Inside ASI-AP

I hosted our third boardroom lunch of the year last week - 9th July - and we had an invited audience of sales and marketing executives. We tried a new boardroom layout this month with a single long table setup in true boardroom style rather than our 3 separate lunch tables.

Last year we used the theme of "what keeps you awake at night" as a means of getting feedback and prompting discussion. This year I have adopted a new theme based on the 7 business drivers of high-performance non-profits and the iMIS Business Excellence Framework (iBEF). The 2 business drivers I used for this luncheon were "segmentation" and "automation". See more in the copy of the speech below.

Instead of asking for feedback on 3 things that "keep you awake at night" I asked for feedback on 3 things that you could "automate within your department". I have started a new wiki page to track these answers (note an ASI staff only login is required to view this page since it is confidential).

Handout: Handout for MD Boardroom lunch 09Jul08.jpg

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Luncheon speech for Sales & Marketing contacts MD Boardroom Lunch 9 July 2008

Good afternoon and welcome. It is my great pleasure to host our monthly boardroom luncheon today.

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 sales and marketing 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 talk to you about 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 you would like to automate in your job or in your department. Automation? 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 you do using iMIS that you would like to happen automatically – as part of an automated process – and this could be a task you currently do in a manual fashion or it might be something your team does. If you do not use iMIS, then consider whatever system you use to manage your membership and finance programs, and what you would like to automate with those systems. The what you would like to automate list will not be published, it is just for my reading.

Now your job over lunch 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 nominate your table introducer and introduce yourself to your table, and we will being serving main course.

[Main course served]

Welcome back. And lets hear the introductions from each table.

[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, your donors, manage your events, manage education and training, manage your marketing, manage your website and process all the commerce related to your members and donors, 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.

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.

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 has already been 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?

Great question.

[handout of iMIS Value Cycle]

First thing - is what I talk about when I come to visit your CEO or your executive management teams. I talk about the iMIS Value Cycle. And this is what I show to your management. And I talk about how ASI wants you to be a world class organisation - innovative and driving towards excellence. The iMIS Value Cycle supports that, and it is a simple way of explaining what iMIS does.

As I am sure all of you here know, iMIS does a lot more than what you are probably using of it today.

[Explain briefly and unscripted the 4 parts of the iMIS Value Cycle - how the relationship management component is like traditional CRM, how commerce is well used, but that most customers are weaker in the areas of marketing/communication and business intelligence]

The reason I show this is that much of the new functionality in iMIS 15 is around these areas - the lower 3 - because we need you as organisations to fully embrace iMIS and we need to offer features and function in these areas that you can use. iMIS 15.0 is giving you new features to fully embrace the iMIS value cycle - and we need you to!

Of particular relevance to this room is the segment of the value cycle here – on marketing and communications. And I want to focus on that today.

Firstly I want to talk about segmentation. And then briefly touch on marketing automation and sales force automation.

Segmentation – most of you would be engaging in some form of segmentation in your marketing efforts. At it’s simplest it may be segments by state or branch or other geographic region. Many of you will have queries setup to extract names in each segment, you then probably put those into spreadsheets and then do some further manipulation. The end result is probably some nice data in good segments, but the process to get there I would suggest is painful and time consuming and likely to be dependent on one person knowing how to do it all. The other problem with this approach is then knowing how to measure the response and success rates of each segment, since the segment data is now off your system into a spreadsheet and not linked to any response tracking. Bummer.

But I have some good news for you. iMIS provides a segmentation module that helps take the pain out of managing your marketing segmentation processes.

The iMIS Segmentation module does 3 things:

1 – when you create your segmentation queries, it can either keep the query so you have a dynamically generated segment; each time you run it will goto the database and pull new names based on the query you have created. Or, the segmentation query can save the actual names in the segment at the time you created the segment; this means the segment stays the same over time and you can track responses and conversions against the original segment; plus it also means you can track as people move between segments. You will need to use both types of segmentation approaches in your marketing campaigns.

2 – n-select segments; you may have heard about this as A-B testing, but the more generic name is n-select segments; A-B testing is simply a 2-select segment. You can define 2 or more segments and have iMIS automatically and randomly put names into those segments. It is used to support your market testing approaches.

3 – guaranteeing names only appear in 1 segment only for any given segmentation job, and also that no names get missed out. Part of the challenge in doing segmentation by hand using queries and spreadsheets is the high chance of an error in a name going into 2 segments by mistake, or names getting missed out entirely! The iMIS segmentation module ensures you don’t make these mistakes.

