Member benefit programme for chambers of commerce

Your members are worried about this. We will handle it, and it costs the chamber nothing.

Every October a chamber needs a cybersecurity session, and most have not booked one by the first week of September. We will run it, and we will do the complimentary work behind it: five full assessments for members the chamber chooses on its own published criteria, a free three-minute test any member can take, and a monthly threat rundown written in plain English. Your staff do not deliver anything, do not support anything and do not chase anyone. There is a royalty on paid work that comes through your link, and it arrives whether or not anyone in the building lifts a finger.

Send me the programme outline

No fee to the chamber, everOne paragraph and one link in a newsletter you already sendNon-exclusive, 30 days to walk awayWe handle delivery, support and complaints

The offer, in full

What the chamber gets, and what your members get.

The chamber

A done-for-you member session

Forty-five minutes, in person or online, on what actually breaks a small business and the handful of moves that stop it. An engineer presents, not a salesperson, and there is no pitch from the stage. You get the date, the room and the attendance; we bring the content, the slides and the follow-up.

Five complimentary assessments for members you choose

Our full Cybersecurity and Data Protection Assessment, delivered free to five member businesses. You nominate against criteria you publish; we make the final selection and do all of the work. Each one ends in a written plan the owner can read.

Non-dues revenue that needs no staff time

A monthly royalty on what we actually collect from members who come through your link, with a statement every month showing every line. The Association of Chamber of Commerce Executives is blunt that dues have been a flattening or declining share of chamber revenue for years, which is why this is the part most membership directors want to talk about first.

A renewal argument you can use on the phone

A benefit a member has used is a benefit they renew for. Every member can take the free test and read the rundown, so the benefit is real for the whole roster and not only for the five who get the assessment.

Someone else to call when something goes wrong

A named person at AccuSights, a direct line and a written escalation path, published on the member page. Chambers fear the member complaint more than they want the revenue, so we put our name and our number on it.

Every member

The three-minute Cyber Hygiene Test, free

Twelve questions, one tap each, a score at the end and the two or three gaps that matter most. No cost and no obligation, for every member, on any day.

The monthly threat rundown

What actually happened last month, what it means for a business their size, and the one control that answers it. Written for owners, read in three minutes.

The member session, and the recording

Whether they can make the room or not.

A member rate on anything paid

Published, better than our public price, and stated on the page so a member can check it. A benefit that is not better than what they could get alone destroys chamber credibility, so we put the difference in writing.

The complimentary work

Five assessments and a month of the 24/7 watch, given away on merit.

This is the part the chamber gets to announce. Five member businesses receive the same assessment our paying clients receive, at no cost, plus their first month of the 24/7 watch so they can see what covered feels like before deciding anything. Nothing is owed to the chamber on the complimentary work and nobody has to buy anything to be considered.

Five Cybersecurity and Data Protection Assessments

An engineer looks from the inside at what the business owns, what it holds and how it would be attacked, scored against the CIS Controls v8.1 Implementation Group 1. Two to three weeks. It ends in a cyber health score, the top gaps in plain English, and quick wins separated from projects.

One complimentary month of the 24/7 watch

For those same five, after the assessment: the AI agent on every laptop, inbox, server and cloud account, and a named engineer who confirms and calls. One month, no card, and it stops on its own unless the owner asks for more.

A written result the owner keeps

The plan is theirs whether they buy anything or not, and it is written to be handed to an insurer, a customer or an IT provider.

A limited number of complimentary assessments, allocated on the stated criteria. Nothing here is decided by chance and no selection is random. No purchase, payment, membership upgrade or attendance is required to be considered.

The chamber nominates. We select on the published criteria. Nothing is left to chance.

1The chamber publishes its criteria

Yours, not ours. The suggested set below is a starting point and every chamber we have talked to has changed at least one line of it.

2Members are nominated

By chamber staff, by a board member, by another member, or by the business itself on the nomination form. One page, five minutes.

3We select and we deliver

AccuSights makes the final selection against the published criteria, schedules the work, does it, writes it up and handles every question that follows. The chamber is told who was selected and why, and never has to defend the decision.

