Greater Memphis Chamber is a chamber of commerce that advocates for businesses in the Greater Memphis area, including eight counties in areas such as western Tennessee, northern Mississippi and eastern Arkansas. 

It’s a membership-based organization that combines a traditional networking organization with support for business members to help them reach their full potential. 

They also advocate on behalf of these businesses with local, state and federal governments providing investment opportunities to enrich their community.

In 2021, the Greater Memphis Chamber ventured a more data-driven approach to its economic and workflow development; therefore, forming the Greater Memphis Economic Research Group (GMERG). The GMERG's mission is to examine and provide industry-leading economic research to create insight that is crucial to strategy recommendations for building businesses and bringing new business into the Memphis area.

MacKenzie Stonis is one of the four Economic Research Analysts of the GMERG division. Their responsibilities include, but are not limited to, providing monthly reports on select industries that answer questions such as the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) contributions, future projections and job briefs. 

Due to the nature of her work and the research conducted by the team, they needed an app to create engaging and professional data-centric reports. They were naturally inclined to create documents in Microsoft PowerPoint and Word since these applications were readily available. 

However, they soon realized that these tools fell short when producing consistently branded content on a larger scale and displaying data more effectively with a wider range of charts and graphs. 

It was their Marketing Strategy Director, Diamond Young, who discovered and introduced them to Visme. It suited their needs, not only from a production standpoint but also for organization, shared capability and collaboration.

The team now has 10 active Visme users, including the entire GMERG department, the Chief of Staff, an out-of-house graphic designer and the Marketing Strategy Director. 

Overtime, Visme will be distributed to other departments and employees of the organization to give others the opportunity to improve their document and content creation needs or workflows. The decision to onboard more team members onto Visme stemmed from a desire for consistent branding. 

The team has mastered the art of building templates for presentations, flyers, infographics, letters, and more. When there's a need for any of these content types, Visme's convenient 'duplicate' function empowers users to create a cohesive, branded document with the right fonts, logos, and colors.

This feature eliminates the anxious feeling of  'where do I start?', often associated with a blank document. Despite the diverse design sensibilities within the GMERG team, Visme ensures that all our documents share a consistent look and feel.

Why Greater Memphis Chamber Chose Visme

MacKenzie’s role as an economic analyst is to review and translate large volumes of data into actionable strategies. To effectively manage her responsibilities, she needed to focus on producing extensive documentation of the data and strategies she discovered. 

This led her to seek a tool that could simplify this process while also supporting visually informative materials to properly educate her team’s audiences about the available strategies. Additionally, she aimed to enhance her team's work by moving away from the bland PowerPoint presentations that were being produced.

When Visme was introduced to her, she was the first user in the organization. She created a personal account to test out features and tools, and within less than 24 hours, she was sold! 

She found that what really made Visme stand out against other tools she tried was its extremely user-friendly interface. Other tools came with an Adobe-like interface which works great for advanced designers, but she wasn’t able to navigate these as smoothly since she didn’t have previous design experience.  

“I have enough complication in life; I don’t need my report-building tool to add any fuel to the fire,” MacKenzie laughs.  

“I personally had experience with similar applications before Visme and found their tools weren’t as user-friendly as Visme, and their tools didn’t handle data very well. They didn’t provide the solution I really wanted.” 

The two major selling points of Visme were its ease of use and the fact that it could intuitively handle data without the need to rely on external tools such as Excel to provide graphs and charts. Visme provides a more integrated approach and all-in-one solution to her data visualization needs. 

An unexpected feature that stood out to MacKenzie was Visme’s ability to provide a large selection of photos or graphics. For example, when she’s designing in Visme and needs images of certain public figures or areas within Memphis, she can easily find a variety of images to choose from. 

“Visme offers a fantastic selection of varied and high-quality photos of Memphis, unlike other tools or a Google search that often presents repetitive images. It's been incredibly useful for our marketing as well as our reporting needs, ” Mackenzie shares 

Now, MacKenzie doesn’t have to worry about searching for graphics online that could potentially trigger a copyright violation or trying to find the right file type to download graphics, as Visme eliminates that hassle completely. 

How Greater Memphis Chamber Uses Visme

The department's overall goal of GMERG is to ensure that the research and data are easy to understand and consume. While MacKenzie and her team are accustomed to viewing and comprehending large amounts of data, their target audience is not. Therefore, creating easily digestible content for everyone was crucial for their success.

“If we're going to be a data-driven organization and use data to create action, everybody has to understand the data, the importance of the data, and the strategy that comes from it,” MacKenzie remarks.

For Mackenzie and her team, these documents are often used to advocate key opportunities and justify funding, often involving million-dollar deals that can trigger a positive domino effect within the Greater Memphis community. 

They found that Visme seamlessly helped them to create the translation between numbers and the actions that justify it. 

“Visme provides a bridge between us and several major investors that we might ask to fund a training center worth millions of dollars or use our research to show a government entity that x billions of dollars can make a significant impact in this area,” MacKenzie states.

A vast majority of their data comes through Visme’s integration with Excel. This feature helps users not only export or import data from Excel but also provide real-time updates to ensure that their projects are always up to date with the latest changes. 

Next to Excel, Visme also offers users who are data-focused the opportunity to import data from Google Analytics, Google Sheets, Hubspot, Salesforce and more. 

In the future, MacKenzie and her team are planning to integrate with Tableau and Visme to expand their content and project opportunities. “Once we get up and running with Tableau and integrate it into Visme, the world is our oyster, and the possibilities are endless!” MacKenzie remarks. 

How Visme Helps Them Save Money & Cut Costs

Since using Visme, they have been able to create world-class reports. Once published, these reports are available for purchase by external stakeholders, generating revenue for the GMERG department.

