Inside ASI-AP

I hosted our final boardroom lunch of the year this week - 29th October - and we had an invited audience of membership department executives.

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 business drivers of high-performance non-profits and the iMIS Business Excellence Framework (iBEF). The focus for this presentation was on process management rather than functional management using the "join now" process as the example. 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 processes that you manage in your department (to get everyone starting to think about processes). 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).

Presentation: Slides for MEM contacts MD Boardroom lunch 29Oct08.ppt

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Luncheon speech for Membership executive contacts MD Boardroom Lunch 29 October 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 most of you are the leaders of the membership department. 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 processes that your department currently manages. Processes? Huh? Why would you want to tell me that? Well, let me be a little more specific. I am going to talk after lunch about process management and iMIS, and about business excellence. So I want to get your thinking about process and managing processes – even talking about them over lunch. The list of processes you write down 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 and that you explored the steps around your new member join process.

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.

[slide]

The iMIS Value Cycle is a great way for me to show you what iMIS does for your organisation. And the Value Cycle also reflects our goals to help you become a world class organisation - embracing concepts like continuous improvement and excellence.

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, etc]

If we take a typical iMIS customer today, and if I was asked to rate them on how well they use iMIS, this is what I would produce - as a typical customer.

[slide] and [pause]

Of course we would like to see a typical customer using these lower parts of the value cycle far more extensively. This is how I would like the report card to look!

[slide]

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!

[pause]

I thought the best way to get my point across today is to take an example. The example is one that I hope you talked about over lunch - and that is the "member join" process. This is a process that is fairly common and I would think most of you here have some form of new member or customer join process. So I hope the example is of relevance to you.

If I was to ask you to write down the steps of your member join process, or to draw a flowchart of the process, typically this is what I get back.

[slide] and [pause]

Some of you may have some extra steps in there for Board approvals or checking pre-requisites, but at a very high level I would think this is pretty close. OK?

The challenge we have here however is that what we are looking at here are very functional steps. This is really a list of functions that your own membership department performs. I would argue that this is not really a true picture of the overall process.

[slide]

What we need to do is take it up a level. And this really gets to the heart of the differences between functional steps and process. And that needs to happen at your level. We have to move away from the departmental silos, take the member's view on how they interact with your organisation, and really look at the end-to-end delivery of the process. This will of course impact on other processes as well once you widen your view.

We need you to help drive this process thinking into your organisation. iMIS 15 can help you.

[slide]

Let me come back to the member join process. Take 2! Once we widen out the thinking we see there are other business problems. [read the 2 problems out].

How does this impact our member join process? Are they related? Absolutely. Let's look at the end to end process - which starts by attending an event, or purchasing a product, and does not end until they complete their renewal at the end of the first year.

[pause] then [slide]

Again, taking a typical customer, here is a process, end-to-end, that would more accurately reflect the member join. [go through each box in turn]

You should see that this is a true process, a broader view than the functional steps I had in the first take. This is about business excellence. Continuous improvement. And understanding variation – that is, where the "broken bits" are.

If you think back to the iMIS Value Cycle, you will see in this process we are fully embracing the value cycle. If we implement a process like this, we are using a lot more of the iMIS functionality - and iMIS is helping us run the process and improve the process, not just recording names, addresses and transactions.

[pause] then [slide]

So process management is critical and iMIS 15 supports these principles. The principles of business excellence - integrated departments, standards, consistency, efficiency and quality.

In case you are wondering how iMIS actually supports these principles, let me briefly explain some of the modules in iMIS.

[slide]

The key functions here are controlling the process, automating the process, and measuring the process. Just for the member join example I gave you, these are the modules of iMIS you will be using.

Firstly we have iMIS TaskCentre. iMIS TaskCentre automates regular tasks for you so that you don't have to do them manually. Like sending confirmations. Or automatically identifying non-members that attend multiple events.

[slide]

Next we have iMIS Campaign Management, part of the marketing suite of iMIS modules. Campaign Management controls campaigns – like acquisition campaigns and renewal campaigns. It figures out who needs to get which message and when, and then provides you with response rates and other measurements that let you determine the success of the campaign so that you can refine it for the next iteration.

[slide]

The iMIS Process Manager runs overall processes for you – like the actual acquisition process that you follow once someone responds to your acquisition campaign. Or the process that you will use to take care of a member in the first year to ensure they renew at their first renewal.

Process Manager keeps track of dates and tasks and who’s doing what, who's overdue and what comes next.

[pause]

[slide]

So to summarise, here are some of the iMIS modules that will help you adopt a process focus.

TaskCentre for automating parts of processes, Process Manager and Campaign Manager for controlling the processes, and Analytics / iDashboards and Campaign Manager for measuring the processes.

[pause]

So I have talked now about processes and managing processes and how some of the new modules in iMIS 15 can help you do that.

I did just want to remind you that you don't need to buy all these modules to become process focused. You can take it one step at a time – start with baby steps and automating just a few simple tasks with iMIS TaskCentre; or jump into marketing automation with Campaign Management. But the key is to get your processes documented, communicated and to be using iMIS as your central system.

[slide]

We at ASI believe it is vital that your organisation become process focused and drives towards business excellence. But that's us. I am actually interested to see why you think process management – and a focus on process – might be important to your department and to your organisation?

[Ask for a couple of volunteers to give reasons as to why process management would be important. Below are some of my reasons:

Integrate departments
Establish standards – easier to train staff
Promote consistency – every member gets the same quality of service
Increase efficiency
Increase quality
Identify variation – find the "broken bits"
Forecast business performance
]

Thank you for your feedback.

[pause]

I do not want you to leave here today thinking this is just a business theory. Firstly, ASI believes in practicing what it preaches. We use iMIS to run our business, and as an example we use all of these tools to manage our sales process - our new customer acquisition process. Our data is in iMIS and the process is managed by iMIS Process Manager. What changes when you take this approach is the way you manage the business. Sure I have the standard reports - customer counts, rentention rates, revenue numbers - that all come from iMIS. But let me show what I get when l look at process management.

[slide]

I manage the overall process by looking at different buffers along the steps of the sales process and ensuring the buffers are in range. Out of range measures - like a couple on here - need attention now. I don't have to wait until the end of the quarter to get my new member/customer join numbers. I manage the process. All this data comes directly from iMIS and iMIS Process Manager and feeds the Excel charts live.

[pause]

Finally, I mentioned earlier that ASI wants to help you be a world class organisation. To embrace the full parts of the iMIS value cycle, continuous improvement and the drive towards excellence. The Australian government also wants to help you – and if you are interested more I suggest you look up the Australian Business Excellence Framework program.

[pause]

There is a lot of information presented here and I realise we do need to try and keep things simple. You can get started fairly easily on the road to process management with iMIS by jumping into some process mapping and drawing up a flow chart like the one I showed earlier. One flow chart for each of the processes you wrote down for me before lunch.

ASI can help you with this.

[slide]

So let me try and wrap it up. The iMIS Value Cycle and whats new with iMIS 15. Strong use of iMIS here for most customers (relationship management), OK use here for commerce, but lacking in the marketing and intelligence areas. iMIS 15 will help you implement the full iMIS Value cycle. And I showed you today, using the member join process, how you could do so.

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 membership 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 process management to fully embrace iMIS in your organisation.

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.

[close]