The criteria we suggest, which the chamber is free to replace

A member in good standing on the date of nomination.
Between 5 and 250 employees, because that is the band where an assessment changes the most and gets bought the least.
Holds something worth stealing: patient records, card data, client financial records, controlled unclassified information, or the personal data of its customers.
Has not had a formal security assessment in the last 24 months.
Can give an owner or a manager roughly two hours across three weeks. Without that the work is not worth doing.
Preference to a business that would struggle to fund an assessment on its own, because that is the whole point of giving it away.

No purchase, payment, membership upgrade or attendance is required to be nominated or selected. The chamber may add, remove or replace any criterion, and whatever it publishes is what we select against.

What we are asking for, and what we are not

Chambers have been the small business support system in this country for a very long time, and we are asking to support that work rather than to be endorsed by it.

A chamber spends its year making introductions, filling programme slots, arguing for its members in front of a city council and answering the phone when a business owner does not know who else to call. That is unglamorous and it matters, and none of it is our work. We are a security company. We do not want your name on our services and we will not ask for it, because under the FTC Endorsement Guides an organisation that says it endorses something has to have run an evaluation it can describe, and a chamber has adopted no cybersecurity standards and should never be put in that position by a vendor.

We ask to be described as a member benefit programme and a programme partner. Never endorsed, recommended, vetted, approved or certified by the chamber.
We ask for a licence to use the chamber name and mark for the limited purpose of identifying the programme, with the chamber approving anything before it is published.
We ask to be included in a member communication the chamber was already sending, once, in a described paragraph with one link.
We do not ask for the member list, for a segment of it, or for permission to email members directly. Not now and not later.
We do not ask for a referral target, a minimum number of introductions, a marketing commitment or an exclusivity clause.

The money, honestly

It is a royalty under a trademark licence. It is not a commission and it is not a referral fee.

The chamber licenses its name and mark to AccuSights so that members can recognise the programme as theirs. The payment is what we owe for that licence. It is stated as a percentage of the revenue we actually collect from members who enrol through the chamber’s own unique link, it is paid monthly, and a statement shows every line behind it.

The distinction is not cosmetic. Section 512(b)(2) of the Internal Revenue Code excludes royalties from unrelated business taxable income, and the reason associations have lost that treatment in court is that they promoted the product, administered the programme, handed over the member list and agreed to deal exclusively with one vendor. So we structure the opposite of that. Every operational task is ours: the page, the link, the scheduling, the delivery, the support, the reporting and the complaints. The chamber permits the mark and permits one paragraph in a communication it was already publishing. That is all.

Nothing is owed on the complimentary assessments, on the complimentary month, on the free test or on the session. The royalty is payable only on what a member actually pays us, and it is payable whether or not that member was ever nominated.

Never calledCommission, referral fee, finder’s fee, per-lead or per-sale bounty.Never conditioned onA referral target, a minimum number of introductions, a number of emails sent, or exclusivity in the category.Never involvesThe member list, a segment of it, or any direct email from us to a member using chamber data.AlwaysNon-exclusive on both sides, terminable by either side on 30 days’ notice for any reason, with all use of the mark ceasing on termination.

The rate itself is the one number that is not on this page, because it is set with each chamber in the first conversation and written into the licence. Ask for it on the call and you will have it in thirty minutes.

Whether this income is a royalty for the chamber’s own reporting is decided on all the facts and circumstances by the chamber’s counsel and its auditor. We put the analysis and the sources in writing when we send the draft agreement, and then we stay out of it. We will never tell a chamber that a payment is tax free, and any vendor who does is telling you something they cannot know.

Material connection disclosure

The chamber receives a royalty from AccuSights when a member becomes a paying customer through this page. Complimentary assessments are allocated on the published criteria above, never by draw or chance, and nothing is owed to the chamber on them. The chamber has not evaluated, endorsed, certified or approved AccuSights or its services, and nothing here should be read as saying it has. Disclosed under the FTC Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising, 16 CFR 255.5.

What chamber staff actually ask

What does this cost the chamber?

