Exiting Estes chamber chief springs into a new challenge

ESTES PARK — The 135-mile commute between Estes Park and her family’s home in Colorado Springs was taking a toll on Donna Carlson. Her husband and children didn’t want to move north. But Carlson, as executive director of the Estes Chamber of Commerce, couldn’t leave until she’d accomplished what she wanted.

And now she has.

“I loved being in Estes Park,” said Carlson, who was hired in April 2020 as the newly formed chamber’s first full-time leader — just in time to deal with a pandemic-fueled lockdown. “After about a year and a half of being away from my family, and living in different bedrooms here and there, and vacation homes, and wherever I could find a place to stay, my husband said, ‘I think it’s time for you to come home’ — and I said ‘I’m not ready to leave yet.’

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“But round about last February, I was approaching my second full year here, and we had finally tripled our membership” from 134 when she arrived to more than 350 now, “and that was the point — there was almost a shift in me that said this is a good thing. We’ve built a strong, healthy organization, and I’m not going to cripple the organization if I leave. In fact, I think it’s in a very healthy position to turn over to somebody who brings a new skill set. So I felt at liberty to go ahead and offer my resignation. The board was really appreciative that I said ‘I’m not going anywhere. I’ll stay ‘til May if you want me to.”

Carlson’s last day in the Estes Park post will be May 7, and she’ll start May 16 as vice president for membership at the merged Colorado Springs Chamber of Commerce and its Economic Development Commission.

“It wasn’t even until after I’d given notice here that I learned about the new position I pursued in the Springs,” she said.

On April 25, the Estes chamber’s board announced that Colleen DePasquale, who has been president and chief executive of the Greater Fort Myers (Florida) Chamber of Commerce and its nonprofit foundation for 11 years and once worked at a hotel in Russia, will take the reins in Estes Park effective May 23. That means two of Estes Park’s primary business-promotion entities will have Sunshine State transplants at their helms, since Visit Estes Park in March 2021 hired Kara Franker as chief executive. She had been senior vice president for marketing and communications for Visit Lauderdale in Broward County, Florida.

Carlson said she hopes her chamber successor will be “really strong in political advocacy at a local, county, state and federal level” with “an intuition for the boundaries of chamber influence. As a 501(c)(6), you can be a nonprofit that does advocate. We need somebody who understands that — and also knows when to say no.”

Carlson got some lessons on that topic in her last few months on the job, involving both the chamber’s reaction to state House Bill 22-1117, which dealt with how lodging-tax revenue is spent, and a measure on the town’s April 5 municipal election ballot that concerned funding under Colorado’s Taxpayer Bill of Rights. On March 23, the chamber sent out an email endorsing the TABOR measure — “really, basically to give the town a little more control over spending,” Carlson said — then retracted the email the next day when a chamber member suggested it wasn’t legal for a nonprofit to make such an endorsement. Two days later, after studying the law, the chamber retracted the retraction.

“Every time you make a mistake, it’s an opportunity to learn something that you’re never going to forget, and it’s going to improve your processes,” Carlson said. “So I’m happy for it, and I’m happy to take the fall for it.”

Carlson said that throughout her term in Estes Park, she also fielded complaints from business owners who said “What’s the value of my chamber membership?” When she’d hear that, she said, she’d go to her membership database “and look at how involved they are. And then I could say, ‘Have you attended any meetings? Your membership means nothing if you don’t use it.’

“I’m not going to listen to complaints from people who complain about things they don’t like if they’re not going to be part of the solution,” she said. “I have very little tolerance for that.”

Besides increasing chamber membership, implementing a supplier-attraction program and launching a lead-generation and referral system, Carlson said her biggest source of pride in what she accomplished in Estes Park is that “I can walk into just about any business, and I know the name of the owner. That’s not something that you learn too quickly. They found a leader who went out there with sneakers on, and I went door to door with my executive-director badge on, and people aren’t used to seeing that, and it built a lot of trust.

“I love the fact that when we have a Business After Hours, every person who arrives I know their name and the business they run.

“I had been working for a month to get Duck Race prize donations, sending emails and reminders and having people make phone calls, and I couldn’t get anything to happen until I put my sneakers on and went door to door and sat there and watched them fill out the forms. It seems like that’s the only way to get things done. But the conversations I have when I go door to door are so rich; it’s worth it.”

That personal touch won’t be quite as easy in a large city such as Colorado Springs, but Carlson said her role in the new job will be narrower in scope.

“I love the fact that I’m focusing just on membership development, which also means I’m focused on connecting members with each other, catalyzing business relationships,” she said. “That’s what I love to do. There’s a lot of the administrative parts of the chamber that I’m happy to hand off.”

The highest membership fee for the Estes chamber is $3,000, while at the Colorado Springs chamber it’s $25,000. “It’s a different conversation,” she said. “The good news is I’m familiar with that.” In her previous position at the Springs’ heralded Center for Creative Leadership, she said, she was “used to doing $300,000 deals. The critical difference now is that I know how to build value in chamber membership.”

In the media release announcing DePasquale’s appointment, Carissa Streib, who chairs the Estes chamber’s board of directors, wrote that “we have established a strong reputation of advocacy and support under Carlson’s leadership, and we wish her the best in her new endeavors.”

Even though Carlson will be back home with her family in the Springs, she’ll still nurture her connections in Estes Park.

“At the first opportunity,” she said, “I’ll bring my new membership team up here for a strategic-planning retreat.”