Inside ASI-AP

We hear these things and it is simply not a good enough excuse anymore.

So let me start by giving you the CEO view of iMIS. And to do so, I would like to draw your attention to this handout you have called the iMIS Value Cycle.

The first thing you will notice is that the cycle is a continuous cycle – which means it embraces one of the core fundamentals of business excellence – which is continuous improvement.

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 donation, 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 things to note here is that iMIS is an enterprise system. It is not just a system to track your members and donors – that's just the top part. It is not just a system to track payments from members or donors – that's just the bottom part. It is an enterprise system that will work right across your organisation.

Let me illustrate that point by giving you an example of what happened after a customer started using iMIS across their organisation. This was a real estate organisation and before iMIS they had separate systems in each of their departments. If their merchandising department sold an "auction" sign, no-one else in the organisation knew or cared. But when they started using iMIS the training and events team all of sudden were able to see what customers were buying. And guess what – they were able to check to see if that member who bought an "auction" sign had actually been to an auctioneering training course, and if not, they signed them up. While this may seem elementary, for this organisation it was almost earth shattering in the way it opened up the business. Now you may laugh, but before you do I suggest that you take a hard look at your own organisation and I am sure you have examples like this going on regularly, today.

So while we can talk about the iMIS Value Cycle and agree with concepts, the execution is lacking in most organisations, and this has got to change. If anything, the global financial crisis is a good wake up call for many of you here today that organisations in the non-profit sector need 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.

Each month we hold these Boardorom luncheons, we invite various department heads from your organisations, and we continue to spread the message of business excellence. But we can really only be successful if you here today, the CEO's and GM's, understand our message and can help drive your organisations towards business excellence – a focus on process, measurement and continuous improvement. To implement the iMIS value cycle right across your enterprise.

We will now be serving main course. I would invite you to discuss over lunch, with your peers at your table, your member acquisition processes. That is how do members join your organisation, and how do you ensure that they rejoin for their second year? What are the processes you have in place, how do you measure them, and what role does continuous improvement play in your acquisition processes. Mick will be continuing that theme right after main course is served.

--- Main course served ---

Paul kicked off today talking about Business Excellence and the iMIS Value Cycle. I am going to continue that theme. Firstly, I want to talk about process and the opportunities that adopting a true process focus can bring.

I want to walk through a simple example that should be relevant to most of you – the process for acquiring a new member.

When I work with your teams and I ask about the member acquisition process, I tend to get a very departmental view. Your management teams and their staff will talk in a lot of detail about the functional steps in processing a membership application and payment. Give or take some detail, they will create a list of steps that looks something like the steps mapped out on the handout you have entitled New Member Joins.

NewMemberJoinsProcessJul09.JPG

Now, it certainly helps to have this level of detail documented about the rules and instructions for processing a new member's application and payment. If the proverbial bus comes along, someone will be able to pick up these instructions and keep the organisation ticking over.

But this is not a process focus. This is merely a set of processing instructions

It tells us nothing about where these new members came from. Did they attend an event or training class with us? Did we target them from an acquired list? Did they register their interest with us on our web site? How did we campaign to them? How many times did we have to ask before they responded?

And once they have joined, what do we then expect to do with them. Will they simply just get our newsletter? Will we sit back and hope that they find the things they expected to get from us when they decided to join?

I'm sure it won't be quite as unstructured as that, but I am also sure that for a lot of you, your members are not being engaged in a way that is measured and repeatable. Do you know how many non-member event attendees are being converted to members? Do you know the rate of first year members that fail to renew? Can you cross reference this against the activity those new members undertook? Are new members who attend the annual conference more or less likely to renew? If they are more likely to renew, are you targeting them in structured and repeatable ways to drive their conference attendance and, as a consequence, an improvement in first year renewals? Do you then go back and confirm that the assumptions you made about this correlation are true?

Being truly process focussed is about driving these things. If you look at the other side of your handout, there is an expanded view of the New Member Join process.

AcquireNewMemberProcessJul09.JPG

This time it is called Acquiring a New Member. When we look at the process at this level we see a number of things that were hidden from us in the New Member Join process.

We can now start getting an organisational picture of how a new member is engaged. This will be a series of steps that are inherently inter-departmental. It is a customer-centric view. And implicit within the process is the fact that we can measure what happens at each step to confirm or refute the assumptions we've made about the process and make refinements

To create a picture of how this manifests itself at customers that I've worked with, I thought I'd highlight a few examples of inadequate or siloed processes

A national membership organisation we work with has coined the phrase mail-out fatigue. More and more they are being contacted by members complaining about the number of mailings they are receiving. The reason it is happening – nowhere in the organisation is there a defined process for how, what and how often each contact should be contacted. So each department and each region is sending out many single message emails a month and no one is recording the communications being made. It is not uncommon for a member to receive upwards of 20 emails in a month. Imagine how this would impact on someone who has just joined as a member. And with all this unmanaged communication, how can they know what is being effective?

