Inside ASI-AP

We held our very first boardroom luncheon in Sydney yesterday. We have run these in our Melbourne boardroom for over a year now and they have been well regarded, and with the growth of our Sydney business it was time to run them in Sydney as well. Of course we don't have the same boardroom in Sydney as we do Melbourne, so we booked into Prime restaurant in the basement of the GPO building in Martin Place and enjoyed a nice 2 course lunch.

We had a combination of existing iMIS customers and prospective iMIS customers attend, including a few of our 10+ year customers from the earliest days we were in Sydney. The invited group were membership managers and executives and there was plenty of discussion around membership performance in the GFC.

The focus of my presentation was on business excellence and I talked about the concepts of process focus and continuous improvement. I used my regular example of "join now" to explain the differences between functional steps and a true focus on the process of membership acquisition. Read the speech below - from the part after desert being served - to see my main message.

A copy of the speech is below, also a copy is on the iBEF social networking site over at http://members.niug.org.

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Luncheon speech for Membership executive contacts iMIS Business Excellence Lunch 25 June 2009 - Sydney

Good afternoon and welcome. It is my great pleasure to host our monthly iMIS Business Excellence 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 business excellence. 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 you 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.

--- Main course served ---

Welcome back. Before we serve desert I just wanted to give a brief overview of ASI and iMIS.

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.

Another way to explain what iMIS does is to look at what iMIS can do for your organisation which we call the iMIS Value Cycle.

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 business excellence.

[Explain briefly and unscripted the 4 parts of the iMIS Value Cycle - how the relationship management component is like traditional CRM, etc]

As you can see the value cycle is about continuous improvement, which is one of the fundamental concepts of business excellence frameworks.

Just after you sat down I asked you to write down 3 processes you or your department are responsible for managing. I'd like to hear a few of those from you now.

[Ask for a couple of volunteers. Examples of process should include: member renewal process, new member process, member strike-off process, etc]

The reason I am asking you about processes is that I want to challenge you to think about processes a little differently by the time we finish lunch today. Getting a process focus is a foundation of business excellence. After desert I am going to talk specifically about the "join now" process and introduce to you a new way of thinking.

--- Desert served ---

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 – on iMIS Business Excellence.

I thought the best way to get my point across today is to take an example to demonstrate the principles of business excellence. 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.

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.

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 do that.

Let me come back to the member join process. Take 2! Once we widen out the thinking we see there are other business problems. For example, in this organisation, they have a large number of non-members attend events but few of them sign up as members, and then also they have a very low retention rate for 1st year members (in fact down to around 60%).

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.

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.

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.

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. These are the blue shaded boxes on the flowchart handout.

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. These are the purple shaded boxes on the flowchart handout.

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. These are the green shaded boxes on the flowchart handout.

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.

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. For example, why don't you just consider what steps you should undertake to ensure you have a strong and well executed "First Year Member Retention Process". But the key is to get your processes documented, communicated and to be using iMIS as your central system.

We at ASI believe it is vital that your organisation become process focused and drives towards business excellence. And there has never been a better time than now.

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.

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.

So let me try and wrap it up. The iMIS Value Cycle and iMIS business excellence. 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.

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 live or on-demand 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. And look out for the NiUG Discovery conference being held on the Gold Coast in late October.

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 introduction to business excellence and business excellence principles with iMIS. 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.

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