Because the goals of the Carroll County Chamber of Commerce and the Carrollton Area Convention and Visitors Bureau are similar in nature, the groups maintain close contact to ensure that the local business community remains strong, regardless of the struggles of the national economy.

The visitors bureau works to both attract people into the county for special events and then to get them to spend money while they’re here.

“We market the area as a destination with a goal of bringing people and their money into the community,” said Jonathan Dorsey, head of the local bureau. “The people have a good time, leave their money, and then they go back home. Hopefully, they’ll come back and do it again.”

In this way, Dorsey said, the visitors bureau deals primarily with “short-timers” or those who are only in town for a few days at a time, compared to the chamber, which actively communicates with businesses permanently located in Carroll County.

The bureau receives all of its funding through the tax on hotel and motel rooms, known informally as the bed tax. Hotels in Villa Rica and Bremen do not pay into the bureau, as those cities have tourism wings that operate independently of the Carrollton organization.

With the money it brings in from the bed tax, the local bureau organizes and implements a steady advertising campaign, sometimes simply promoting the area and other times promoting major events that go on in the county.

The organization has partnered with the Carroll County government and Carrollton Main Street to help promote large events, like the Taste of Carrollton and the Mecca Fine Arts Festival, outside of the county. In the past, those events were only advertised locally, but the bureau has been able to allocate funding within the last year exclusively for out-of-county advertising. The end results of this expanded advertising campaign has been positive thus far, Dorsey said, and they’re likely to continue looking up in the future.

“I feel like that it has made an impact but not as much as it’s going to,” he said. “This sort of augmenting existing ad efforts can help us meet our mission, which is to help local businesses to meet their mission.”

And that’s where the Chamber of Commerce comes in.

The chamber’s primary goal is to help the local business community as much as possible, said chamber President Daniel Jackson, and every dollar that gets spent in area restaurants or hotels is a step in the right direction, regardless of who is doing the spending.

“It’s a good thing when tourists come in, see your community, spend their money and leave. Anyone who spends money in our community — whether it’s part of a state swim meet, or various sport tournaments, or the police and fire games — those people are also getting exposed to the community. It gets the businesses exposure.”

The chamber itself succeeds only if it is able to generate this kind of exposure, but even then, promotion is only a small part of what the organization does.

It also offers seminars to business owners to help them learn how to run their companies more efficiently, as well as giving those owners the opportunity to network and socialize among the greater business community and the residential community at large.

“There are multiple facets to any chamber organization,” Jackson said. “But in the end, we’re trying to do what’s right for local businesses.”