Our vision is for Austin to have the country’s most prosperous business community. To that end, we successfully delivered programming throughout 2016 to support the key drivers that contribute to making the Austin region a great place to live, work and play. This included a broad range of member-based programming, one that supports the business community as well as member needs to market and sell their products and services, and control costs.

It all starts with our membership. We ended the year with about 2,800 member companies. Our members deeply care about the Austin region and want to ensure the vitality of our business community. That’s important as being on all of the “Best of” media lists don’t just happen; the Chamber and its partners help to make Austin the most enviable city in the United States. That continued throughout several areas in 2016 including the economy, education and talent, transportation and membership.

Membership

• The Chamber significantly revised its membership tiers in 2016 to add even more value. The new tiers can be found here.
• About 540 new members joined the Chamber in 2016. Approximately 80 percent of members are small businesses.
• We held more than 100 events and programs that were attended by over 10,000 people. These featured a variety of key topics impacting our region: economy, innovation, education, talent, and transportation. See our flickr page for photos of several events.
  • Annual Trip to D.C. We led a delegation of 60 local business, civic and elected leaders to Washington, D.C. to meet with the White House, Senators Cornyn and Cruz, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and the seven members of our U.S. House delegation. The Chamber delegation, led by 2016 Chair Fred Heldenfels IV, Pete Winstead and Ben Barnes, included 17 CEOs and 43 other major leaders who advocated for our region and discussed how we can better partner with decision makers in Washington, D.C. to improve our local innovation ecosystem and infrastructure.
  • Intercity Visit to Seattle. In September, we lead a large contingent of delegates from Austin to Seattle as part of our yearly program to gain exposure to best practices and lessons learned in other communities about issues also impacting Central Texas. The Chamber has led visits to 11 cities since 2005.
• We helped our members reduce operating costs through Chamber negotiated member discounts. Chamber Members purchased $1,000,000 through our Office Depot partnership and in turned saved a combined $250,000. The Austin Chamber ranks in the top 5 nationally among all Chambers participating in the Office Depot partnership savings program. Chamber members also saved more than $100,000 off the retail price of SXSW badges to attend one of Austin’s most highly recognized events.

Throughout the year, we recognized small, medium and large company successes as well celebrated leaders in the community.

• In November, we recognized 25 outstanding educators, leaders and top performing local high schools during our annual State of Education: Politics, Progress and Possibilities event. This included Texas State University president, Dr. Denise Trauth who received the Chamber’s Human Capital Award, for extraordinary impact on Central Texas' college readiness, enrollment and success.
• In September, we highlighted 24 outstanding businesses from almost 500 nominees at our annual Business Awards celebration.
• In May, we honored 12 of Austin’s hottest start-up companies, who show enormous promise.
• In March, we recognized 12 finalists and 4 winners of the Austin Gives Generous Business Awards. Austin Gives has grown to about 480 participating businesses, a year-over-year increase of 26 percent. These are companies that have made giving back to the community a key part of their operational strategy.
• In February, we recognized Alan Graham, co-founder of Mobile, Loaves and Fishes, as our 2015 Austinite of the Year.
• The Chamber refreshed our website to make it easier to navigate with a special emphasis on being mobile friendly.
• In terms of social media engagement, the Austin Chamber was ranked #3 on the list of Top 100 Social Media Friendly Chambers in the U.S. More than 29,000 people followed us on Twitter, a 20 percent increase over the previous year. We also continued our strong following on Facebook (5,800+ likes), LinkedIn Group (6,400+ members), YouTube (75% increase in video views) as well as Instagram (840+ followers) and Flickr.

Creating Jobs and supporting the economy

“Jobs are the basis of most everything else. A great job solves a host of social ills. How we treat our job creators today will determine how successful our city can be tomorrow. Job creation is why Austin is thriving. Without jobs, we will decline.” Tony Budet, 2016 Chairman, Austin Chamber.

Members join the Chamber for various reasons. Many business owners tells us that while they might not have a large amount of time to engage, they see value in their membership as an investment to help keep our local economy strong so they can grow their businesses. The Chamber recognizes the importance of jobs but also the connection between education, jobs and poverty and making smart investments in students, families, and small businesses.

Opportunity Austin is the Chamber’s regional economic development initiative aimed at fostering job-creating investment in the five county region of Central Texas, also referred to as the Austin MSA. Through Opportunity Austin, now it’s its third generation, investors fund programming to help the entire region maintain and grow our business environment and quality life. One of the main focuses is on creating jobs.

Simply put, when there are more companies relocating to our region, it increases the number of potential customers and business opportunities for our members.

