Inside ASI-AP

Last Wednesday (22 Aug) I hosted the fourth 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 last week's function was sales/marketing/communication executives. We had an average attendance of 15 guests evenly split between customers and prospects. In particular, we welcomed Phil Clearly at the lunch, currently with the ETU, but well known through football commentary circles and a former MP - and he did a great job of introducing his table.

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.

After lunch, I spoke on iMIS 15 and what it means to a marketing and communications executive. 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 Sales/Marketing/Communication contacts MD Boardroom Lunch 22 August 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 marketing and communication 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 time 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.

[Main course served]

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 from each table.

If you are looking for things to talk about at your table over desert, 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.

[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 the only complete, upgradeable, web-based not-for-profit business software system available. iMIS provides a broad range of relationship management, marketing communications, commerce and business intelligence functionality. That all sounds fancy, but there are really some pretty basic principles here. Let’s take a simple example – running an event. Before a system like iMIS, you probably use a spreadsheet to track the event. You probably get a dump of your member or donor data from your main database before the event, and then as the event marketing progresses, you get change of addresses/emails lost between the spreadsheet and the main database, or someone forgets to process a registration into the spreadsheet, and we haven’t even mentioned your website yet. iMIS gives you a single, complete system to manage your members and donors, manage your events, manage the marketing of your events, manage your website and process all the commerce related to event registrations, including online reigistration. But I will come back to this shortly.

So, that’s one of the reasons your organization would invest in iMIS.

Another reason, and equally important, is because 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 member’s record spread across multiple systems multiple times, or the inability to understand all the products and services a customer uses from your organisation.

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 contact and activity data stored in iMIS, for any of your staff, volunteers, committee members, even members, 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. . Speaking generally, many of our customers now employ sales staff and manage a sales team – and they need sales force automation functions to support this. In iMIS, this module is called Process Manager and it has been significantly enhanced in iMIS 15 to help you manage all processes like acquisition programs, renewal and retention programs, corporate sponsor sales, and event and product sales. Targeted customer offerings is another fairly recent trend for our customers – sophisticated segmentation tools like RFM Analytics and Marketing Campaign management are newly enhanced modules for iMIS 15.

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 in iMIS 15 include online communities for online collaboration, an updated intelligent query tool for getting to your member data quicker and easier, and an enhanced data warehousing and business analytics engine to let you monitor trends in your organization over time.

But I really want to spend time now talking about your departments – marketing and communications - what’s coming for you in iMIS 15? There are 2 things I want to talk about – marketing automation and content management.

Firstly, marketing automation, which is something you may not be completely familiar with, so I have on your tables a handout that looks like this [hold up marketing chart].

In iMIS, we have a number of modules referred to as our Marketing Suite, which includes functions such as campaign management, segmentation, RFM analytics, acquisition management and of course the Informz email and SMS marketing platform. All of these provide you with capabilities to automate your marketing activities. And that means you can spend more time on the message and the segment analysis and less time on the actual execution of a marketing plan, and that in turn should give you the opportunity to improve your response rates.

Let me use the example in the handout, which is for our 2008 conference and donor retreat. This diagram is a high level view of our overall marketing plan for the event. You will see for the kick off stage, we are going to send 3 different announcements [read all 3], and for each of those 3 different announcements, we are going to send them to 7 different segments [read all 7] – each segment will get a slightly different message in the email or letter.

Without marketing automation, you would most likely do all of this in spreadsheets, and it would be time consuming; in fact, it may be so time consuming that you end up not bothering, or you only do it once. With iMIS, you actually create this campaign setup in iMIS – you tell it the dates of each stage and solicitation, you tell it the segments, and you tell it how you want response rates measured, and then iMIS automatically executes and tracks the marketing campaign for you. And not even that, but since registrations for the conference get processed back into the iMIS event management system, it can be set to automatically not to keep sending emails or letters to people once they have registered for the event.

So YOU spend YOUR time planning a great campaign, crafting the message, and understanding the segments – and doing the things that will help you improve your response rate. Which is a lot more fun and rewarding than manually massaging spreadsheets.

[Pause]

The second area I want to talk to you about is content management. Of course, with iMIS 15 we continue to drive more and more functions to the web. Online membership renewals, registration wizards for online event registrations, variable gift arrays for online donations, a new look for your online shop, and online communities – are all part of iMIS 15. We encourage our customers to drive all of their marketing activities to your website. But once they get to your website, they have to be able to easily identify what you sent them there for. Hence the need for strong content management, which is available with iMIS 15. So not just managing the data about your customers, but managing your content too, and all in the same system. That opens up many possibilities for highly effective targeted communications ….

But just to keep things simple today, you will see a handout on your table of the home page of NZICA [hold up handout], the NZ Institute of Chartered Accountants. They are long time users of iMIS and iMIS web content management. They have a number of audiences they provide communications to, and iMIS provides them with content TAGGING functionality to enable this to be managed quickly and easily. If you look to the bottom left corner of the home page, you will see quick links for resources – and this automatically brings up content that has been tagged for that audience. So for example, ‘students’ – whenever new content is being added to the main website, it can be tagged as being relevant to the ‘student’ audience, and once it is tagged, it will then automatically be shown when you click thru here for students. So you create content once, you can tag it with content tagging, and then it can appear automatically in multiples places on your website.

So like the marketing automation we have already talked about, it means you get more time to work on your message and your content, and less time on actually trying to get it onto your website.

So – there we have a brief summary of iMIS 15 and a couple of areas relevant to your departments. iMIS 15 is available now but we are not planning to ship the CD’s to customers until September.

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 service and 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 marketing and communication executives 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]