Inside ASI-AP

Our biggest boardroom lunch so far was held this last week on Tuesday 25th with the invited audience being membership department executives, which over the years has been the bread and butter audience for iMIS. We had 20 guests the majority of who were customers.

I focused my after lunch speech on iMIS 15 process manager and segmentation - challenging our guests to look hard at their regular renewal processes and not just keep doing it the same way as last year. A transcript of my speech is below.

I am continuing to ask the questions on "what keeps you awake at night" and I have added the responses from this group to the wiki page here.

As it was grand final week in Melbourne, Marla had the room decorated with balloons in the colours of Geelong (blue/white) and Port Adelaide (black/blue), and Martin was proudly wearing his Port Adelaide scarf.

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Luncheon speech for Membership contacts MD Boardroom Lunch 25 September 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 membership department 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 membership and member 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 after main course 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. iMIS gives you a single, complete system to manage your members, manage your events, manage education and training, manage your marketing, manage your website and process all the commerce related to your members, including online e-commerce – all in the same system! 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. I wanted to take a minute to recognise those customers in the room that have been long time iMIS customers - “customers for life” already – well for at least 10 years:

Mary – VECCI
Carolyn & Sandra – Taxpayers Australia
Matt & Ben – Gymnastics Australia
Liz – CPA Australia
Bisa – Australian Physiotherapy Association
Jude & Cheryl – APESMA

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 member 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 member 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 has been upgraded. This year online surveys and SMS texting has been added. Informz gives you campaign based analysis for email 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 department – the membership department - and what iMIS 15 means for you. There are 2 things I want to talk about – process automation and segmentation. And I want to challenge you to leave here today and think hard about how you will embrace iMIS for the next couple of years.

Firstly, process automation, which is something you may not be completely familiar with, but it is easy to explain. In iMIS, it is called Process Manager.

The example I want to use is your membership renewal process. Which is a fairly important part of your business. But lets talk about the administration of the membership renewal process. The administration of the renewal process is not a high value activity, and it eats up staff time. And while this staff time may be about members, it is not member facing. Opening an envelope and doing data entry of a membership renewal is not member facing time.

Take a minute to think about your membership renewal process. For most of you, it will be as it is because “we have always done it that way”.

[Pause]

I would suggest to you that much of the renewal process can be automated. From the initial letters or emails, to thank you emails, to reminder follow ups, to strike off notifications. Using a process workflow we can establish who does what when, and then automate the tasks that iMIS can do all by itself. And for those tasks that need someone’s input – iMIS will remind them to do it, and tell their manager when they haven’t.

I want you to think about your renewal process. Not the renewals but the process. Do you even have it written down? Would it work if you were on extended leave? Is it effective? Is it efficient? How much variation exists in each step?

iMIS Process Manager, along with Campaign Management, can manage and automate your renewal process. And then you will be able to answer those questions. And I am strongly suggesting you need to be there inside of 5 years.

[Pause]

The second area I want to talk to you about is segmentation.

Following on from the same example we used on the renewal process, let me find out from the room a little more about the renewal process.

How many have an annual renewal process – same time every time? The rest are then on anniversary?

Consider now the invitation to renew that you mail out. Who sends the same basic letter to everyone? Anyone send something different to different members based on some pre-arranged segments? If so, ask about it …

[Suggest some possible segments – long term members, fast payers, slow payers, rural vs. country, first year members …]

Typically most segmentation is around the demographic areas – gender, age, geographic location, interest areas.

But with iMIS, you have so much more information available – you know what members have purchased, how often, how much, how they pay you, what activities they attend, events, training, certification, do they login to your website or not, what pages they look at on your website, are they opening your emails …

iMIS 15 gives you an easy way to manage this via the segmentation module. Why a module? Once you get into segmentation other than male/female, you need some database grunt behind you to make sure you include everyone, don’t miss members, and don’t double up on members. And also to help you assign priorities – what if a member falls into 2 segments, which one should they actually be assigned to? The Segmentation module does all this.

Let’s now revisit the renewal process – given that we can automate much of the administration of this process, it makes sense to add in segmentation. The only extra work it creates for you is copy writing the messages that go to different segments, but I think you will agree that is far better use of your time than doing manual data processing.

If you looked at previous payment behaviour, could you get slow paying members to pay you faster by sending them a different renewal invitation? Note that a member paying you faster is a financial plus for your organisation.

What about first year member renewal rates – if you sent first year members – that is new members in the past year that are getting their first renewal notices - a different renewal invitation and take them through a slightly different renewal process – could you improve that all important first year retention rate?

Finally on segmentation, I want to show you what a leading organisation is doing – AICD, an iMIS customer, have a new membership sign up form and renewal form. [Hand it out]. This is the same form for paper and for online applications and renewals. Note the 7 questions on the top right hand side – not the traditional questions on interest areas, but psych profile type questions with levels of relative importance from 1-10 – like you might see on a DISC or Myers-Briggs profile assessment. Depending on the answers to these 7 questions, each member is then allocated to one of 4 segments. Depending on which segment a member is allocated they are then aligned with AICD products and services that are also targeted specifically at one or more of those segments.

So summarising the discussion so far on process management and segmentation – it means you get more time to improve the renewal rates and less time on doing data entry.

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 next month.

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 membership 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]