Inside ASI-AP

Yesterday I hosted the third of our monthly "MD's Boardroom Luncheon" function in our Melbourne boardroom. The purpose of these luncheons is to get our customers together, over lunch, in our boardroom, for some networking and information sharing.

The functional title used for yesterday's function was fundaising executives. We had a slightly smaller turnout than previous month due to 4 last minute cancellations (3 of those cancellations from Asthma Vic). We also had more prospects than customers at this lunch for the first time, so the discussions were a little different than just iMIS only discussions, but the networking was good nevertheless.

I used the same theme as last month on asking our guests "what keeps you awake at night?". Of course, related to iMIS and their business systems generally. I will be using that feedback to attempt to maintain an ongoing dialougue, electronically, to see if we can collectively solve some of those things that keep people awake.

After lunch, I spoke on iMIS 15 and what it means to a fundraiser. A transcript of my speech is copied in below. I spoke mainly on customer for life and how we promise to do two things to make that promise - keep them upgraded (with technology and best practice business process), and give them great service and support.

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Luncheon speech for FUNDraising contacts MD Boardroom Lunch 26 July 2007

Good afternoon and welcome. It is my great pleasure to host our boardroom luncheon today, a new monthly event on the ASI calendar.

We have 2 objectives today. Firstly, networking. Networking – ohhh, I hear some of you sigh - not another networking event, our calendar is already full of them! Well that may be true, but today is a little different. Firstly, all of you in the room work for non-profit organizations. As an aside, you may be surprised to learn that the iMIS community in Australia is made up of almost 2,000 people like you. But we need to go a step further. The other thing all of you have in common is that you are fundraising executives. And for that reason, I know you have common challenges that you face in your jobs, and we would like to think that over lunch you will talk about some of those challenges.

The second objective is to provide you with the latest information on iMIS 15. Which I will be doing after lunch.

So – let’s get started. You have 2 tasks to complete before we serve lunch. The first is to look at your profile form in front of you. We would like to share your contact details with the rest of the group here today, but to do that we need your permission. So please check your details are correct, cross off anything you do not want us to publish, and if you are OK to share just with this group here today, tick the box.

At the bottom of the same profile form you will see space to write 3 things that keep you awake at night. Keep you awake at night? Huh? Why would you want to tell me that? Well, let me be a little more specific. If you are an iMIS customer, I want you to be specific about 3 things that keep you awake at night related to iMIS and your software systems, including your websites. If you do not use iMIS, then consider whatever system you use to manage your donors and fundraising programs, and what keeps you awake at night with those systems. The what keeps you awake at night list will not be published, it is just for my reading. But we will quickly collate your answers while you are eating lunch, and I am guessing that many of you will have challenges in common, and between us, after we leave today, as a group we can start to try and work on getting you a decent nights sleep.

Your second task is introductions. Here’s how we are going to do this – you need to nominate someone at your table to be the ‘introducer’ – and it can’t be one of the ASI staff. Each of you need to introduce yourself to one another at your table, and then the introducer will stand up and briefly introduce your table to the room.

So take 10 minutes now to check your profile form, write down 3 things that keep you awake at night, and nominate your table introducer and introduce yourself to your table.

[10 minute break]

Welcome back. If you can have your profile forms ready for collection now, Marla will come around and collect those from you. And lets hear the introductions.

If you are looking for things to talk about at your table over lunch, I’d like to draw your attention to this card: “7 Business Drivers of High Performance Non-Profits”. Pick 1 or 2 drivers from the list to discuss over lunch. Let’s eat.

[Lunch and desert served]

[Main presentation]

Welcome back, I trust you enjoyed lunch and your conversation with your peers.

Let’s move on now to our second objective of the luncheon – an update on iMIS 15.

