Inside ASI-AP

We held the June boardroom luncheon in the Melbourne office today Tuesday 23 June. For the last 2 years these have been called the "Managing Director's Boardroom Luncheon Series" and they ran only in Melbourne. For 2009, we have refined the format and renamed them to the "iMIS Business Excellence Luncheon Series"; and for the format, we are introducing other speakers besides just me, and will be running them in both Melbourne and Sydney, with the first Sydney lunch coming up later this week.

For today's lunch Mick Varga was the featured speaker, and the audience was marketing and development managers / executives from both customers and prospective customers. I spoke for the first 10 minutes to provide the introduction and overview, then Mick spoke for 10 minutes between main course and dessert, and again for 10 minutes after dessert.

With the focus on iMIS Business Excellence (iBEF) for the lunch we continue to build up the iBEF social networking site over on the NiUG website (powered by GoLightly of course!). Mick has posted a number of blog entries - including the lunch speech and slides, and a number of issues faced by organisations plus solutions to those issues. Go here for the blog section of the social networking site for iBEF.

A full copy of the speech is listed out below.

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Luncheon speech for Marketing and Development executive contacts iMIS Business Excellence Lunch 23 June 2009

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, and yes I know networking is one of those lingo-bingo buzzwords, but I would like to think of today being a little different. Firstly, all of you in the room work for non-profit organizations. The other thing all of you have in common is that you are marketing or development 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. We will not be asking you to introduce yourself to the whole room, but I do ask that you make the time during lunch to introduce yourself amongst your table and get to know your peers.

The second objective is to talk to you about iMIS Business Excellence, which I am going to start with right now. After main course Mick Varga, the manager of the iMIS Business Excellence Program will be speaking, and then Mick will be back again to close off the luncheon with you after dessert. I did just want to take a moment to give you a brief overview of ASI and iMIS as some of you are new to the iMIS community.

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! 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 problem of the day.

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 business excellence.

Over the past year, we have been talking to many of you about the iMIS Value Cycle. Whether you use iMIS or not, this chart will help drive your organisation towards business excellence. It starts at the top with Relationship Management – essentially the CRM functions of your system – and then circles clockwise, to marketing and communication – getting the right message to the right person at the right time, and then getting the right result – a transaction – commerce – like a membership renewal, an event registration, a product sale. And then we use all that information to build business intelligence that allows us to refine our relationships, our marketing and our commerce to go around the cycle again. Continuous improvement, one of the key concepts of business excellence. Continuous improvement.

Unfortunately, while we talk about the iMIS value cycle extensively, the organisations we deal with still have difficulties in changing the way they work to implement these concepts. And that has got to change. With the regulatory reviews currently underway by state and federal governments and other forces already at work, the non-profit sector needs to embrace business excellence programs and best-practice concepts sooner rather than later. And if you are an iMIS customer we are going to be driving you this way harder than ever before. While at the same time ensuring each version of iMIS, including the latest version iMIS 15.1, allows you to implement and build on business excellence.

So for the Boardroom luncheons this year, we are going to spend more time on giving you practical solutions that you can implement today. To drive your organisation towards business excellence with iMIS. We are going to tell you things you may not want to hear and ask you to face up to problems that you may actually be a big part of. And we also acknowledge that as the marketing and development leaders in your organisation you can play a significant part in driving forward the concepts we are talking to you about, more than ever before. And we need you to do so.

If you have been to one of my luncheons here before, you will recall that we asked you to write down and share with us "things that keep you awake at night". You have already told us the things on your mind. Let me read you some of those back:

- Lifetime value analysis of customers
- Donor behaviour analysis
- Attrition of donors by donor segment
- Automatic unsubscribe and opt-out handling

We agree with you. We want you to sleep at night, peacefully! So let's agree to get started today.

If you think about the value cycle, you will see that all the challenges I just read back are related to one or more items on the Value Cycle. In fact to those of your formally trained in marketing you will recognise the Value Cycle as a closed loop marketing system. Which it is, but try and explain some of that to the other departments you work with ...

Which brings us to the topic of today's presentation on iMIS Business Excellence which is on segmentation and targeted customer offerings. Our business excellence message is that segmentation and targeted customer offerings is a whole of business strategy, not just the marketing or development department.

I want to summarise the challenges you may be facing into a few broad areas that I am going to outline now by giving you examples. After main course, I am then going to ask Mick to lead the remainder of the presentation which will provide you with tactics and solutions to solve these challenges using iMIS 15.

The first example is poor execution of segmentation. Many organisations execute segmentation by exporting their database into Excel and then they create the segments by hand. And this is of course very prone to error. Last week a national charity sent out a number of duplicate mailings – one for donors, and one for their members. If you were a member and a donor, you may have got the same mailing twice. Apart from being expensive and wasteful, it was poor donor care as the organisation was unable to explain to the customer when they called in to check why they got two magazines. The culprit – the segments were created by hand in Excel.