Nothing. There is no fee, no minimum, no sponsorship to buy and no budget line to open. The complimentary assessments, the session, the free test and the rundown are all paid for by us. If a chamber ever has to spend money to run this, we have designed it wrong.

What do we actually have to do?

Three things, and none of them touch delivery. Permit the use of your name and mark for the programme. Include one described paragraph and one link in a member communication you were already sending. Nominate members for the complimentary assessments if you want to, which is optional. Everything else, the page, the scheduling, the work, the writing, the support and the complaints, is ours.

We already have an IT partner or a technology sponsor. Does this conflict?

Usually not, and you should ask us early so we can tell you honestly. Most chamber technology partners sell managed IT, hardware, phones or insurance. We assess, we build compliance programmes and we watch for attacks, so we sit beside those rather than on top of them. If your existing partner does the same work we do, say so on the call and we will tell you it conflicts rather than let you find out later.

Is this exclusive?

No, and we would decline it if you offered. Exclusivity was one of the facts that cost an association royalty treatment in the Tax Court, and it is also just bad for your members. You stay free to add another security partner tomorrow, and we stay free to work with the chamber down the road.

How are members selected for the complimentary assessments?

You publish the criteria, members are nominated, and AccuSights makes the final selection against those published criteria and delivers everything. It is merit, not chance. Nothing is random and nothing is decided by luck, which keeps the programme clear of promotion and lottery rules and keeps the chamber out of a registration it never wanted to file.

How and when are we paid, and what is the payment called?

It is a royalty under a trademark licence, paid monthly on the revenue we actually collected from members who came through your link, with a statement listing every line. It is never structured or described as a commission, a referral fee or a bounty, and nothing is owed on the complimentary work. How your chamber reports the income is a question for your counsel and your auditor, and we send them the analysis and the sources rather than an opinion.

What if a member complains?

They call us, not you. The member page publishes a named person, a direct line and a written escalation path with our response times on it. If a member does come to you first, forward the email and we will have picked it up the same business day. This is the part chambers care about most and it is the part most vendors leave blank.

Can we cancel?

Thirty days’ notice, in writing, for any reason or none. Every use of your name and mark stops when the notice period ends, the page comes down, and any royalty already earned is still paid. There is no term you have to run out and no penalty for leaving.

Do you get our member list?

No. Not the list, not a segment of it, not an export, and no permission to email your members using anything the chamber holds. You communicate with your members through your own channels, which is how it should be and also happens to be what protects the royalty characterisation.

Can we say the chamber endorses AccuSights?

Please do not, and we will not ask you to. Under 16 CFR 255.4 an organisation that endorses something has to have reached that view through a process good enough to reflect the collective judgment of the organisation, and if it is held out as expert it needs recognised experts or standards it previously adopted. A chamber has adopted no cybersecurity standards. Member benefit, member offer and programme partner are accurate, defensible and enough.

Who is behind this

A security architect who spent more than two decades inside the institutions that spend the most in the world on security, and a physician trained in medicine and surgery who watched a breach empty an emergency department.

They started AccuSights after businesses in the founder’s own family were breached, one of them losing a payroll, with no reasonable way at their size to buy what the large institutions buy.

That is why the product is small on purpose: the controls that actually stop attacks, in plain English, at a published price, with a named human on the other end.

Read the whole story →

How to start

Three steps, and the first one is thirty minutes.

1Thirty minutes with a founder

Not a salesperson and not a partnerships coordinator. You will hear the rate, the licence terms and what October looks like, and you can say no at the end without anyone chasing you.

2We send two pages and a draft

The programme outline your board or your CEO can read in four minutes, and the trademark licence and royalty agreement, drafted so that your counsel has something to mark up rather than something to write.

3We build the page, you add a paragraph

Your members get a page with your name on it, your link and the nomination form. You add one described paragraph and one link to a newsletter you were already sending. Nothing else changes in your building.

Two ways to start, and both of them are short.

Book thirty minutes with a founder, or leave your details and the two-page programme outline is in your inbox within one business day. October fills up in September, so the sooner the session date is set the better the room.

Six fields, about ninety seconds. The two-page outline arrives by email within one business day, and a booking link comes with it.