Inside ASI-AP

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.

Last month I attended as both a delegate and as a sponsor the "CEO Symposium" event run by Associations Forum. This is the third year this event has been run by John Peacock and his team. The venue this year was the Novotel Pacific Bay Resort at Coffs Harbour. A copy of the agenda is here: AF-CEO-Symposium-Brochure-08.pdf

The delegate numbers were about the same as the previous year (65 delegates), but I did notice the average size of the organisation they represented to be smaller than the previous year. In fact this is a trend that we have been noticing at most of the conferences in the past year. A consistent number of CEO's and senior staff from the large associations and non-profits are just not attending.

From Saturday through to Tuesday ASI had a booth at the Perth FIA conference, and Marla, Colin and myself were there to attend to the booth and learn a few things.

Marla flew out today, Colin and I (Jay) fly out tomorrow morning.  We're heading off to Perth for the FIA Conference.  Once again, ASI are sponsoring the conference and will have a booth that the three of us will be tending to.

This year all of our efforts are going into letting people know about the new iMIS Friendraising module, and we decided to use the Friendraising module as part of a promotion, here's how it works:

1. Colin, Marla and I will try our best to get as many friends as we can.
2. For every friend we get, we'll take them through the donation process using iMIS Friendraising.  No one actually has to donate anything, just go through the process to see how easy it is.
3. For every one who 'donates' ASI will donate $5 to a pre-selected charity.

So who are the charities:

Marla, Colin and Jay are on their way to Perth today and tomorrow to man the ASI exhibition stand and to spread the word about iMIS Friendraising. Information on the conference can be found on the FIA website - it runs from Sunday through to Tuesday.

The team has come up with a great concept to promote Friendraising, with matching caps and shirts asking conference delegates to "Be my friend" !

The Great Things Award for 2007 was presented by me during the NiUG conference dinner on Thursday night 11th October. It was won for the second year in a row by The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP), and the award was accepted in person by Kim Keane, the RACGP IT Manager.

The RACGP have done some great things with iMIS this year, including:

With day 1 of the Discovery conference being devoted to hands-on workshops, the formal opening session was held on day 2, Thursday 11th October. Rod Dalglish, NiUG chair, did the official opening, and this was then followed by my opening presentation, which ran for just over 20 minutes.

I took this photo from the main stage looking out into the crowd. You can see the room is almost full, with a record 97 delegates - a 15% increase on last year. Looking out made me very proud of everything the local iMIS community has achieved in the past 10+ years, and in particular what the NiUG committee has achieved in 2007. Everyone on the ASI team should also be very proud, because you have helped make the iMIS community what it is today. It really is something special.