Inside ASI-AP

I was reading an article over the weekend in the May-June edition of Advancing Philanthropy (the journal of the AFP - Association of Fundraising Professionals - www.afpnet.com), which is conveniently now provided to all members of the Fundraising Institute of Australia (FIA - www.fia.org.au). The article was a summary of a study by the Run Walk Ride Fundraising Council (www.runwalkride.com) and it shows that funds raised through athletic charitable events - such was walkathons and bikeathons - grew by more than 10% in 2007. The top 30 athletic fundraising events in the US generated more than $1.64 billion in gross revenue in 2007. The top programs included Relay for Life (American Cancer) at $406m, Team in Training (Leukemia) at $125m and Start! Heart Walk (American Heart) at $106m.

For the first time Bob Alves was actually in Australia for the first quarter CEO update. Bob flew in from the US on Monday morning, and at 1pm in the Melbourne office we had pizza lunch and then played the pre-recorded presentation that he had recorded on the Friday night before coming to Australia. The presentation ran about 45 minutes and it was a little weird listening to Bob speak while he sat there with us - and he didn't even move his lips!

During the presentation Bob covered off first quarter Balanced Scorecard results, financial results, value award winners and he highlighted the global Consulting department. He also made particular mention of the strong first quarter results for AP, Europe and Canada (I had posted previously about the AP first quarter results).

After relocating the Melbourne office last year, this year it is the turn of the Sydney office. We are moving from North Sydney into the Sydney CBD area - which gets us closer to customers, transport options and higher quality premises. To support our telecommute environment we are taking out space in a shared executive office on level 33 of Australia Square - which is located at 264 George Street (down towards the Circular Quay end of George Street). Australia Square is an iconic building in that it is a round tower which at the time it was built was the tallest building in Sydney.

On Tuesday Jay, Mick and I were at APESMA (www.apesma.asn.au) for the fourth of a series of meetings with each of their key departments to help us plan out a one year roadmap as part of their iBEF program. APESMA have some unique challenges in that it was recently restructured to split the commercial business units from the traditional union organisation. The commercial units - including Chifley Business School (www.chifley.edu.au), Member Advantage (www.memberadvantage.com.au) and ETM Search & Selection (www.etm.com.au) - are all substantial businesses in their own right, but they also share infrastructure and many services with APESMA.

The open project manager position has now been filled and we are very excited to be welcoming Andrew Kennedy into the ASI Consulting team. Andrew will be based in Sydney; he will be starting the week of June 2nd. Andrew comes to ASI with strong project management experience including at Optus, a national law firm and most recently a software company specialising in customer data integrity solutions. Like myself and some of the other ASIer's, Andrew is engineering educated; and his interests are soccer, rock climbing and teaching spanish.

Bob will be in Melbourne and Sydney later this month - arriving into the Melbourne on Monday 19 May, then heading to Sydney on Saturday 24 May prior to flying home on Sunday 25 May. While in Melbourne his main responsibility is to host the Annual Executive Round Table for our invitation-only largest customers; he will also be in the office for a couple of days on Thursday and Friday catching up with me, my review and AP business plans and budget reviews. And if there are no delays to his incoming flight he should also be joining us in person for the quarterly pizza lunch and CEO address on the Monday 19th.

As I posted about during the Innovations conference last month, the iMIS Business Excellence Framework (iBEF) program is to be rolled out in the US embracing selected AiSPs and customers. Bob has appointed Neil Kleinberg to lead the program launch in the US, and over the coming weeks Mick and I will be meeting with Neil and others to help co-ordinate and support the launch. I am also in the process of creating a wiki that will incorporate all of the iBEF documentation so it can be opened up for collaboration with ASIer's in the US, the AiSP's in the program and to customers - I'll post more on this as the wiki nears completion.

Mick was in Sydney yesterday visiting with the Taxation Institute of Australia (www.taxinstitute.com.au) and conducting the first of their iMIS Business Excellence Framework (iBEF) meetings. The first meeting agenda was a workshop session with their strategy team to better understand their strategies and key initiatives. I normally attend these meetings with Mick in person but this time we decided to keep me in the office and connect me in using Sykpe video instead.

