Inside ASI-AP

Bob and I travelled from the Discovery conference on the Gold Coast yesterday to Kuala Lumpur (KL). We flew out of Brisbane direct to KL - flight time 8 hours. Keith flew direct from Perth and met us at the hotel (his flight time was just over 5 hours).

This morning, we held our first sales seminar in KL. The topic was 'Intro to iMIS' - basically the same demonstration as given in the webcasts of the same name.

Our implementation partner in KL - NSelvam Consult www.nselvam.com - did great work in getting about 20 individuals from various NGO's to attend. The seminar ran for 3 hours and then we had a lunch in the hotel restaurant. Keith gave a great demo of iMIS, I then gave a brief presentation on the 5 commitments of ASI, and then Bob closed off the seminar with a discussion on the value of working with ASI.

There was a variety of NGO's in attendance - a couple of large ones (> 100 staff) and some smaller ones (3 with 20 staff). Overall everyone was very enthusiastic with about 3 of the organisations showing real interest at the end of the seminar. It reminded me very much of the original seminars we did 10+ years ago in Australia with iMIS LAN! In fact Bob made a similar comment how much he enjoyed the seminar and that it was like starting over again.

The seminar was held at the Hilton Petaling Jaya. Petaling Jaya – better known as PJ – is the main business centre of KL. It is about 20-30 minutes by taxi from downtown KL. Many of the NGO’s are in the PJ area, so it was convenient.

To better understand web usage amongst the NGO’s, we did a quick survey via a show of hands to the following questions:

How many of you currently use packaged software? Membership = 0, fundraising = 0, content management = 1

How many of you have a custom built software application? 3

How many of you want to provide better access to members/donors through the web? 2

How many of you use an email marketing tool? 0

How do you send broadcast emails? Outlook

We got some further information about the question regarding future web usage, since the low number surprised me a little (Malaysians are very web aware). Turns out there has been some security issues recently with some high profile websites getting hacked here and everyone is a little nervous.

We do have some work to do in addressing pricing for the Malaysian market, but in the meantime things are underway! A great day all in all.

Postscript photo - Bob and Selvam at dinner following the seminar