Amalia Meadows, Executive Director is the entire staff of the Gardendale Chamber of Commerce. Planning, implementation, development, sales, luncheons, festivals, sponsorships, marketing for the chamber and for its members: it's all her. “I basically run this chamber solo, like a solopreneur,” she says. She joined with the goal of modernizing the chamber.
Amalia isn't new to software. Before the chamber, she worked as a marketer and TV producer, spent time in hospitality, and served as chief of staff for an entrepreneur who built a business turning around distressed properties, buying old resorts cheap, refurbishing them, and making them profitable again. She's used ActiveCampaign, HubSpot, GoHighLevel, Salesforce, Pardot, and Pipedrive extensively. “I'm very fluent in CMS-ese,” she says. That background matters, because when she says the chamber's old platform was bad, it's a comparative judgment from someone who's used a lot of software.
The Challenge: A System Built for Nobody
Amalia won't name the chamber's previous vendor publicly, out of fairness to the brand, but she's blunt about the experience. She showed the old platform's back end to a colleague, who immediately placed it: “She said, 'Oh wow, I used to work with medical software, and that's what it looks like.' And I'm like, I knew it. Not very focused on the user experience.”
"Every time I sat down to send an invoice or do anything, I would always have to troubleshoot. I would download the PDF, upload it to ChatGPT because I didn't have time to read the whole user manual, and I'd have to ask ChatGPT questions."
— Amalia Meadows, Executive Director
Support made things worse. Response times were slow enough that Amalia's board president once left a strongly worded voicemail: the chamber would stop being a customer that day if they didn't hear back. On another occasion, Amalia was on the phone with a manager who couldn't solve the problem she was calling about. “When your manager doesn't know how to solve a problem, there is something wrong with the system,” she says.
The Breaking Point
The moment that pushed Amalia to switch happened in front of a prospective member. She was trying to sign someone up on the spot, handing over her own phone so they could enter their contact information directly into the old system's form.
"She was having a really hard time. I could tell the impression the chamber was giving was not a good one. I also wanted to come across as professional and user-friendly. I'm like, this is not cool. I'm out."
The form itself was part of the problem. It repeated the same fields multiple times, forcing members to enter identical information more than once. “I'm like, what is this? This is crazy,” Amalia says. As someone who's worked closely with business owners and investors throughout her career, she knew exactly what that friction communicated: “If people are suffering and we're putting off a very unprofessional view, then I'm out.”
Why GrowthZone
Amalia evaluated other platforms before choosing GrowthZone, drawing on her own extensive CMS experience to make the call. The decision came down to one thing.
"GrowthZone's really good at the user experience, which is why I chose it over any other software."
Getting Started
The chamber's new GZ CMS website launched June 9, 2026, which Amalia marks as the real go-live date, since it's also when she started sending invoices through the new system.
Onboarding was hands-on from the start. Amalia worked closely with GrowthZone's Raquel, and specifically credits a shift away from lecture-style training toward hands-on coaching: “I really particularly enjoyed when she switched tactics rather than making the trainings a lecture. She started doing everything hands-on so I could actually do what I had to learn, with her coaching me step by step. I'm more of a doer.” She also worked with support specialist Nehemie Macombe and website builder Alena Rehberger, and describes all three as personable, thorough, and clearly part of a strong internal culture. “It's like an instant connection with the three people I've worked closely with.”
Even a finance-side concern got hands-on attention. Amalia's outside accountant worried about how the new platform's QuickBooks integration would track processing fees, having seen other systems duplicate fee entries and inflate reported revenue for other clients. GrowthZone arranged a direct call between its own accounting team and Amalia's accountant to walk through exactly how the integration works.
"I really appreciated how they went the extra mile with them."
What Changed
Sales Without the Phone Call
Before, even a $15 luncheon ticket often required a phone call, with Amalia walking a member through a long, repetitive form. Now, members buy tickets and reserve sponsorship booths directly online. For an upcoming Health and Wellness Expo, Amalia says the process for sponsors is simple: “They can see what the sponsorships give, and they can buy their sponsorship right then and there with their credit card. It's so effortless.”
A New Non-Dues Revenue Stream
The chamber now sells “Hometown Hero” banners directly through its website store, a product it didn't have a mechanism to sell before. Amalia has sold roughly a dozen banners in the two months since launch and plans to expand the store with more products.
A Better-Looking Front Door
Amalia leaned on her TV and film background to build a video hero image on the homepage, betting correctly, in her experience, that video drives more engagement than static images. “I know that as somebody who comes from TV and movies, I know that video increases engagement. That was a no-brainer for me.”
Direct Member Praise
Prominent community members have told Amalia unprompted how much they like the new member portal. “I've heard members, very important members of the community, just give me feedback and say how amazing they loved the info hub. It was so easy to use.”
Streamlined Invoicing
Batch invoicing that once took significant manual effort now happens in bulk: “I can just get a batch done and then press send after the invoices are generated. It was so easy.”
Looking Ahead
Amalia hasn't yet turned on every feature available to her, including the community platform, email blast tools, and banner ad space, and plans to add them as chamber revenue grows. She also hasn't dug into Google Analytics tracking yet, something she's added to her to-do list. Given how quickly she's already turned the website into a sales channel, in just over a month, that's a lot of runway still ahead.
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