Before I do, however, I just wanted to give a brief overview of ASI and iMIS generally.

iMIS is an integrated system that really does provide a 360 degree view of your donor. That’s a pretty common buzzword you hear thrown around today, but for a fundraiser, there are some pretty basic principles here. Let’s take a simple example – managing donations, managing events, and managing volunteers. Before a system like iMIS, these functions would typically be managed in 3 different systems – 1 for donations, 1 for events, and 1 for volunteers. And you probably know what happens – the donation system does not know who is a current volunteer, so you send your best volunteers the same message you send to a $10 a year donor. Great. Your events are run by another system, so when a high value donor turns up at a lunch, no-one realizes they are there because they weren’t automatically flagged in the event system. Having a single view of the donor solves all of these problems. iMIS gives you a single, complete view of the donor. But that’s only half the problem solved. You then have to have the right tools to use that data effectively – through segmentation, RFM analysis, and integrated campaign management. iMIS gives you those tools as well. And it can do it all from the web as well. But I will come back to this shortly.

As for ASI, we are the leading providers to non-profits. We only work with non-profits. ASI believes in customer for life. We believe once you buy iMIS you will never have to buy another system.

Customer for life – that is a big commitment to make. And for us to make that promise, we have to do 2 things. We have to keep iMIS upgraded with both current technology and with current business practices. And secondly we have to give great service and support.

Unfortunately for us, when you first buy iMIS, customer for life is a pretty hard message for us to get across. You generally buy iMIS to solve some business problems. Common examples of business problems include high maintenance costs of supporting a custom built system, a donor’s record spread across multiple systems multiple times, or the inability to improve donor retention rates because of system limitations.

For many of you, the actual reasons for buying iMIS may be lost with previous management. But that doesn’t really matter, because iMIS needs to keep solving your business problems, today and into the future. So we have to keep you up to date. Customer for life.

Which is a great introduction to iMIS 15. iMIS 15 is the next upgrade of iMIS from iMIS 10. Why the numbering? Actually this is ASI’s 15th year in business. iMIS 10 was released in our 10th year, and iMIS 15 in our 15th year.

Importantly, iMIS 15 is an upgrade. It will come shipped to you on a CD that you can use to upgrade from your iMIS 10.6 system. It is like an upgrade to Windows or to Office.

So what’s new in iMIS 15? Firstly, let me talk about the technology. I said to keep you as a customer for life, we need to keep you up to date with technology. iMIS 15 is doing that. A large part of iMIS 15 is written in Microsoft’s .NET technology and almost all of the non-processing aspects is now browser based. Which means the average user can use just a web browser to look up contact information and run queries. What does that really mean for you? What business problem does that solve? It means easier and quicker access to donor contact and activity data stored in iMIS, for any of your staff, volunteers, committee members, even donors, directly from your website. No need to install software or give extensive training. And importantly no need for each person to keep their own little Outlook contact lists or spreadsheets of donor information. This business problem is solved by technology – the web. So yes – iMIS is right up to date with technology.

We also have to keep you updated with best practice process if you are to keep iMIS for life. iMIS 15 delivers many new functions here as well. Fundraising is becoming more sophisticated – and your donors are expecting more from you. Your donors live in a modern community where expectations are being set by others. Your donors expect that you know about them and their history with you; they expect to get personalized messages; and they are demanding that you lower your administration costs. Best practice means an integrated system, it means electronic communication, it means Moves Management, it means RFM analysis, and it means segmentation far more personalized than just “this year but not last year”. iMIS 15 delivers you these best practices.

Our Informz email marketing platform is also continually being upgraded. This year online surveys and SMS texting has been added. Informz gives you campaign based analysis for open rates, click thru rates, and conversion tracking back to your website. If you are not aware of Informz and the flexibility of a true, integrated email marketing platform, make a note to talk to us this year about Informz.

Other best practices coming in iMIS 15 include online social networking fundraising – basically donors asking donors via your website – you might know this as “a-thons”. This is a whole new form of fundraising very quickly gaining great results for a low cost – hopefully you’ve seen the websites like “Movember” or “Comic Relief” where you get your own webpage so that you can ask your friends to donate on your behalf, you have your own little tracking barometer, you can post up pictures and stories on how you are tracking. ASI has signed a partnership with Artez, a leading Canadian company in online social fundraising and this will become integrated into iMIS 15 and let you connect with donors like never before.