The next example is poor execution of segmentation. Many organisations execute segmentation by exporting their database into Excel and then they create the segments by hand. This is, of course, very prone to error. Recently, a national charity sent out a number of duplicate mailings – one for donors, and one for their members. If you were both 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 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 some selected segments. However the member call centre was not able to identify the members in those special segments and was not able to properly manage the calls. The result – a lower conversion rate. Which was unfortunate because the marketing campaign was actually spot on.

How does iMIS help? The answer is found in the iMIS Value Cycle and that's what I'm going to touch on briefly after dessert. While you're enjoying your dessert, we would like to know where you see your organisation in line with this. Do you have a defined, customer focussed acquisition process? Or is your organisation still a loose collaboration of departmental silos that treat the member independently?

--- Desert served ---

For this section, I want to go back to the iMIS Value Cycle diagram that has been given to each of you today.

The iMIS Value Cycle is a simple yet powerful explanation of how iMIS can help you consistently improve the way your organization is run.

There are 3 key messages within it.

The first message is that you are a single enterprise and you need an enterprise system. To be excellent, your organisation needs a system that is seamlessly integrated.

You need to know that a group of prospective members was influenced more powerfully by message A than message B.

You need to be able to get a single view of all the interactions that took place to get to the point of a member joining.

And then after they have joined, you need to know that new members are retained at a higher rate when, for example, they attend a particular event or purchase a particular product

And you need to know these things with concrete certainty. Only a fully integrated system can relate directly your marketing and communication efforts to the commerce or engagement they generated. The outputs from one activity are the inputs to others. Without an integrated, enterprise system, delivering this is practically impossible.

The second message follows on from this - your organisation runs on processes where the inputs of one process are the outputs of others.

When a new member is added, you need to know and have defined the best way to manage the ongoing engagement with them.

Based on your research and knowledge about other members with similar profiles, you need to know how this new member will get the most from their relationship with you.

You need to know and have defined the optimal mix of products and services to be offered to them.

And you need to know that doing these things will deliver the best chance of retaining them.

By having defined processes that are member focussed and follow the flow the iMIS Value cycle it is possible to ensure that your organisation is streamlined and efficient. When you acquire a new member, you need defined processes to manage the communication with them. You need to ensure that crux of those communications is to drive engagement.

Some of that engagement will be commerce, certainly, but it will also be other participation – on a committee, as a volunteer, or as a speaker at an event. Through the recording of that engagement, you will be able to explore the patterns of behaviour and then feed that knowledge back into the cycle. As an example, we can see tangible results of that participation as a measureable improvement in their likelihood to renew.

And this leads to the third element - continuous improvement.

For some of you, you may not be in a position to know the relationships between the different processes in your organisation. You might not know that a new member attending a particular event delivers a much higher likelihood of second year retention. Or that an element of your membership only joins to get a discount on the annual conference. You may have a feeling about it, or have anecdotal evidence, but you lack the concrete evidence.

But if you use an enterprise system that adheres to this kind of value cycle, you will get this concrete knowledge. And once you have it, it forms the basis for continuous improvement.

You can use the integrated knowledge that has been gained from each area of the value cycle to refine your understanding of your membership.

You can analyse behaviour patterns and adjust processes accordingly.

You can create defined processes that offer specific engagement opportunities that you know will drive improved retention, like targeting all new members with that key event, or creating a new membership offer for those members that only want the discount on the annual conference.

And then it is on to the next lap of the cycle - measuring whether those changes to the process were effective, continuing our pursuit of excellence.

To close, I'd just like to look at some of the areas within iMIS that support the value cycle.

There are of course the tools that you know about that most of you here are using, such as the core Customer and Relationship management modules and the vertical commerce modules

But there is now much more to iMIS, aimed at supporting you in an integrated way in all areas of the value cycle

There are Process Manager and Task Centre that support definition and management of your processes and automation where appropriate.

There is the Marketing Suite that enables the creation of segmented, targeted marketing campaigns and automatically correlates the activity generated by the campaign with the segment and message that led to that activity.

There is iMIS Analytics, which enables you to drill down into all the information in your iMIS system to identify relationships between pieces of information to assist in refining your processes.

And there are tools for softer engagement, like iMIS community and Social Networking tools that support open, member to member interactions.

To get more information on what is available in these and other areas, there is a link at the bottom of the value cycle diagram you have. And as a follow up from today, we will send each of you a personalised value cycle that shows you the components of iMIS you own and don't own, and where they relate to the value cycle.

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 CEO and GM 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 and continuous improvement 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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