Are millions of chambers of commerce and business associations still using WeChat groups and Excel? Future Man City will adopt "cross-association interconnection" to break down information silos.
The Common Dilemma Faced by Millions of Small and Medium-sized Chambers of Commerce and Associations: The Organization Remains, But Connections Are Broken
Chambers of commerce and associations are the most typical acquaintance-based organizations for small and medium-sized enterprises, as well as important ties for regional industrial collaboration. In China, there are a large number of chambers of commerce and associations, over 90% of which are small and medium-sized organizations — their member size generally ranges from 200 to 300, and the proportion that has completed digital transformation is still very low. This means that the daily operation of the vast majority of chambers of commerce and associations still remains at the stage of WeChat groups, Excel spreadsheets and paper ledgers to this day.
In Guiyang, this primitive state has very specific manifestations. A chamber of commerce with 200 to 300 members is often supported by only one or two full-time staff: they have to send WeChat messages one by one to check accounts for membership fee collection, rely on scrolling sign-up chains in groups for event registration, and rummage through hard drives but still cannot put together a complete member file during the transition of leadership. The inefficiency in management is tolerable, but the truly fatal dilemma lies in another aspect — each chamber of commerce is an isolated information island. Member enterprises have their own demands and resources, but these demands cannot go beyond the chamber, and external resources cannot get in either. When chambers of commerce want to connect with each other, on the one hand, there is a lack of credible credit endorsement channels, on the other hand, they worry about the leakage of member information, so most of them can only stay in a small circle of acquaintances in the end.
As a result, members' sense of experience gradually fades. The member activity rate of many chambers of commerce is less than 20% all year round. When the chamber collects membership fees at the end of the year, the first reaction of members is often "What exactly has the chamber done for me this year". The renewal rate declines year by year, and the influence of the chamber in the regional enterprise circle weakens accordingly. This is not an individual problem of a single chamber of commerce, but a structural dilemma faced by a large number of small and medium-sized chambers of commerce and associations: the organization remains, but the connections are broken.
Not Another Event Management Tool, But a Connector That Enables Resource Flow
The solution proposed by Future Man Cheng is the Chamber of Commerce Interconnection Platform. It consists of three parts: the management backend, WeChat Mini Program and cross-chamber interconnection engine, which aims to answer the core proposition of "how to make resources truly flow between chambers of commerce".
On the management side, the platform adopts a mature multi-tenant SaaS architecture. One set of system can serve multiple chambers of commerce at the same time, with independent and isolated data for each chamber, and functional modules can be activated on demand, no need to deploy servers separately, which significantly reduces the use cost for small and medium-sized chambers of commerce and associations. The secretariat can complete automatic membership fee reconciliation and intelligent overdue reminder in the backend, and member files, event registration and data dashboards are also uniformly stored in the system, no longer relying on personal devices and manual spreadsheets. On the member side, the WeChat Mini Program and official account message channels are connected, so members do not need to download additional applications, and can complete the whole process of joining the chamber, paying fees, registering for events, finding cooperation partners and other operations within WeChat. For small and medium-sized chambers of commerce and associations without full-time IT personnel, the basic configuration can be launched within half a day.
The core difference comes from the self-developed cross-chamber interconnection engine. Different from the traditional chamber of commerce system that only serves a single chamber and further strengthens the information island, under the premise of compliant data authorization, Future Man Cheng has established a cross-chamber matching mechanism with credit endorsement from both chambers: each chamber of commerce fully independently determines the scope of information disclosure, and the data ownership always belongs to the chamber; all cross-chamber business opportunity docking is jointly endorsed by both chambers, instead of putting member information into a borderless shared pool. As a result, members can search for target enterprises across industries and regions on the platform, initiate cooperation with one click, and expand their network radius from dozens of people in their own chamber to the entire interconnection network. At present, the industry label system built in the platform has covered 326 segmented industry directions, and the membership fee collection rate of early customers has increased to 87.5%.
A Team Rooted in Chambers of Commerce, And Its Ongoing Implementation Path
The Future Man Cheng Chamber of Commerce Interconnection Platform is developed by Guizhou Future Man Cheng Technology Co., Ltd. The most prominent feature of this team is that its founder Wang Chuan comes from the chamber of commerce circle, who has first-hand understanding of the daily work of the chamber secretariat and the real demands of members. Before writing the first line of code, the team first visited a large number of local non-local chambers of commerce and industry association leaders in Guiyang, fully figured out what the chambers are busy with every day and what members care most about, and then the product started. This perspective that grows from inside the industry also allows the team to see the most realistic trust threshold for cross-chamber interconnection earlier — in the early stage of the launch of the interconnection engine, almost all interviewed presidents and secretary-generals would ask the same question: if we open the member directory, will our members be poached, and who will guarantee the data security? To this end, the team spent nearly half a year polishing the mechanism, and finally resolved the concerns through the method of independent authorization by the chamber and joint endorsement by both parties.
At the present stage, the project has iterated from the early verification of providing customized systems for local Guiyang chambers of commerce to a standardized multi-tenant SaaS product, completed full-function development and obtained software copyrights, landed in dozens of chambers of commerce and associations in Guizhou, and verified the channel cooperation model. In terms of business model, the platform reduces the decision-making threshold of chambers of commerce with free trial, allowing customers to feel the efficiency improvement in high-frequency scenarios such as membership fee collection and event registration first, and then complete the conversion naturally. For market expansion, the platform establishes channel agency cooperation relying on chamber of commerce service providers and non-local Chinese chambers of commerce, and provides three service schemes: standard SaaS, private deployment and customized development, so as to generate continuous revenue through channel commission and annual product fees. Non-local Chinese chambers of commerce are regarded as a unique incremental path — such organizations have a naturally strong demand for cross-regional resource connection, which is highly consistent with the positioning of the interconnection platform.
In a larger context, the digitalization of small and medium-sized chambers of commerce and associations is still a blank field with low penetration rate. The differentiated path chosen by Future Man Cheng is to promote chambers of commerce from a single "back-office tool" to a cross-organizational industrial collaboration network. In the next step, the team will continue to link partners across the country with the channel agency model, continuously polish the cross-chamber supply and demand matching capability, and gradually complete the layout of the resource network from local to national. For chambers of commerce and associations, the end point of digitalization may not be moving spreadsheets to the cloud, but to re-energize the resources that are dormant in each chamber.