Inside ASI-AP

The formal dinner was held on the Thursday evening with special entertainment provided by Basil, Sybil and Manuel from The Fawlty Towers Dining Experience (performed by Interactive Theatre). Over dinner each of the conference sponsors briefly addressed the audience, and we also presented the Great Things Award.

After dinner, about 30 of us headed into Surfers Paradise for some relaxation and dancing at Melbas.

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Opening Presentation to NiUG Discovery Conference 2007, Thursday 11th October

(Powerpoint attached below)

Wow what a turn out! It is truly amazing to see what NiUG has achieved here in Asia-Pacific in less than 1 year!

The main purpose of NiUG is to share, compare and become more aware! I want to remind all of you of that inspiring purpose statement especially the newcomers. Yesterday during the sessions, during the breaks, and during drinks last night I listened in on many conversations where sharing and comparing was going on, so I know already this conference is fulfilling a good many of your expectations.

If any of you are wondering if ASI has any influence on the NiUG leadership or policy. The answer is no. NiUG was and has been built by volunteers and is all the better because of that.

We are here to support you and we are delighted to do so because our company purpose is "to help people achieve great things through innovative solutions" and NiUG is truly one of the great things that has come from you! You have our full support.

We really like the PAC! This is a great feedback mechanism for our product planners direct from you. If you don’t know about that and you are interested in ASI's product direction you might want to find out more from your NiUG Leadership.

One of the great aspects of NiUG is that it is obvious that everyone involved is concerned about the needs of the many. NiUG is truly delivering benefits to all iMIS users.

ASI globally have helped NiUG become more International with chapters holding conferences and recruiting members in US, Canada, England and of course here over the past year. We will continue to help where we can.

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But in particular I would like to welcome our international guests – Doug Morris, Jake Bound and Peter Foley. Volunteers, flown here at their own expense. Doug is the original iMIS guru [expand]. Jake a Cold Fusion web guru [expand]. Peter a web fundraising guru [expand].

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As some of you know ASI has changed the user licensing model with the introduction of iMIS 15.0. One of the big reasons for the change is because iMIS is moving towards a full web based product and there is no way to control web usage with a concurrent model nor is their a way to do concurrency checking with a named user model.

And frankly concurrent user models are 20 year old and were devised before the Internet existed in the commercial arena.

So far, we have only released our pricing and policies in the US. There have been discussions on NiUG about the licensing model not fitting customers. The exceptions aside, in the US we are finding that about 70% of our customers fit into the conversion model with little or no cost. The other 30% are looking at extra cost to give access to the same number of people they had on concurrent user licenses. But there are specific and valid reasons for this in most cases. But there are also some unique scenarios that we are trying to understand so we can address them and we are still doing that.

We are not in any urgent hurry to release local pricing or policies here because for at least 70% of you there will be no cost. So we are happy for the US team to take the time they need to get it right first.

In the meantime, if you want to install iMIS 15, go for it. You can download it from the wwww.imis.com website; we also have a supply of CD's in our Melbourne office. But you WILL need to get a new license key, and we will give you a time limited license key based on our best guess of what "named" users you need – you just need to get an approval from Colin Bryant or myself.

We have at least 3 new customers in the room that are installing iMIS 15 from the get go, and at least one of those will be live in the next month. Over the next year, we expect about 70 of your organisations to upgrade to iMIS 15. I will post updates on my blog as I hear about customers upgrading so you can track things there as well.

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When we started the company we pushed these five commitments as a guide for us all to use to drive progress. They are as important today as ever, and I just wanted to take a minute to remind everyone of what they are:

And I know if we are successful delivering all of this to you we will keep you as a customer for life which is our company mission!

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Before I finish, I would like to take a few minutes to remind you what iMIS can really do for you. I know a lot of you only use a small part of iMIS, and in many cases you don't know all the things iMIS can do. It really is about education. We are working internally on a program called the "SMART Customer" program that will help you understand more about iMIS. But since I have your attention now let me start with the iMIS overview that I give to your CEOs. It's called the iMIS Value Cycle.

If any of you are from a marketing background, you may be familiar with the term closed loop marketing. Well this is similar. The iMIS Value Cycle is a closed cycle that continues to go around.

It starts at the top – with a good customer database. 1 name, 1 record in 1 iMIS system. Once we have that, we can use that to communicate effectively – right message, right person, right time. Simple tools like mail merge, to Informz email, SMS texting. The point of any good communication – the right message, right person, right time – is the right result. Sooner or later, it will be a commercial transaction – either immediately like an event registration or donation. Or maybe later in the year when they renew membership. To track that we you need to use the commerce parts of iMIS – of course things like AR/Cash, but all the other areas as well – online web transactions, EFT, Bpay, credit card authorization, deferred income, general ledger interface.

[Side point - Eliminate data entry – if time] Too many of you are still doing extensive data entry. It is not smart to do that any more. So many electronic tools. And if you can't, then outsouce to a bureau that does it specially and they give you a file that you then import into iMIS.

Once we have all these 3 things in the system – customer relationship info, communication info, commerce transactions – we can put that all into a data warehouse and analyse it to enable use to make better informed decisions on who, how, when and why. And then we start the cycle again.

Unfortunately, very few of you have gone one full cycle yet. Some of you are up here in the first segment, and probably about half of you have got down the bottom here.

We want to help you go the full cycle, and then do it again, and again. Guaranteed to help improve your business, to help you service your members and donors better, and to get more done with less. And if your organisation needs some more convincing, I am happy to come visit you and present this to your executive team and Board.

It is important to me that you use iMIS well.

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"Customer for life". If any time we do something that is not in keeping with our goal of keeping you as a customer for life, I need you to tell me. Here are my contact details – email and phone. You will also see my blog address there where I post weekly updates on things that I do and things going on inside of ASI – hence the title, "inside ASI AP".

I hope you have a great conference, remember to share, compare and become aware!

Thank you !

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