Inside ASI-AP

ASI was pleased to host the very first meeting of 3 REI's (Real Estate Institute's) - Qld, SA and Vic (all iMIS customers) - in the Melbourne office last week, and I joined the team of REI's and ASI'ers for lunch. While both REISA and REIV have been long time users of iMIS, REIQ only recently joined the list of REI users and between the 3 organisations they agreed to meet up and share iMIS experiences. And they will be meeting up ongoing on a more regular basis as a result of the success of this last meeting. It was great for me to be able to meet with the key exec's from each and share stories over lunch. At lunch was David and Jason (SA), Ivars and Neelu (Vic), Greg (Qld) and Shearne, Colin and myself from ASI.

Our 6th Annual Executive Round Table is scheduled for May 20 and 21 to be held at the Sofitel Mansion and Spa in Werribee, just outside of Melbourne. We have made a venue change this year and gone back to the Sofitel chain for a better quality hotel and dining experience after being at Moonah Links for the last 2 years. Plus it is not as far for Marla to drive to when I lock my keys in my car!

The theme for this year's round table is "achieving business excellence" with specific focus on process centric cultures and targeted customer offerings. We will also be presenting an iMIS 15 roadmap for the first time - something that customers have been requesting for the last couple of years. Bob Alves is host once again, and the ASI team includes Mick, Jay, Marla and myself from AP, and David Riffle is also flying in from the US. Colin arrives back from the US right as the round table starts so he should be attending but not having to present. And we have a great guest speaker which I posted about earlier in the week.

I hosted our first boardroom lunch of the year yesterday - 30th April - and we had an invited audience of finance managers and finance executives. We had a slightly smaller crowd than expected with a few same day cancellations but overall I was very happy with who was in attendance.

Last year we used the theme of "what keeps you awake at night" as a means of getting feedback and prompting discussion. This year I am adopting a new theme based on the 7 business drivers of high-performance non-profits and the iMIS Business Excellence Framework (iBEF). The 2 business drivers I used for this luncheon were "automation" and "process".

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.

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.

The 2007 ASI-AP Christmas party has come and gone with about 65 of us ASI'ers and families riding the rails on Puffing Billy on Sunday. Since Shan is still in hospital my special date was Jasmin on her first party outing.

We left the office by bus just before 11 and arrived at Belgrave station about 40 minutes later. Then it was boarding onto the First Class dining carriages of Puffing Billy for a 12.20 departure up to Lakeside station. Lunch was served en route. After a bit of running around (or cycling around for some of us on the water bikes) we were back on the train to return home. Then back on the bus for a return to the office by around 4.30. And wow what a great day!

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" !

Philip King, the CEO of Artez Interactive (www.artez.com), was in our Melboune office yesterday to present a morning seminar on online fundraising and an afternoon masterclass on the same topic (more detailed session info copied in below).

I sat in on the morning seminar and also manned the video camera to that we have a recording of the presentation. Artez provide the technology behind the new iMIS Friendraising module. Currently the recording is on digital video tape, but I will try and find a way to get it published on the web somewhere.

Colin and the Customer Care team kicked off the 'Preparing for iMIS 15' roadshow today in the Melbourne office. The 90 minute presentation now hits the road - Perth on 27 Feb, Wellington 5 Mar, Sydney 11 Mar and Brisbane 12 Mar (see www.advsol.com/ap/share for the details).

A copy of the presentation is here Preparing for iMIS 15 - AP 080219.ppt
and the handout here iMIS 15 Views Comparison 080131.pdf.

This wiki page provides a summary of speeches and presentations made by myself, organised in date order. For each speech, a link is provided to get the full text of the speech or the presentation slides used. Only 2007 and beyond are included below.

The lunch on Friday 5th October was hosted by TAK Systems, Ingram Micro and Sun Microsystems. It brought together technology partners, including ASI and a local managed hosting service provider – with about 7 non-profits and the NCSS (National Council of Social Service). The format of the lunch was similar to the MD Boardroom lunches that I host in Melbourne each month, but more interactive and more open discussion. Also, the non-profit invitees were sent some questions by Chris (TAK) in advance regarding challenges they may be facing in the areas of: 1) Managing information; 2) fund raising methods and analytics; 3) communications; 4) events and activities; and 5) process management.

Our biggest boardroom lunch so far was held this last week on Tuesday 25th with the invited audience being membership department executives, which over the years has been the bread and butter audience for iMIS. We had 20 guests the majority of who were customers.

I focused my after lunch speech on iMIS 15 process manager and segmentation - challenging our guests to look hard at their regular renewal processes and not just keep doing it the same way as last year. A transcript of my speech is below.

I am continuing to ask the questions on "what keeps you awake at night" and I have added the responses from this group to the wiki page here.

We held our very first IT round table event on Thursday 13 September. For me, I believe it is the best event we’ve run ever. And most of the delegates that attended agreed with strong agreement recorded on the feedback survey.

The IT round table was modelled after the annual Executive round table which we have run for 5 years now. The Executive round table is an invitation only event to our largest 10-15 customers, and for the past 2 years the customer executives at that function have suggested that we run a similar round table event specifically for their CIOs/IT managers. So we did - we invited the CIOs and IT Managers from our largest customers and hosted them in our Melbourne boardroom. We had customers fly in from NZ, Perth, Sydney and Canberra.

Last Wednesday (22 Aug) I hosted the fourth of our monthly "MD's Boardroom Luncheon" function in our Melbourne boardroom. The purpose of these luncheons is to get our customers together, over lunch, in our boardroom, for some networking and information sharing.

The functional title used for last week's function was sales/marketing/communication executives. We had an average attendance of 15 guests evenly split between customers and prospects. In particular, we welcomed Phil Clearly at the lunch, currently with the ETU, but well known through football commentary circles and a former MP - and he did a great job of introducing his table.

Looking for feedback or suggestions on who we might ask to act as guest speaker at the IT Managers tech briefing on 13 September. Thoughts so far have centred on getting someone to talk on a general IT topic (such as Web 2.0) that is both interesting and that can be related somehow back to the day's agenda.

People thought about so far include:

James Farmer - an expert in utilising Web 2.0 for education and information management

Someone from the Data Managers Association

Others?