Inside ASI-AP

From Saturday through to Tuesday ASI had a booth at the Perth FIA conference, and Marla, Colin and myself were there to attend to the booth and learn a few things.

Internet Marketing Session

I attended the "Internet Marketing" session being presented by John O'Donnell from Blackbaud, however he arrived about 25 minutes late for a 60 minute presentation so unfortunately we didn't get to see the whole presentation or get to hear much from the audience.  Maurice (representing the FIA) did get up while we were waiting and started a discussion around Internet success.  There were two things that came out of this: people are still measuring success through page impressions and some charities have intentionally not gone to live transactions on the web citing that there donor base is 'too old' to use the technology.  It also appears that there are many people using 2 party models for web based donations (using a bank's payment processing page as an example) and are ok with this.  This means that they are probably double entering this information into their systems rather than doing things in real-time.

There are a couple of things I thought interesting about John's presentation that he bought up. In general he was fairly agnostic:

• He identified that the Internet spans geography (which we all know) and that this means that social tools can be used to reach from AU to the rest of the world, however charities have a new competition because that also means that every other country is reaching to AU.
• I like a phrase he used... "stretch your point of influence".  Primarily talking about the widget concept and things like Facebook or myspace.
• Blackbaud have a product that does something like iMIS Friendraising too, and he spoke briefly about tools like EveryDayHero, saying that his biggest issue with them is that donors may get ambushed given that there are other charities on these sites also.

Although I don't think it was intentional he made reference to Australia's Biggest Morning Tea, an event run by the Cancer Council (our customer in Vic, their's in NSW) however they are using Artez for this.  He also showed an Amnesty International youtube reference, another customer of ours.

Social Fundraising

One of the things that was most apparent to me this year is that just about everyone has a Friendraising equivalent offer of some sort.  RE has something, ThankQ has something and EveryDayHero.com.au is a dedicated site for this purpose, all represented at the conference.  ThankQ were in fact right opposite us, everyone is pretty friendly even though we are all competing.  It made us really think about what differentiates us from the other offerings:

• We are already integrated, no work to be done
• Complete control over look and feel of the event site
• Integrated to a tried, tested and trusted partner rather than building our own
• Users will not get ambushed as they might with something like EveryDayHero.com.au

I think fundamentally though Friendraising is simply another module, an extension to an already comprehensive product. 

Layout

Not sure how many of you saw our booth at the last conference, but the layout of the exhibitors was a bit lousy.  This year the conference was a convention centre rather than a hotel and the difference was amazing.  The high ceilings and the natural light was great, it felt very open and not crowded at all.  The booth looks great too, we were the only ones who had flooring of any sort, everyone else had carpet and we had while vinyl flooring.  It really is impressive.

Commonwealth Bank

Many of our customer use the ComBank tools for direct debt processing and I had a change to catch up with one of the product managers.  The have a new branded product called BPoint (I think) that does some nice things:

• There is a full webservice based API to integrate to
• They have implemented a nice solution to credit card security called tokens.  These are place holders for the real credit card numbers so that in iMIS you can store what "looks" like a credit card number but is actually not a credit card number, then store the 'real' card number in the banks secure online application instead.

Demonstrations

What I also noticed this year was that it really only DonMan that appeared to be ready and willing to do a demonstration of their product.  We made a decision a while ago to not do demonstrations, just flag waving and promotions at conference.  ThankQ and RE appeared to have systems setup just in case, but DonMan were the only ones with a projector in their booth.

iMIS Live Connection

One thing that I thought was cool was that the FIA had a connection live to their database onsite. This was easy for them as they are hosted anyway (i think) so it was natural for them to do this.  However what was even better was that I asked them to update my title in the database and they did it there and then.  If only all customers would do this!

Our Promotion

I must admit that I have a new appreciation for face-to-face fundraisers.  Until you asked someone for money you really don't know how hard it is, and weren't even really asking people for money!

I think our promotion was great, it showed people how easy it was to use the Friendraising product.  And although it took us a few attempts to explain what we were doing smoothly we all got the hang of it very quickly.  Here are the results:

1. Marla, 14 sponsors for a total of $70
2. Colin, 14 sponsors for a total of $70
3. Jay, 10 sponsors for a total of $50

The dollars might not sound like much, but if imagine that the average gift is easy 4 or 5 times that then you quickly move into the thousands of dollars.  Also, this means we had the opportunity to show almost 40 different organisations our new product, an excellent result I think.  In retrospect we should probably have dropped our goals and increased the donation amount, but to be honest most people were so concerned with the dollars as mush as they were with the fact that the thermometer changes in real time.

At one point I even had someone check their mobile phone immediately after doing the donation and the email was ALREADY IN THEIR INBOX!  How Cool is That!

The other comment I would make is that just about everyone new of this sort of functionality, so we didn't really have to explain the concept very much only how iMIS made is happen.  So in general there is a broad understanding of the benefits of something like Friendraising.