While we have conducted many video conference meetings on our Tandberg video units, these are only ASI office to office - customers do not have the Tandberg equipment for us to call into customer boardrooms. So enter the $100 webcam and Skype. Mick setup the webcam in the Institute's boardroom and then ran the meeting for 3 hours with me sitting in my office. The quality was far better than expected and I would certainly use it again.

I met today with an export advisor from Austrade (specifically the Tradestart program) to better understand the options available to us for export assistance into Asia - via government programs, grants and also paid consultancy. We talked specifically about our existing relationships with NZ, Singapore and Malaysia and then on understanding how Austrade can help with new markets like India, Pakistan and further into the future China, Japan and Korea. While we have been aware of such programs before - to sit and hear them all at once was both exciting and stimulating.

I caught up with Ross on Friday night by phone. The official Olympic qualifying period had just ended and Ross did not qualify for the Beijing games this year. It is disappointing for Ross, but in many ways the cards were stacked against him this last 12 months or so, and he showed a lot of courage to dig deep and keep it all going. He is enjoying life in Gent, Belgium and is starting to find a routine with his local fencing club and getting onto the European circuit where there are high calibre fencing tournaments every weekend - and just a train ride or car ride away. He is getting to see a lot of Europe - make sure you follow his photos on Facebook if you aren't already.

I was a guest of AIM Vic at their "Managing the Future" lunch series on Tuesday where the keynote speaker was Bob Welsh, CEO of VicSuper. Bob has been leading VicSuper with sustainability as a core operating principle since 2000, and has recently been recognised by the UN for his achievements in this area.

There was certainly of lot of interest in sustainability with over 200 people in attendance at the lunch, in many ways driven by the new government's plan to introduce a carbon emissions trading scheme from 2010. This will mean that the cost of carbon will directly impact an organisation's bottom line and as a result costs for many services - including electricity - will go up.

In writing up todays monthly luncheon I realised I did not post my speech for the previous luncheon which was for CEO's and executives back in November. The lunch was held on 16 November 2007 and was well attended due to our special guest - Bob Alves, ASI's CEO. We even had 2 execs from a potential customer in NZ fly over for the luncheon and to meet Bob - which was a first!

Like the October luncheon for finance executives I based this presentation on the iMIS Value Cycle; plus I also discussed the Australian Business Excellence Framework and ASI's own 7 Business Drivers of High Performance Non-Profits. The business excellence frameworks are very relevant for forward thinking CEO's and proved to be a popular topic. I also used the same "what keeps awake at night" question to get feedback on some of the issues the CEO's in attendance are facing.

Jay presented the first Friendraising seminar today in Melbourne, with about 16 attendees in total. The seminar was promoted as an educational event on Friendraising technology without specific reference to iMIS or ASI. I believe we earned a lot of respect in taking that approach with the audience today.

Jay had put some new slides together to explain the Friendraising model and they are the best explanation I have seen so far of the social networking fundraising model that we call Friendraising (also called peer-to-peer fundraising or team based fundraising or even a-thons). Jay had a video camera recording his presentation today so in the next week or two there will be a video available for everyone to watch.

The March 2008 financials have been published - and thus also the first quarter (Q1) results. The budgets are now loaded into Great Plains so we have our first actual to budget results available.

The quarter has been very strong in AP with revenue growth in all areas. Total revenue was up 8% on budget and very significantly 22% up on first quarter of last year. AP EBITDA is ahead of the budget by $320k and ahead of last year by $330k - both better than forecasted increases.

Globally the first quarter financials have also been positive - just under budget for total revenue and 6% up on last year; EBITDA is ahead of budget.

Jason M travelled to Kuala Lumpur last weekend to spend 2 weeks onsite implementing our newest Malaysian customer - the Malaysian Nature Society (MNS - www.mns.org.my). MNS are starting with a basic iMIS membership system with plans to grow into a full iMIS web solution over time. The team at MNS have been great hosts for Jason as it is first time in KL - introducing him to local food and the local cinema. Jason will be finished the implementation later this week and then he takes a couple of extra weeks to tour around KL and Malaysia.