2016 Economy Highlights:

• Through out-of-state recruiting missions, we helped to attract 50 new companies which plan to add 3,900 direct new jobs to our five-county region. We are focusing more on recruiting companies that provide middle skill jobs that will diversify our economic mix.
• About 80 local companies expanded in the region, adding a combined 5,000 direct new jobs, 10% more than the previous year.
• Innovation: about $825 million was invested in local startup and early stage companies.
• The Kauffman Index, a leading indicator of entrepreneurship, ranked Austin as the No. 1 city for startup activity in its annual report measuring new business creation in the U.S.
• A chamber group visited the Pentagon in June to encourage the creation of a "Third Coast" Defense Innovation Unit here in Austin. Following our successful meeting, U.S. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter came to Austin to announce the creation of a 3rd U.S. Defense Innovation Unit (DIUX). The Pentagon has initially opened an office at Capital Factory to gain access to Central Texas' start ups, innovators and small, high growth companies.

Education and Talent

DTC70 Partnership Draws National Recognition
The Austin Chamber and its partners are working to achieve our goal of a regional 70 percent direct to college enrollment rate. The partnership has been recognized by the White House, ACCE, and NLC as a best practice or strong regional model in 2015 and 2016.

DTC70 Partnership Improves Student Financial Aid Awards, Research Shows
Over the last two years, national researchers from leading universities partnered with the Austin Chamber and eight local school districts to conduct a study on the effectiveness of text messaging campaigns on FAFSA filings. They recently released a study finding that when Texas students were reminded by text message to complete key college financial aid completion steps, they filed their FAFSA earlier and received up to $2000 in additional aid. You can read more about the success of this program here.

DTC70 Summer Melt Program Expands Support to 10,000 Graduates
To remove college enrollment barriers, last summer DTC70 partners in nine school districts supported 10,000 high school graduates. The collaboration provided ground-breaking, real-time data on student completion status of key Austin Community College enrollment milestones to school district counselors, to more effectively target assistance. Counselors also supported students heading to other in/out of state colleges. Harvard University and UT-Austin Ray Marshall Center evaluations demonstrated DTC70 partners improved direct college enrollment rates for first generation, low income and underrepresented students who received summer college transition support by four to 10 percentage points.

DTC70 ISD Partners Led State on FAFSA filings

• Record Class of 2016 FAFSA filing rate. 80 percent of high school seniors who submit their FAFSA directly enroll in college. For over a decade, the Austin Chamber has worked with districts, businesses and over 150 volunteers to assist families in the FAFSA completion process through its Financial Aid Saturdays Program. This past spring, DTC70 partner districts achieved a 50 percent Q1 FAFSA filing rate for the Class of 2016 and topped the state in first-time FAFSA filings for this period.
• Our volunteers worked with 16,000 high students and their parents to complete the FAFSA which resulted in over $130 million in financial aid through the Financial Aid Saturdays program!
• To combat the repercussions of the largest downsizing of the U.S. military since WW2, the Chamber hosted Operation Austin II on October 18th at Fort Hood, the largest Army base in the United States. The Austin Chamber led over 50 companies to Fort Hood to recruit over from thousands of exiting soldiers and their spouses for jobs in Austin companies.

Place

Austin voters approved $720 million mobility bond.
The Chamber, with financial support from our Opportunity Austin investors, worked together with the Mayor, business, active transit and bicycle advocacy groups to raise $1 million to ensure the largest single transportation bond in Austin's history passed overwhelmingly. This has already leveraged an additional quarter billion dollars from TXDOT for Highway 360.

• Since Opportunity Austin began, our transportation advocacy efforts, along with others, have resulted in more than $7 billion in funded road infrastructure projects either completed, under construction, or will begin construction soon. This includes the Austin voter-approved funding for the local $720 million transportation bond package.

We advocated on behalf of members to propose new energy rates to help the business community and consumers. This led to the Austin Energy rate case settlement that cut base electric rates paid by almost all customers, including large and small businesses.

Through our Air Services Task Force, chaired by Doug Driskell at Dell, we worked throughout the year to further expand international non-stop flight options for Austin, such as Frankfurt, Germany; and Guadalajara and Mexico City. Mexico.

• AUS continues to enjoy a healthy mix of air service offerings. There are 60 nonstop destinations, up from 51 last year, including seasonal and announced services.
• British Airways added a first class option to London-Heathrow with the Boeing 787-9 aircraft, and the flight performance continues to exceed expectations. This is one of the few markets in the US, if not the world, where a carrier added the first class product to a transatlantic route. The Chamber led efforts to bring Austin its first transatlantic non-stop service.