Two Big Events, One Recurring Headache
St. Johns County Chamber of Commerce runs on a lean team, and for most of the year, payment processing isn't a major concern. But twice a year, at its golf tournament and its foundation gala, that changes fast. Elizabeth Middlebrooks, Director of Marketing and Communications, and Elizabeth Erwin, VP of Program Development and Marketing, both watched the same problem play out event after event: members standing in long lines to pay for small, incidental purchases like mulligans, extra drink tickets, 50/50 raffle entries, because there was no fast way to take a card.
"We were manually entering card numbers into GrowthZone as people wanted to pay because we didn't have a great way to just swipe the card or tap the card. We realized we were losing out on a lot of revenue that way."
The Challenge: Cash Nobody Wanted and a Line Nobody Liked
The chamber actively encouraged cash for small purchases at events, but as Middlebrooks put it plainly, "nobody uses cash these days." Without a fast card option, staff were stuck typing card numbers directly into GrowthZone on the spot, a slow process that created real bottlenecks. At the foundation gala, staff manually built invoices for auction item payments while a line formed behind them. At the golf tournament, the same problem showed up around mulligans and raffle sales.
"We had 10 to 20 people in line trying to wait for mulligans and raffle tickets anything else they needed to get... it just wasn't efficient enough."
The chamber briefly looked at other payment processing solutions, but the search kept losing priority once the event ended and the next one took over the team's attention.
"You feel the pain and the pressure during the event, and then after the event, the next big thing comes up... it always kind of got pushed to the wayside. But man, when we do have an event, it really is a huge pain point for us."
The Timing Lined Up
GrowthZone launched the GZ Pay app in the spring, just weeks before the chamber's golf tournament. With the event closing in fast, Erwin moved quickly: ordering card readers with expedited shipping and getting the whole team set up in a single 15-minute walkthrough during a regular weekly staff meeting.
"I ordered the card readers and hoped that they would get here in time... I paid extra to have it. It was not long before Chamber Golf Classic."
Getting Started
Setup for staff, according to both Middlebrooks and Erwin, was almost anticlimactic given how much friction it solved. Downloading the app, logging in, and connecting existing account information took about 30 seconds per person. The only part that required real care was configuring fee items correctly, so revenue would land in the right bucket for reporting, and even that was double-checked with the Chambers outside accountant before the event.
"It was really easy... just like using any other app. It was really quick."
One staff member had a device-specific connectivity issue during setup, which the team never fully traced to a cause, but it resolved without affecting the event itself.
Event Day: No Line, More Sales
The impact was immediate and visible. Members tapped their cards the same way they would anywhere else, no waiting, no confusion, no explanation needed.
"Everyone was very happy... they were like, oh, tap my card just like I do everywhere else."
The change didn't just remove friction; it changed buying behavior. Where members previously carried a few dollars in cash and bought one raffle ticket because that's what they had on hand, the ease of tapping a card led people to buy more.
"People were buying 5 or 10 [raffle tickets] because it was just faster to tap the card."
The Accounting Side
With no in-house accountant, the chamber relies on contracted accountant who pulls reports directly from GrowthZone into QuickBooks. Because GZ Pay transactions flow directly into GrowthZone's billing and reporting, tagged to the correct revenue source at the point of sale, there was no more guessing which card swipe belonged to which event or fundraiser.
"It wasn't a guess, it wasn't giving us a spreadsheet later and saying, I've got 25 card transactions for $3 apiece, what does this mean? We were able to put it all in one place, and it made it a lot easier for them to give us a clean financial report."
Before GZ Pay, matching manually entered card payments back to member records was its own separate time sink, made worse by simple data-entry typos that broke the automatic match.
"If we're typing in a name and there's a typo, it doesn't automatically match up. There was a lot more manual input, but a lot more manual reconciliation in the end too."
The Results
Real time savings. The team estimates GZ Pay saved at least a couple of hours of staff time on reconciliation alone, on top of significantly less cash to count by hand.
More revenue per event, not just faster processing. Because tapping a card removed the friction of exact change or limited cash on hand, members spent more per visit, buying extra raffle tickets or add-ons they likely would have skipped with cash as the only easy option.
A better member experience. Both Middlebrooks and Erwin point to this as the most noticeable shift, even without a formal way to measure it.
"I wish that we had measured this somehow, but I'd say it significantly increased member satisfaction with the event. I think people were way happier."
Less stress on staff, too. Watching a line grow with no way to speed it up had been a recurring source of pressure during events; that pressure disappeared along with the line itself.
Advice to Other Chambers
Both interviewees were emphatic that GZ Pay doesn't require a finance background to set up or run, a point they consider especially relevant for small chambers without dedicated accounting staff.
"You don't necessarily have to be a finance person to set it up and use it. That might be an obstacle for some... but if you know how to set up the fee item in GrowthZone, and even if you don't, just look in the help section. You don't have to be an accounting person to set it up and use it."
Their one practical caveat: even with cashless payments at the front end, chambers still need petty cash on hand for payouts, like paying out a 50/50 raffle winner in cash after collecting entries almost entirely by card.
"If everybody uses a card, how am I going to pay you the cash that you won? Just make sure you're accounting for that."
They also noted GZ Pay isn't just for large-scale events; it works just as well for smaller fundraising activities layered into any event.
