Inside ASI-AP

Jay, Amanda and I manned our stand at the Connecting Up 2009 Conference which was held in Brighton le Sands, Sydney on Monday 10 & Tuesday 11 May. The conference was focused on "how technology, social media and networking is changing the way nonprofit orgtanisations operate, communicate and connect with their supporters, members and beneficiaries."

The conference was mainly attended by Social Services organisations who have few supporters (donors) as the majority were fully funded by the government. While the budget was handed down last night, many of these organisations were thinking about how it was going to affect their services, and how they would have to consider cutting some services they offer. Very little consideration seemed to be given to raising funds through the community to continue delivering their services.

The inaugural ArtezInterAction was held in Sydney last Thursday 30th April. It was attended by 69 delegates (inc staff and speakers), with 12 no-shows/cancellations (many of these were freebies).

The opening presentations was given by Martin Gill who was full of energy and very engaging. He's a great speaker. The presentation he gave on the implications of new technology is available here: http://www.artez.com/blogs/philipkingspodcast/episode14martingillfounder... (filmed at ArtezInterAction 2008).

Other speakers included Brian Pendleton from CauseForce who provided examples of some of the events they've developed, including raising $13m for cancer research; Sara Mansfield from Pareto Fundraising and Rod Jacka from Panalysis. Three Artez/iMIS Friendraising customers were involved in the master panel on Analyzing Event & Campaign Success Factors. Dave Simms from Leukeamia Foundation explained how they rebranded Worlds Greatest Shave and the idea behind Light the Night which was first tested in SA and WA to "test the system wouldnt crash", then rolled out nationally after being deemed a success.

Rod Dalglish from Bus Association Victoria recorded a video testimonial while in the US for 2007 Discovery. The testimonial has been uploaded to the ASI YouTube Channel. Go to www.youtube.com/asicommunity to see it.

After only 3 years on happily "engaged" bliss, I am happy to finally announce that i am getting married to my fiance, Michael Bonola. The date has been set for 20 October 2007!

Of course, Paul's constant nagging about my setting a wedding date didn't make any difference. In fact, the more he asked, the longer I was happy to put it off ;-)

I guess Paul will have to think of something else to say about me at our next Staff Retreat ...

We are well into our campaign to educate customers about iMIS 15 and now prospects are getting in the know too!

Last week we sent the following postcard to all active prospect contacts on our database who fit our target market (orgs with more than 10 full-time employees) - that's almost 11,000 contacts - inviting them to download an i15 brochure from our website - www.advsol.com/i15.