The next example is not linking your customer segments to your product or service offering segments. A large national charity messed up a major sponsorship deal – worth over a $100,000 – because even though it was agreed they were in the large sponsor segment, they were offered a number of service products targeted at small sponsor prospects by a junior staffer in a different state office.

The final example is the segmentation model being well known in the marketing department, but not known to other departments – in this case, the call centre. The marketing department of this membership organisation did some nice work in tailoring some campaigns to sell some training courses, including a couple of special offers for members in a couple of selected segments. However the member call centre was not able to tell from the system those members in those special segments, and were thus not able to properly take the calls. The result – a lower conversion rate. Which was unfortunate because the marketing campaign was actually spot on.

While you are having your lunch, I would like you to spend just 2 minutes completing a very quick survey on your organisation that will make you think about these examples and whether they may have happened, or could happen, in your organisation.

Mick is going to be talking about these topics after main course, but we would like to get you thinking now and making a quick assessment of your organisation's current status in these areas. On the left hand side you will see a list of issues and challenges. Against each one, you just need to tick the column for "yes" – that is, yes we have this issue at our organisation; or "no" for no we don't have this issue at our organisation; or if you don't know if you do or don’t, then just tick the "don't know" column. We will be collecting these up towards the end of the luncheon and will use them to have a follow up discussion with you on your next steps towards business excellence with iMIS 15. One last task before we eat - 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.

[main course served]

For those of you who I haven't met, I'm Mick Varga. I run the iMIS Business Excellence Program, which is a program targeted at helping our customers achieve excellence through the use of iMIS.

It might be something as simple as streamlining how you classify your constituents through the improved use of standard iMIS functionality. It might be the use of automation tools to remove the mundane, repetitive work from your team so that they can provide real value to your organisation instead of simply pushing keys. Or it might be as wide ranging as reviewing a complete end-to-end process, like customer acquisition, in order to get the best out of what is available in iMIS. Whatever it is, the key is to make sure that it is tied to achieving a strategic initiative or goal.
 
Today, I want to talk to you about one of the areas that I have been spending a lot of time working on with our customers – driving a business improvement by doing more intelligent, refined segmentation.

The reasons why your organisations want to improve are not new – they are driving donor acquisition and retention, event attendance, product sales, better relationships. There is always a push to improve the return on the marketing investment. A lot of this revolves around the ability to effectively segment the database. Yet, given how fundamental this is to every organisation that we work with, it is surprising to see how difficult - if not impossible - it is for you to do.

Firstly, to do any kind of analysis and breakdown of the target lists, data is being extracted out to 3rd party tools, like Excel or Access, or shipped off to a third party organisation completely. There is then a huge amount of manipulation occurring just to apply the criteria needed for the different segments. But that is only the start of it.

To then make sure that each final list is unique, so that we are not sending a mail out to the same person multiple times, there is a huge amount of additional effort, most of which seems to be done manually because the cascading effect of the various exclusion criteria between lists becomes impossible to manage in a tool like Excel.

And that's just to get us to the point where we can send out our message. But to then analyse what happens as a result of our efforts adds a whole other level of complexity. Comparing incoming transactions or responses and assigning them back to the segment that generated them is the most important part of this whole process. But most of you just don’t bother doing it properly because it is so hard.

Using iMIS can address these issues. There are a number of tools within iMIS that provide the ability to either simplify these tasks, or in some cases remove them altogether.

Firstly, there is the ability to use IQA to create a set of core queries that define the different target groups in the database. These can be based on any information in the system – any combination of slow moving and transactional data

The Segmentation module then provides for the creation of a distinct and prioritised set of segments based on these target groups. Standard functionality will enable segments to be created that ensure each target exists in only one segment without you needing to specify any kind of exclusion criteria. As well as this, it also adds the ability to use n-select functionality to support A-B testing

Another module, RFM analytics, uses the industry standard RFM model to automatically generate segments without needing to even create queries to define selection criteria at all.

And this can all be done on both existing contacts and new prospects in the same campaign while still keeping these lists separate in the database.

Once you have built your segments, to then configure a campaign that targets different messages at these groups, asks for donations to different funds, or offers different streams of a conference is easy and is supported through the campaign management module. Campaign Management will also then assemble the response data to give you an up to date indication of the performance of each element of your campaign.

To illustrate how some of the segmentation challenges are addressed through iMIS segmentation, I have the an example. Imagine we are running an Alumni. We simply want to create different segments where there are target groups based on the degree that someone achieved. So we want to create lists of people with degrees in Law, Arts, Economics, Science, Medicine and so on. Now, to do this, it seems quite simple – we build a query where the degree code on their record equals Medicine, or the degree code equals Science. If there are 50 degrees offered we need to create 50 copies of the query, where each is targeted at a specific degree. A little laborious, for sure.

