Inside ASI-AP

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.

The annual iBEF Executive Forum for our top 10 or so customers was held last Wednesday and Thursday at the Peppers Torquay Sands Resort, south west of Melbourne.

We held the June boardroom luncheon in the Melbourne office today Tuesday 23 June. For the last 2 years these have been called the "Managing Director's Boardroom Luncheon Series" and they ran only in Melbourne. For 2009, we have refined the format and renamed them to the "iMIS Business Excellence Luncheon Series"; and for the format, we are introducing other speakers besides just me, and will be running them in both Melbourne and Sydney, with the first Sydney lunch coming up later this week.

For today's lunch Mick Varga was the featured speaker, and the audience was marketing and development managers / executives from both customers and prospective customers. I spoke for the first 10 minutes to provide the introduction and overview, then Mick spoke for 10 minutes between main course and dessert, and again for 10 minutes after dessert.

I have added a Twitter block to the left hand side of the insideasiap.com web site taking feeds from staff Twitter accounts on an hourly basis. So far myself, Jay and Kelly are being aggregated and displayed. If you would like yours added, just let me know.

You may also be interested in following Twitter search feeds for "iMIS" and "NiUG". Try these:

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=imis

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=niug

If you are using a Twitter client such as Tweetdeck or Seesmic it is easy to add in search views for these automatically. They also let you monitor specific user accounts and create groups like "work" and "home".

We held the first boardroom luncheon in Melbourne office last week on Thursday 21 May. For the last 2 years these have been called the "Managing Director's Boardroom Luncheon Series" and they ran only in Melbourne. For 2009, we have refined the format and renamed them to the "iMIS Business Excellence Luncheon Series"; and for the format, we are introducing other speakers besides just me, and will be running them in both Melbourne and Sydney.

For the lunch last week Mick Varga was the featured speaker, and the audience was IT managers and IT executives from both customers and prospective customers. We also changed the format and made the presentation style a little more hard hitting, less high level and giving more practical advice that can be put into action right away. I spoke for the first 10 minutes to provide the introduction and overview, then Mick spoke for 10 minutes between main course and dessert, and again for 10 minutes after dessert.

I hosted our final boardroom lunch of the year this week - 29th October - and we had an invited audience of membership department executives.

Last year we used the theme of "what keeps you awake at night" as a means of getting feedback and prompting discussion. This year I have adopted a new theme based on the business drivers of high-performance non-profits and the iMIS Business Excellence Framework (iBEF). The focus for this presentation was on process management rather than functional management using the "join now" process as the example. See more in the copy of the speech below.

I hosted our fourth boardroom lunch of the year this week - 1st October - and we had an invited audience of CEO's and senior executives.

Last year we used the theme of "what keeps you awake at night" as a means of getting feedback and prompting discussion. This year I have adopted a new theme based on the 7 business drivers of high-performance non-profits and the iMIS Business Excellence Framework (iBEF). The focus for this presentation was on process management rather than functional management using the "join now" process as the example. See more in the copy of the speech below.

Last but not least in a big few weeks of iMIS Friendraising launches (see posts on Pink Ribbon Breakfast and Light the Night), the Cancer Council Victoria (CCV - www.cancervic.org.au) launched their latest fundraising event "Girls Night In" at www.girlsnightin.com.au. The Victorian home page is shown below:

CCV is part of the national Cancer Council group that are deploying the Artez online fundraising solution all around Australia. In Victoria, since CCV are also iMIS customers, they are also implementing the iMIS Friendraising bridge.

We welcome Kelly Jones and Pauline Hipkin to the local ASI team. Both started on the same day - Wednesday 13 August 2008. After spending time with Julie first up Wednesday morning, then joining myself and some of the other ASI managers for lunch, it was straight into bootcamp with Jay and Kevin; photo below in the team room with Kevin.

Thursday morning I had the ASI strategy and industry overview sessions of the Bootcamp, pictured below are Kelly and Pauline in the boardroom listening to my presentation. What you can't see is the dancing going on - part of my regular strategy Powerpoints - "The Star Wars theme", "I'm so excited" and "I'm on the road again" all get a short play!

For the past 7 years we have run an annual executive briefing/forum for our top 15 association customers, and since last year we have also added a twice yearly IT round table for that same group of customers. For the first time we are taking the executive forum program to our top fundraising customers.

While we have had a number of large fundraising customers for the past few years, with strong sales in the last year into large fundraising organisations we now have a core group of at least 20 organisations that give us the numbers to run our first executive forum.

The executive forum is scheduled for Wednesday 3 September to be held in our temporary Sydney office. A save the date email has just been sent out - copy below. This is an invitation only event where we have invited the senior executive responsible for iMIS in each of our top fundraising customers. The agenda will be high level and based around the concepts of the iMIS Business Excellence Framework program and the 7 business drivers of high performance non-profits.

Two big website launches this week for iMIS 15 .Net Content Manager. I already posted about the AFI website launch, and then just 3 days later the Global Illumination website www.globalillumination.org.au - went live for the National Breast Cancer Foundation (NBCF www.nbcf.org.au).

This website was launched hot on the heels of the Pink Ribbon Breakfast website that I posted about here and rounded out a big couple of weeks for our teams.

The first event run by our new iMIS 15 customer - the National Breast Cancer Foundation (NBCF) www.nbcf.org.au - is now live online and ready for registrations, sponsors and donations. The Pink Ribbon Breakfast is a well known annual event with many high profile stars as ambassadors led by chief ambassador Sarah Murdoch.

The Pink Ribbon Breakfast website www.pinkribbonbreakfast.org.au went live this week using the iMIS Friendraising module. The registration home page is shown above.

The Australian Film Institute (AFI) purchased iMIS 15 earlier in the year. They went live with their back office system back in May to support their membership, events and the voting for the annual AFI Australian Film Awards - with Leo doing most of the project. For those that don't know much about the AFI, and if you like films, their annual membership of just $55 per year is a great deal - since it gives you discounts at all cinemas plus a chance to attend the screenings of Australian films in the lead up to the awards.

This week they launched their new .Net website - www.afi.org.au - using the iMIS 15 Content Manager module. The website was implemented in just a few weeks by Nasser and his team at Avion Software. This week was a soft launch with just content only available so far; later in the month the functional pieces we be added including the member only area, online join, online renewals and other functions for competition and voting registration.

On Thursday 24 July we hosted our 2nd IT Round Table event in the Melbourne office. This is an invitation-only event for the IT managers of our largest customers and customers in the iMIS Business Excellence Framework (iBEF) program. It followed on from the Executive Forum we ran for the same group of customers earlier in the year (for the Exec Forum the invitations are for COO's and senior executives). I posted some notes on our preparation here.

Based on feedback from the IT round table last year we are going to run these 1 day events every 6 months. The next one is scheduled for November and we will move to Sydney for that event.