Inside ASI-AP

The deadline for the September 2008 round of funding for the ASI SMART Company Scholarship Fund has been extended to Friday 12 September (from Wednesday 10th Sept).

This is the time NFP staff can apply to attend FIA’s Fundraising Leadership Program (FLP)- an intensive four day program covering advanced professional issues in fundraising and philanthropy, transformational leadership and social marketing.

One full scholarship is available along with up to 5 part scholarships (25% of early bird member rate registration fees). More details about the scholarships is at www.advsol.com/ap/scholarship and the FLP at www.fia.org.au.

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.

I missed posting both the customer survey results for Q1 and the BSC results. So this is a catch up for Q1. I should have the Q2 results done in the next couple of weeks, so look out for those then.

Q1 is a great example of how the BSC works as a management system. Before the BSC we generally managed the business on financial results. But in the balanced scorecard, financial results are only 1 perspective of 4 total perspectives. The financial results for Q1 in AP were outstanding, and without the BSC everyone would be happy. But if you look at our BSC strategy map below you will see we have some significant red areas in the 3 other perspectives. And since it flows from bottom up, reds will eventually flow up and lead to poor financial outcomes if they are not addressed now.

To further strengthen the iMIS community through the independent user group - NiUG International (www.niug.org) - ASI is subsidising membership for new and existing customers. We believe NiUG membership is a positive influence on iMIS customers and we have announced the subsidy program to support that idea - for both new customers and existing customers.

The details are as follows:

The dates and location have been set for the AP NiUG Discovery conference - set for Wednesday 15 October to Friday 17 October up at the Australis Noosa Lakes Resort in Noosaville (on the Sunshine Coast).

Already there is a large contingent of international speakers confirmed for the conference - including Marty Rabenovets (ASI's Director of Product Management), Doug Morris (CEO of CSI Inc. and NiUG International board member), Rob Wenger (CEO of Higher Logic) and Jeff from Informz.

Recently we purchased a Google Search Appliance to beef up the search functionality of the various ASI websites - and we have named it the Googlebox. It is currently available internally at the URL http://googlebox/.

The Googlebox is not just able to index website content but in fact anything in our systems - including SQL databases and Exchange email boxes. As most of you know we do have a lot of information stored in our own iMIS SQL database including all SMRs, community postings, consulting project postings, enhancement requests and other things. This will now go into a single search index on the Googlebox along with all of our websites, the docs.imis.com online manuals and files from Clarity.

On Friday 1 August we moved out of our North Sydney office which had been our Sydney home for the past 4 years. In fact we have been in North Sydney since Jason first moved there to open up our Sydney presence over 6 years ago.

Now we start our move into the Sydney CBD. For a few reasons - firstly to get higher quality premises equal to our Melbourne office, to get access to flexible boardrooms so we can run events in our office, to be closer to customers, and to be closer to central public transport. These are all the same reasons we moved our Melbourne office into the CBD last year. The Melbourne office move has been one of the best things we have done and I would like to see similar success with the Sydney move.

Customers that purchased iMIS 15 recently in the Asia-Pacific region include:

Malaysian Nature Society (live)
Starlight Childrens Foundation (mid implementation)
Leukemia Foundation (event pilot live)
National Breast Cancer Foundation (mid implementation)
Professional Golfers Association (PGA) (implementation not yet started)
Australian Film Institute (AFI) (live)
Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (implementation about to start)
Australian Orthopedic Association (implementation just starting)
Aged & Community Care Victoria (ACCV) (live)

Please welcome all to the iMIS community!

June is our half-year for financial reporting so it is a significant set of results. In AP we have had a record 6 months - and not just beating previous results by a few % points, but in fact smashing them. Revenues were just under $4m for the 6 months - 15% ahead of budget and 34% ahead of last year. And all that with no increase in headcount - in fact there has been a decrease.

EBITDA results have also been strong ahead of both last year (by $500k) and budget (by $300k). Of particular significance is that Q2 was a great quarter in it's own right, further extending the already ahead of budget results posted in the first quarter (see full story on Q1 financials).