Inside ASI-AP

Liza and I went to a seminar this afternoon hosted by Xponential where we heard Ted Hart talk about having success in online fundraising.  I hadn't heard of Ted before and I'm not sure what makes you a guru (he didn't talk at all about his success or history) but the content was good.

The presentation was about 4 hours long and was broken into two sections, a review of Web 2.0 and why this is important and then in the second half he did a live review of just about everyone's website in the room.

From Saturday through to Tuesday ASI had a booth at the Perth FIA conference, and Marla, Colin and myself were there to attend to the booth and learn a few things.

Marla flew out today, Colin and I (Jay) fly out tomorrow morning.  We're heading off to Perth for the FIA Conference.  Once again, ASI are sponsoring the conference and will have a booth that the three of us will be tending to.

This year all of our efforts are going into letting people know about the new iMIS Friendraising module, and we decided to use the Friendraising module as part of a promotion, here's how it works:

1. Colin, Marla and I will try our best to get as many friends as we can.
2. For every friend we get, we'll take them through the donation process using iMIS Friendraising.  No one actually has to donate anything, just go through the process to see how easy it is.
3. For every one who 'donates' ASI will donate $5 to a pre-selected charity.

So who are the charities:

I listened to a great podcast yesterday from Merlin Mann of 43folders.com

If you don't podcast then there is a video you can watch: http://www.43folders.com/izero/

This has really helped me in setting a plan for managing my inbox. If you are struggling to get through the noise then he has 5 simple ways you can manage emails. Worth listening to/watching.

On the side, his website http://43folders.com, has all sorts of information for doing things a little more productively and is worth a look.

I must admit, I'm probably more critical than others when it comes to things that iMIS doesn't do. However tonight I have been filling in a requirements document for a prospect and I wanted to share a thought i had.

Off the back of the recent Discovery conference where we talked about blogs being an 'untapped market' and discussed some of the incredible statistics in relation to this style of content, I just found some information about readership.

A recent study from Forrester found that 24% of Generation Y read blogs, twice as much as Generation X.

This really is something that we should be exploiting right now, it's easy to build one and non-profits are perfectly suited to building the style of journal content for a blog.

I have been seeing some interesting ideas come up on a blog recently called Web Worker Daily. This site is dedicated to helping those that work in non-office environments, and due to our move to telecommuting (sounds so 1968 doesn't it?) I though it appropriate to share.

Have a look: http://webworkerdaily.com/