$500 Christmas Bingo Winner

Alice Stevens was the big winner in our Christmas Bingo shopping promotion.  Mrs. Stevens won $500 in ChamberBucks by shopping at local Chamber businesses: Speeds Apple Market, Anderson Pharmacy (twice) and First National Bank.  Ord Area Christmas Bingo participants were eligible if they visited a Chamber business listed on their bingo sheet and won a bingo.

Congrats Alice and to our participants, thank you!! Buying local is not only important, it’s essential to the vitality of our community.  Buying locally, especially during the holidays, produces measurable benefits here at home.  Locally-owned businesses return an average of 75% to 80% of each dollar to their community and that dollar will return up to five times that amount within the Ord area.

Not convinced?  We’ve blogged before on the impact of buying locally here, here, here and here.

Please think twice before you spend your Ord-earned dollars in Grand Island or Kearney.

Rural lacks broadband access

So says the Fed.  And it looks like they are putting teeth behind an effort to get the ball rolling.  Have a look at here, as it sums up my concern over this trend:

“It’s just the cost of doing business,” Lewis said. “I have to sell one more car a month to pay for Internet access we don’t get.” Otherwise, he said, “we can’t sell cars.”

One particular piece of data that we all ought to chew on?  Connected Nation offers insight into the economic impact:

Connected Nation, a nonprofit group based in Washington that works to expand broadband adoption, projected that raising the broadband adoption rate by 7 percentage points nationwide would reap $134 billion a year in immediate economic impact.

I plan to bring this issue to the NEDA board to see what our professional association should do about it.  Your input would be helpful, and sharing would be essential.  A long while back I polled you all to see if you were happy with your connectivity.  Take the poll again here.

One more thing – Happy Monday!