Inside ASI-AP

The Associations Forum National Conference 2010 was held at Crown Conference Centre in Melbourne this week. More than 400 attended the two days which was packed with great sessions. ASI was among 40 exhibitors at the conference. We had a great spot in the exhibit space & experienced good traffic. Click through to fill article to view photos from the exhibitor area.

Media Release: Paul Ramsbottom, ASI Asia-Pacific Managing Director, to present at the Associations Forum National Conference
- ASI To Drive Change In Membership Renewal Process For Not-For-Profits -

Melbourne, Australia, July 22nd –Advanced Solutions International (ASI) – the developer of iMIS -will explain how associations can improve their processes around membership renewal and reduce time inputting data and duplicating effort in a presentation at The Associations Forum National Conference 2010, taking place on July 27th and 28th at The Crown Conference Centre, Melbourne.

Paul Ramsbottom, managing director at ASI Asia-Pacific will discuss with association executives that the significant resources put into the renewal process and complex renewal forms are a thing of the past with the internet and electronic banking changing all of that, and that today a membership renewal is just a transaction where “less is more”.

Jay, Amanda and I manned our stand at the Connecting Up 2009 Conference which was held in Brighton le Sands, Sydney on Monday 10 & Tuesday 11 May. The conference was focused on "how technology, social media and networking is changing the way nonprofit orgtanisations operate, communicate and connect with their supporters, members and beneficiaries."

The conference was mainly attended by Social Services organisations who have few supporters (donors) as the majority were fully funded by the government. While the budget was handed down last night, many of these organisations were thinking about how it was going to affect their services, and how they would have to consider cutting some services they offer. Very little consideration seemed to be given to raising funds through the community to continue delivering their services.

April 8, 2009

ASI Media Release: Discover fundraising insights to make you smile

On the face of it, the UK’s Comic Relief and Brisbane’s Royal Children's Hospital Foundation don’t share anything in common.

That’s until you learn Comic Relief’s Director of New Media, Martin Gill, turned digital media into a powerful fundraising, education and campaigning tool for the organisation in activities including Make Poverty History and LIVE 8.

And the foundation’s Fundraising and Marketing Director, Meredith Campbell, started Daffodil Day in Queensland, established multi-million dollar partnerships for Kids Help Line and co-founded an internet-based charity that runs adventures for women diagnosed with breast cancer and raised almost $1 million in its first four years.

ASI is pleased to support Artez InterAction - coming to Sydney on Thursday 30 April 2009 at Dockside, Cockle Bay Wharf, Sydney. Details at www.artez.com/news_and_events/aia_aus.

Following on from the phenomenal success of Artez InterAction in North America and the UK, Artez InterAction is hitting Australia!

The one day conference promises to deliver the same highlights as its international predecessors. Artez InterAction is focused on networking, fundraising and new technology and will discuss strategic online fundraising, current trends and its impact. You'll hear from both local and international guests and have the ability to network with leading fundraising professionals.

After being in cold London for a week, I arrived in DC Sunday evening and although the temperature was lower, it felt warmer – at least for the first day. The week started off cool (-2 to 1 C) then got cold (-4 to -1 C) and then by Sunday warmed up (-1 to 11 C) - completely different to Melbourne.

It was a busy week with meetings. I started Monday with Moji going through some process and other training items in using the Customer Care Dashboard and opportunity management. I met with Beau Harbin regarding iMIS Training as he is now managing the schedule in the US – we spent time discussing strategy for getting more customers to training, including courses, segmentation and promotion. The rest of the day was spent time catching up on emails.

The dates and location have been set for the AP NiUG Discovery conference - set for Wednesday 15 October to Friday 17 October up at the Australis Noosa Lakes Resort in Noosaville (on the Sunshine Coast).

Already there is a large contingent of international speakers confirmed for the conference - including Marty Rabenovets (ASI's Director of Product Management), Doug Morris (CEO of CSI Inc. and NiUG International board member), Rob Wenger (CEO of Higher Logic) and Jeff from Informz.

Liza and I went to a seminar this afternoon hosted by Xponential where we heard Ted Hart talk about having success in online fundraising.  I hadn't heard of Ted before and I'm not sure what makes you a guru (he didn't talk at all about his success or history) but the content was good.