But immediately, we realise that people have multiple degrees –someone may have in both Medicine and Science as a degree. In fact, we can be sure that there will be people who have 4 or 5 or 6 degrees. So now, this person is going to appear in multiple lists and deduping these lists is a problem.

iMIS Segmentation overcomes this. By simply placing your queries in a segmentation job in the order that you rate their importance, Segmentation will manage all the exclusions to ensure that no target falls in more than one list. All you have to decide is the best order for your targets – that it is more important to target someone as a Medicine degree than a Law Degree, say – assign that priority order to the queries and segmentation will handle the rest.

Once you have the segments defined, it is very quick and simple to build a campaign structure that generates the final target lists, tells you the cost of running the campaign and, most importantly, uses the source coded transactions that come back as responses to track campaign performance, from overall campaign performance right down to the performance of a specific target group.

And lastly, because all of this has been stored away in the database, the ability to return to previously used target lists for comparison purposes or as part of future campaigns is also possible with no further effort.

With that, please return to your lunch. We'd love to hear whether what I've talked about are issues you face, or maybe problems you've solved and how you've solved them.

Thanks for your time. I'll be back after desert for a few more thoughts.

[desert served]

I'm sure that everything I've talked about so far is, at least, familiar to you. Even if it is difficult to do, you think about the best ways to slice up your database to create the optimal definitions of who to target, how to target them and what to target them with. And I hope at least some of you are comparing response rates to this somehow to measure what works and what doesn't.

What I'd like you to think about now, is why this thinking needs to extend throughout your organisation. The Marketing function needs to lead the organisation in the understanding of this thinking

I have a handout that I want you to take a quick look at. It is a very simple process related to our Alumni example. As a follow on from the previous example, all the work we've done in preparing for our campaign is in the first box – Run Marketing Campaign. We created our unique target lists, and we sent each group a specialised message that reflected somewhere the degree they had taken.

The campaign has now been run and has flowed on to the other areas of our organisation.

The Events team follows up responses and manages these to ensure that the event is well attended:

- The event is then run;
- The Event team follows up with attendees to ensure their needs were met;
- Then the membership department steps in and pursues membership opportunities with attendees who are not Alumni members.

Even though it's pretty basic, this process seems sensible.

We know that our campaign has been a success because as registrations are entered, our campaign analysis tools have kept us up to date on response rates for each of our target groups.

There is, though, more that we can do as a Marketing group to assist these other areas of our organisation.

a. We need to champion the importance of getting an organisation wide understanding of the different segments in place, including both constituent and product segmentation.

b. We need to make sure that our Events and Membership teams understand how we have segmented our database and communicated different messages to different target groups. They need to communicate with the same set of groups in distinct ways as well.

c. We need to publicise the queries that have been created to build segments. These will be great tools throughout the business to understand how we want to categorise our database. They might be used to build reports, generate lists for call centre activity or follow up on a specific initiative.

d. The stored outputs from segments can be used to understand how our constituency is changing over time, by being able to see, for example, that a segment with the same base rules has grown or shrunk significantly and to then be able to drill down into this change.

Think about how this might affect what we do in the future. If we have decided that it is most important to talk to potential Alumni members in relation to their attainment of, say, Medicine degree, then when they call the call centre, they should be identified that way to the call centre operator. An alert can be provided to a customer service rep when each person calls based on the original segments that we created.

Based on response levels of different target groups, we might work with our membership team to create a specialised class of membership for that target group. Or even to ensure that the basic definitions that we create to market on are the same definitions that are being used throughout the organisation.
 
To close, I'd like to suggest a few easy opportunities to begin facing these challenges.

If you are not doing any kind of segmented messaging at all, don't feel you have to start big. Begin by just enabling measurement of a variety of target groups. Create your segments and build a campaign around them, but simply continue to send them all the same message. You can at least begin to measure how different elements of your constituency respond. This will still be of clear value.

And when you have a set of core segments defined, investigate how these apply to all areas of the organisation. If it is important for the marketing team to address the database in a certain way, it will definitely apply across the board.

Thank you.

[Closing remarks - by Paul]

That brings us to the end of the presentation.

In closing, I just want to come back to the objectives for today. Firstly networking. I trust that the lunch environment, the exclusive marketing and development executives only invitations, the table layouts, helped you meet your peers today. I welcome your feedback.

Secondly, achieving business excellence with iMIS 15, and giving you practical solutions to start your organisation on the journey towards business excellence, and in particular adopting segmentation strategies across your organisation. Myself, Mick 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]