So iMIS 15 provides you with some great new features to support your segmentation efforts.

But I want to take that further again. Knowing that you have tools like iMIS segmentation to help take the pain out of your segmentation processes, I would encourage you to drive your organizations beyond simple segmentation. I am calling simple segmentation things like geographic segmentation – states/postcodes; and demographic segmentation – gender, age, join date. I am not suggesting those segments are simple or not relevant to your organization, but just that the process to create them is fairly simple.

What I want you to see is how much more data you have in iMIS about behaviour of your customers. What they purchase from you, how long does it take them to respond to an offer, do they open your emails, how do they pay you (online, credit card, cash, cheque), how often do they interact with you, do they call your office, are they on committees, do they volunteer? All of this information is in iMIS. And available to you for segmentation. Things you may not even know are in your iMIS system for you to use – “you don’t know what you don’t know” !

And beyond that you can look to psychographic segmentation. On the handout you will see a portion of the member renewal form for AICD. They use these 7 questions and how you answer them to determine which of just 4 segments you will be assigned to. All of this is tracked and maintained by iMIS. Those segments are psychographic based on the life cycle stage of their members. One of those segments is called “aspirants” – these are members who would like to be company directors but are not yet.

Which brings me to an important concept in your segmentation processes. Having customers in a segment is only half the story. You also need to design your products, services and funds to be relevant to and aligned with the needs of the individual segments. This requires organization wide thinking and buy in. It is the reason why many segmentations efforts fail.

The AICD have a set of products and services designed for their segment of “aspirants”. Those products and services are tagged with the “aspirant” segment – in iMIS. So we have both customers tagged into the “aspirant” segment and products tagged.

Now of course not every member is going to respond to these survey questions. At best maybe 70% will respond. But that is OK. Because we have the products tagged as well we can look at product usage by each customer and use that information to self-select customers into segments – because the products themselves are tagged. So an AICD member who has not completed the survey, but has attended a course on “becoming a director” and went to the “new directors luncheon” will have that information on their iMIS record and we can use that to allocate that member into the “aspirants” segment simply by looking at the product segments.

I would suggest to you that embracing product segmentation and aligning your product/services/funds to your customer segments will provide you with significantly improved marketing responses and more satisfied customers than the traditional simple segmentation. And it should be your key take away today. And of course iMIS supports both customer and product segmentation.

[pause]

The second thing I wanted to talk about today was marketing automation and sales force automation.

I am sure many of you would like to offer improved ways to communicate with your members and donors but are just brick walled by the manual effort required in doing so. And in some cases, you may not even know what is possible to do.

I just wanted to take a minute to highlight 4 of the features in iMIS 15 that can help in your sales and marketing automation.

1 – Informz triggered emails. Informz is the iMIS email marketing tool. Normally you create email campaigns and then send them as you are ready. But Informz can also do automatic triggered emails; these are emails that are triggered by some other event in iMIS – like a new customer joining, an event registration being processed, a new donation being processed. And once setup they run automatically. And then they are tracked like any other Informz email – open rates, click thru rates, conversion rates, bounces.

2 – the iMIS Task Centre. This is a new product that provides workflow automation for common tasks. One good example would be to send a new member a welcome kit – a typical process here is

3 – Campaign Management. This allows you to create your marketing campaigns in iMIS up front, and then have iMIS run the campaigns for you. For example send a first email appeal to everyone, then only send first and second reminders to people who have not yet responded – once you start the campaign, iMIS will automatically manage the work flow and run those first and second reminders for you.

4 – and finally Process Manager. This iMIS module provides you with sales force automation and helps you manage a formal sales process. This may be for acquisition of members, donors, sponsors or renewal of members and donors along with moves management.
iMIS 15 provides you with many new functions and tools to support your sales and marketing efforts.

[pause – then refer to Value Cycle handout]

So here I am back at the iMIS Value Cycle. iMIS 15 is about embracing the value cycle. From a business standpoint iMIS 15 is driving new functions to support these lower 3 areas of the value cycle. Not just a CRM. Today I talked specifically about segmentation, product segmentation and sales and marketing automation. iMIS 15 is a system to help your organisation become world class – embracing marketing, commerce and business intelligence.

We promise to keep you upgraded with technology and with current best practice - and we are doing that. 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 you need to join.

In closing, I just want to come back to the objectives for today. Firstly networking. I trust that the lunch environment, the exclusive sales and marketing executives only invitations, the table layouts, 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. And the iMIS value cycle – with a particular focus on segmentation and automation.

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.