The presentation was about 4 hours long and was broken into two sections, a review of Web 2.0 and why this is important and then in the second half he did a live review of just about everyone's website in the room.

The US-based AFP - Association of Fundraising Professionals www.afpnet.org - recently held its annual conference in San Diego. ASI was a sponsor of this conference including sponsoring the conference proceedings CD, which meant that delegates had to visit the ASI exhibition booth to pick up a copy of the CD. About half of the sessions are included on the CD, and I have uploaded a copy of the CD to our internal network here:

N:\melbourne\marketing group\Marketing\Conferences & Tradeshows\AFP Conference 2008 CD\start.htm

There are some interesting papers available on the CD including annual giving and direct response topics. Unfortunately only 1 of the 'technology in fundraising' sessions was included (a typical sign of technology presentations?).

It was great for Liza, Stuart and Shearne to come to the US this week and attend the Innovations conference for the first time. To sit in the opening session with some 150 people – who are just from AiSPs and ASI staff only! – makes you realise what ASI is, and what ASI has built over the years. Everyone in the room and their families depend on iMIS and ASI doing the right thing, and to me that is pretty moving. And that extends to all the staff that work at our AiSPs – and some of our largest AiSPs now have 30+ staff each dedicated to iMIS. They all depend on iMIS now and for the years to come. I take my part of that responsibility very seriously.

The Wednesday after conference was a full day for me with Chairman's Circle breakfast in the morning and then a full day Board meeting followed by a Board dinner.

The Chairman's Circle are the top AiSP's selected on an annual basis; for 2008 it is about 16 organisations. At the breakfast – which is hosted by Bob and Don – we handed out a draft of the Product Development Outlook document, which is a new document that we intend to publish next month on the iMIS product plans through to 2010. This document has been requested by customers and AiSPs for a couple of years now to help them plan better and get aligned with iMIS releases and technology. The AiSPs were very happy to be asked for feedback and they had some great suggestions on how to make the document a little better. I also spent a lot of time talking about the iBEF program and we explored ways we could have the Chairman Circle AiSPs adapt all or parts of the iBEF program in their own businesses with their own customers. This also got some great feedback and as a result we will be making more formal plans to do this.

I had a number of company meetings to attend today related to some potential acquisitions so I only got to see a couple of sessions, none of them before lunch. At lunch the President's Awards were announced – I blogged about this earlier.

After lunch I attended the session on add-on products to iMIS mainly to listen in on the latest from Informz. The good news is that Informz will be sending someone to the NiUG Discovery conference here later in the year. I was particularly impressed to hear that some 300 iMIS customers now use Informz for iMIS (www.InformzforiMIS.com)! They showed the new adhoc query integration and also announced the new servers they have in Canada (which overcomes the objections some customers have with US law). There was also a demo of the CSA (Customer Service Alerts) and TaskCentre integration which is remarkably simple but opens up many opportunities for automated workflow.

At lunch on day 2 of the Innovations conference Donna and Don presented the awards for the President's Club. I live-blogged yesterday about some of the demo's of each of the nominations, where ASI solution providers and ASI Consulting staff submitted add-on iMIS applications.

Stuart from our own office presented on behalf of Leo his nomination for the REIQ Certification module. For the last 2 years running AP has taken away the ASI Consulting award, so Stuart and Leo had some high expectations to meet! Unfortunately it wasn't to be this year, but there was some pretty tough competition.

I am currently at the Mariott North Bethesda Hotel attending ASI's annual Innovations conference. This conference is for ASI partners and staff. I am blogging live as I can!

SXSW - which stands for South by South West - or 'South by' for short, is a massive festival of music, film, media and interactivity held each year in Austin, Texas. While the music festival always gets plenty of publicity, the Interactive festival continues to grow - and it is now known as SXSWi (the 2008 website is here). SXSWi celebrates the creativity and passion behind the coolest new media technologies.

Being in Austin, a number of ASI staff attended and blogged about sessions they attended, and most are on www.iMISCommunity.com. Of particular interest I found the post on non-profits on the bleeding edge very timely and this one on engaged websites also relevant.