However, most of the financial interest has been from persons who want to sponsor these GMERG reports. 

These sponsorship opportunities can range between $10,000-20,000 per report. Additionally, MacKenzie and her team are currently looking for more paid opportunities for product and industry studies, all while using Visme to help maintain their branding and viewers’ interest. 

“The possibilities for savings and generating revenue with Visme are there, and they’re endless. We don’t have to rely on a designer or an external person, which means every sponsorship dollar that comes from any reports belongs to us.”

Another way they’ve cut down on costs is with the resourceful use of their Visme account. They’ve saved a team spot in their Visme workspace for an external graphic designer as needed for occasional projects. 

Every Visme account comes with its own workspace and user permissions. You can invite people to your workspace or provide them with user permissions to edit, view or comment on projects, giving you more control over who has access and what needs to be done. 

With their out-of-house graphic designer using Visme, the team has faster request turnaround. For example, if they need a designer to create an ad, the designer can easily go into Visme, review past designs and access their current brand guidelines to get a deeper understanding of their needs and content expectations. 

This helps cut down on back-and-forth communication, prevents unexpected bottlenecks and provides a smoother design workflow. Furthermore, they can use the designs from the out-of-house designer to formulate templates and repurpose their creations – further supporting their team of non-designers in creating graphic design quality materials. 

“Rather than constantly checking up on them, on a weekly phone call or email, we can just hop into Visme and check on the status of their work, what they’re currently working on or what’s been produced. It's been extremely useful and certainly cuts down on time and hassle.”

Given that most external graphic designers charge by billable hours, opting for Visme to streamline their content creation workflow and onboard designers has not only saved them time but cut costs significantly.

How Visme Helps Them Save Time

After adopting Visme, the team streamlined content creation, starting with branded presentation templates now available for duplication and personalization. Duplicating these templates allows instant report creation, reducing the need to design from scratch.

“Visme also has helped us create a more consistent brand inside of our research group, especially when it comes to educating new team members of our research group who are relatively new to the chamber, ” MacKenzie shares. 

The team also uses Visme to quickly respond to Request for Proposal (RFP) invitations. In the past, the representative in charge of responding would have to take hours, if not days, finding the right information and preparing the proposals. 

Now the representative can simply go into their Visme workspace and easily find the needed reports to address the RFP’s requirements and responses. They can also single-handedly duplicate and customize reports and submit them without the need for a designer or team. 

This approach has proven highly successful for the team. Now, the point of contact for the RFP has direct access to all required reports via Visme, eliminating communication bottlenecks and significantly accelerating their response time.

Lastly, the team can swifty repurpose their reports to expand their use case across departments. For example, every report is equipped with a high-level infographic inside. They can now repurpose these to be embedded on their website, used for prints and given a QR code (created with Visme) that leads them directly to the website so that each of these is tailored to various audiences. 

“We don't have to bring in outside designers or have an in-house designer to discuss the semantics on why it's important for such a particular item to be in the design. With Visme, we can do it ourselves,” MacKenzie shares.

How Greater Memphis Chamber Wins with Visme

After they received their first official GMERG logo for the department, they wanted to ensure that their projects, reports and content reflected the excellence that they had to offer, all while providing a memorable brand experience for those newly discovering their organization. 

Over time, the team's industry reports gained recognition and received an award from the International Economic Development Council (IEDC). These reports, crafted within Visme, garnered the Bronze Award for Excellence in Economic Development: Promotion, Print Brochure, Population over 500,000. This accomplishment stands as a significant milestone for GMERG, considering that they’re a relatively new department in the Greater Memphis Chamber.

The combination of talented analysts and a tool that worked for them, and not against them, provided winning results.  

“We were able to win this award for something that we produced with Visme. I don't think we would have won if we had gotten anything done with the PowerPoint, to be honest.” 

Made with Visme

The report that won them the award started off as a simple Visme template that offered a creative starting point. It was then customized and modified to align with the topic at hand. The team then inserted images and brand elements and edited it until it was to their satisfaction, similar to their usual content creation workflow. 

“Visme makes the experience of creating a beautiful document easy and stress-free for somebody who's not a graphic designer. After all, my background is in numbers and economics, and Visme is so instrumental in easily merging these two areas together for me,” Mckenzie stated.

Another recent win for the team happened when MacKenzie produced a presentation deck for their site selection department, which is essentially a department of one. She used Visme to quickly prepare some details for several of their largest available industrial sites. This included a map of the sites, along with a snapshot of the labor force within a 45-minute drive.

With Visme’s data visualization tools, she was able to provide rapid demographic information which could then be shared with the product teams, site selectors or companies interested in the site, especially those inquiring about the labor force.

“Visme has been instrumental in our branding efforts and streamlined internal processes, making them much quicker and easier." 

Visme offers 30+ widgets, over 20+ charts and graphs and interactive maps to help you design beautiful statistics and figures to meet all your data visualization needs.

Since using Visme, the team has expanded on the deliverables they create for their team and other departments. They’re looking forward to finding more ways Visme can help them succeed and meet their organizational goals. 

The Team’s Favorite Visme Tools

One of MacKenzie’s favorite Visme tools is the AI Writer. She places a prompt and allows the writer to provide her with quick starting points to help her overcome writer’s block and inspire her in the writing direction she’d like to take when completing industry reports. 

Your Turn

By leveraging Visme's dynamic content creation platform, you can not only find a seamless solution to your design and content creation problems but also fill gaps, save on costs and empower your team to new heights. 

Visme isn’t a content creation tool; it’s a workspace and workflow platform for designers and non-designers alike. 

Take your content creation to the next level and see what Visme can do for you. Request a demo or give Visme a free test run.