One area that I would like to point out to you as an area where you can lower costs – is electronic transaction processing. You must commit to a long term plan to have the majority of your transactions processed electronically. That means using technology such as B*Pay, direct debit, Australia Post Bill-Pay, PayPal, credit cards and online transactions – for gifts, for events and for merchandising. It means someone else doing the data entry for you and you processing the payments into iMIS automatically. The best organizations in the sector do not employ data entry staff; instead they employ data analysts. That is quite a difference.

As for the fundraising department – what’s coming for you in iMIS 15? We have made significant improvements to our Marketing Suite of modules and Process Manager based on direct feedback from some of our very large fundraising customers. Process manager lets you formally implement workflow processes for moves management, for bequests, and for capital campaigns; this means your intellectual property on how you run these programs is in the system – in iMIS – and not in someone’s head. The Marketing Suite includes modules like Campaign Manager, Segmentation, RFM Analytics and Acquisition Management.

I just want to focus on segmentation for now. Segmentation is a word used fairly loosely, but I want to be specific here – lets talk direct mail campaigns. It is typical to run between 2 and 8 segments for mail campaigns, and this may include some A-B testing. Without iMIS, I would guess you do this on spreadsheets – do some sorting, some filtering, copy/paste data to new spreadsheets, and then send it off to the mail house, hoping you haven’t doubled up segments or missed out names altogether. Anything more than a couple of segments and this really starts to get to a complex exercise.

But with iMIS and the iMIS segmentation tool – the system, iMIS, does this work for you. It guarantees not to put people in more than one segment, it guarantees not to miss people. It can automatically do A-B testing and can randomly populate segments based on rules you specify. 20 or more segments – no problem. More segments means better personalization – and this is what your donors are coming to expect. I would suggest the only reason you cannot do 20 or more segments now is that it just does your head in trying to work it all out in a spreadsheet!! So iMIS 15 gives you segmentation like never before.

We have also made improvements to the gift entry screens. We have added a new rapid gift entry screen to allow you to key in large numbers of donations for the same campaign very quickly – much like a batch entry screen. We have made improvements to our batch control system to give greater flexibility on who can post batches and when, plus to make it easy to switch from one batch to another. These are designed to reduce data entry time and cost. And finally we have opened up our payment gateway processing – so it is now easy to implement your own payment gateway, other than Verisign. This can be for credit cards, or even other payment types, like PayPal.

And of course, we continue to drive more and more functions to the web. Registration wizards for online event registrations, variable gift arrays for online donations, a new look for your online shop, and as I already mentioned integration into Artez for online social fundraising – are all part of iMIS 15.

So – there we have a brief summary of iMIS 15. iMIS 15 is currently available in a Release Candidate version. This is a limited release currently being implemented by selected customers worldwide on a pre-approved basis. iMIS 15 will be generally available next month for download via our website, and shipped on CD’s the month or so after that.

iMIS 15 - is the next step in the journey of customer for life. We promise to keep you upgraded with technology and with current best practice. And we promise to give you great support. Anytime we do not do that you need to please let me know. My email, my direct phone number and mobile are on the handout sheet.

That brings us to the end of my presentation. A couple of key date reminders before we leave. If you or one of your team want to see a demo of iMIS 15 you need to register to attend one of our free weekly webcasts – goto our website to signup. I am also very pleased to announce that the NiUG iMIS user group – a true independent user group - is now formally established in Australia. If you are an iMIS user and not already a member of NiUG it is $135 well spent. Contact the chairman - Rod Dalglish at the Bus Association of Victoria.

In closing, I just want to come back to the objectives for today. Firstly networking. I trust that the lunch environment, the exclusive fundraising executive only invitations, the table layouts, the questions on what keeps you awake at night, helped you meet your peers today. I welcome your feedback.

Secondly, an update on iMIS 15, the next upgrade to iMIS to keep you as a customer for life.

Myself and the other ASI team members are available here until around 2.30 if any of you have questions or would like to speak with us individually.

Otherwise - that is the end of our proceedings today, and the luncheon is now closed. Thank you for joining me.

[End]