That has saved a lot of editing time.

Another huge improvement was the ability to track members' interactions with the materials. As an efficient and heavily data-driven organization, the Hampton Roads Chamber appreciated the ability to measure how people were using the welcome packet and other resources. Here’s what Lauren shared:

I love the fact that we have the interaction data because we're able to see how often our members are going in and utilizing the documents. Our previous flipbook had over 6,000 views! This was extremely important to know.

And last but not least, FlippingBook made the Hampton Roads Chamber’s materials much easier to share as well as access. For example, the team and the members rely heavily on the travel guide to stay informed before and during trips, when it’s crucial to be able to find the necessary information on the go. Lauren noticed that FlippingBook was significantly more convenient. 

We found that, though we provide print documents as well, people prefer to open flipbooks on their phone, myself included.

Results

Thanks to the ease of use and the measurable results it delivers, FlippingBook has become one of the Hampton Roads Chamber’s core marketing tools. The team relies on it daily to provide their audience with high-quality, engaging materials, and can rest assured that everyone always has access to the most accurate, helpful information. 

From a tools perspective, if we had to cut our marketing budget in half, FlippingBook is one thing we would have to keep. We don’t have another tool that can do what it does.

The organization has managed to cut printing expenses, reduce editing time, and gain valuable insights into content performance. And even before looking at the metrics, they were confident that their audience enjoys using FlippingBook:

When we first launched flipbooks, the general feedback was, ‘We love this. What are you using?’ People liked the user experience, and one of our partner companies even switched to FlippingBook too!

But the biggest win for the Hampton Roads Chamber has been the ability to provide their members and partners with a better experience through the organization’s guides, encouraging the readers to explore resources, use opportunities, and, as a result, grow stronger and thrive together with the Chamber.

FlippingBook has allowed us to level up our materials and processes. Ultimately, that helps us better serve our members.