Inside ASI-AP

iMIS training dates for the Asia-Pacific region for early 2010 have now been posted. We have a number of face to face courses scheduled in February and March including Web Content Management, iBO .NET, iMIS Overview and Intro Crystal Reports. You can view all the details at www.advsol.com/ap/learning and registrations are now open for the early bird rates.

We encourage you to register early to secure your place and receive the discounted rate.

Further details about our At Your Desk training course program will be available soon.

ASI's SMART Company Scholarship Fund is again offering financial assistance for your professional development. The fund offers four rounds of funding each year (March, June, September & December). Applications for the current round must be received no later than Thursday 10th December 2009.

The Fund specifically assists staff working in Not-For-Profit organisations and has provided grants to more than 70 individuals over the past three years.

If you are not an ASI customer - we invite you to apply in this round for our fully funded scholarships to undertake the Fundraising Institute of Australia Skills 123 Training Courses (see under Program Part A).

Here are a few photos from our last Melbourne boardroom lunch for 2009 - held on Tuesday 1st December.

Today we hosted a group of Membership Execs from the iMIS Community - here are some pictures from today:

ASI is pleased to announce the recipients for the September round of funding for the ASI SMART Company Scholarship Fund.

The Fund yet again recieved a solid stream of applications and was pleased to be able to assist seven very worthy recipients from across Australia.

Recipients included:

Amy Amato, Wildlife Victoria
FIA Skills 1

Cathy Holland, Hear & Say Centre
FIA Skills 2

Luke Williams, The Crusader Union of Australia
FIA Skills 1

Stefania Rochford, Australia Zoo Wildlife Warriors
FIA Skills 1

Liz Balogh, Bush Heritage Australia
Major Gift Fundraising (Artful Fundraising)

The iMIS training class schedule has been updated for Oct - Dec 2009. There is a swag of At Your Desk and face to face classes scheduled.

At Your Desk (AYD) classes represent great value for money (only $165 - Australian dollars). The two hour courses cover a range of topics - including new courses in Customer Management. There are also AYD courses in Events, Billing-Dues, Orders, IQA, Business object Designer and AR/Cash.

Face to face classes have been scheduled for Melbourne including Web Content Management, iBO .NET and Task Centre.

Go to www.advsol.com/ap/learning for all the details.

A number of you have asked me recently how come my blog here is not getting updated as often as it used to.

The main reason is that I have moved to a new tool called Yammer (www.yammer.com) which is like Twitter but it is internal to ASI. Which means I can talk about confidential goings-on at customers and it stays confidential within ASI staff. We have been using Yammer for about 3 months now.

I like Yammer because you can post short snippets, like Twitter, and post often. It requires a lot less thinking than putting together a blog entry.

Of course the downside is that outside of ASI you can't see what is going on, which was the whole point of this blog in the first place ....

Here are the photos from last week's iBEF Executive Forum held in Sydney, Australia (including professional shots.

ASI is participating as an exhibitor at the Associations Forum National Conference being held in Melbourne today and tomorrow at the new Melbourne Convention Centre on the southbank. There are approx 300 delegates attending the two days with about 30 or so exhibitors. The first break this morning has some good traffic through with a few current iMIS customers saying hi and a few prospects showing interest - all very promising! We're focusing on Social Networking and running a short survey on social media and also encouraging prospects to sign up for our next round of Software Selection Luncheons (www.advsol.com/ap/share). Here are some photos of ASI's exhibit stand at the conference - taken this morning (yes the sun was shining in Melbourne!!).

I sat in on the iMIS 15.1 customer briefing in Melbourne last Thursday, which was the first one of these I have been to this year. Marla has already posted photos and Colin also posted about the customer briefing series.

We had the biggest attendance so far for the Melbourne seminar which was held in our boardroom, with 60 guests registered. We hired in some additional seats and the seating was more comfortable than I was expecting.

Colin spoke well to a fairly long presentation of 50+ slides (PDF version here iMIS Customer Briefing Melbourne July 09.pdf) but I really feel we have some work to do in improving the way we explain the benefits of the 15.1 upgrade. The presentation was good in explaining what new things are on offer with 15.1 including some of the current promotions, but what was lacking was explaining the benefits to the customer.

We held our first luncheon of the year with our CEO and general manager contacts last Wednesday under the iMIS Business Excellence branding. It was our largest lunch so far and I think reflective of the importance of non-profits, and in particular our customers, understanding the importance of business excellence, and in particular iMIS Business Excellence, in the current environment.

To have 24 CEO's and GM's in the room listening to our message is a great outcome and on top of that, we just get better and better at delivering the message. Similar to the last few lunches, I did the opening 10 minutes, and then after main course Mick spoke for just under 10 minutes, and then Mick spoke again after desert.

Photos from the iMIS Customer Briefing in Melbourne held this week. Our biggest crowd in the office yet!

here are some happy snaps from today's iMIS Business Excellence luncheon for Executives.

Following on from our recent results of making the top 50 great places to work in Australia (previous posts here, here and here), this article is the first in a series on the actual results for the survey questions that everyone completed towards the end of 2008.

The questions were divided into 5 major areas - credibility, respect, fairness, pride and camaraderie. For each article I am going to cover off one of these areas, and then over the remainder of the year there will be continued discussion on individual points as we work to make ASI an even better place to work.

We held our very first boardroom luncheon in Sydney yesterday. We have run these in our Melbourne boardroom for over a year now and they have been well regarded, and with the growth of our Sydney business it was time to run them in Sydney as well. Of course we don't have the same boardroom in Sydney as we do Melbourne, so we booked into Prime restaurant in the basement of the GPO building in Martin Place and enjoyed a nice 2 course lunch.

We had a combination of existing iMIS customers and prospective iMIS customers attend, including a few of our 10+ year customers from the earliest days we were in Sydney. The invited group were membership managers and executives and there was plenty of discussion around membership performance in the GFC.