The Atlantic Chamber of Commerce (ACC) has launched a new cloud-based community to help get feedback and insight from Atlantic Canadian businesses more efficiently.
Atlantic IMPRESSIONS officially launched late last week.
“During COVID, we noticed that things were turning around so fast – businesses needed help and they needed it fast,” said ACC CEO, Sheri Somerville.
Members of the service can log into the program like any other social media platform. There will be short surveys to take so the ACC can get real-time feedback from businesses.
“The survey technology that the platform has [makes it so] you’re able to develop surveys very quickly and distribute them in real-time to the members of the community,” said Somerville.
ACC and its network of 94 Chambers are working to use the new platform by Vision Critical to gain insight from their fast-growing Atlantic IMPRESSIONS community.
Atlantic IMPRESSIONS dashboard upon logging in. (Image: Submitted)
Somerville said the surveys are short, six to eight minutes or less, and they ask about topics that are relevant and important to Atlantic Canadian businesses.
After enough feedback has been received from a particular survey, the information is compiled into a report and shared back to the community where community members can engage with it.
Somerville said with town halls and meetings, feedback can be exchanged, but people don’t always have time for that now. With Atlantic IMPRESSIONS, you give feedback on your own time and get it shared back to you in an effective manner.
The website is bilingual making it accessible for all Atlantic Canadians to leave their impressions.
“I kind of thought it was an interesting thing to ask people: ‘what’s your impression?’”
With COVID-19, Somerville said the need for this system became even more apparent. Having a quick turnaround of information helps to acknowledge what the needs of businesses are doing the pandemic.
“I think it [COVID-19] accelerated the launch of this program,” she said.
As of one day after the platform launch, 100 people joined the community and 40 people took the first survey.
Somerville said they’ll likely redo their first survey in September since more people are trying to get outside after the shutdown or anxiously wanting to travel via the Atlantic bubble and wouldn’t have time to participate in surveys at this time.
“I’m sure there are many other questions that are going to come up over the next coming weeks and months that we can rapidly get out to this community,” Somerville said.
“And the more [people] that participate, the better the information that we’re going to be able to give to government to inform thinking.”
Hannah Rudderham is a reporter with Huddle, an Acadia Broadcasting content partner.
