Inside ASI-AP

Hosted by Bob Alves and Paul Ramsbottom
at the offices of EMA Central, Wellington, NZ
1 day 9.30am to 4.00pm Exec Forum agenda

The notes below are the ones I wrote down during each of the open discussion sections - the introductions, the share your strategy session, and the closing/feedback session.

1. Notes from INTRODUCTION section:

a. William – NZVA / VetLearn

30 FTEs – with 3 in the IT team

Purchased iMIS 2007 as part of a single repositories project

Currently on 10.6 with i15 iBOs for website integration

Substantial $$ spent

Want to hear about the ASI vision for a stronger customer focus – “disenfranchised” at the moment – a) have to lead things themselves with regard to implementation and b) oversold on the level of efforts required to get things done

We held our very first boardroom luncheon in Sydney yesterday. We have run these in our Melbourne boardroom for over a year now and they have been well regarded, and with the growth of our Sydney business it was time to run them in Sydney as well. Of course we don't have the same boardroom in Sydney as we do Melbourne, so we booked into Prime restaurant in the basement of the GPO building in Martin Place and enjoyed a nice 2 course lunch.

We had a combination of existing iMIS customers and prospective iMIS customers attend, including a few of our 10+ year customers from the earliest days we were in Sydney. The invited group were membership managers and executives and there was plenty of discussion around membership performance in the GFC.

The annual iBEF Executive Forum for our top 10 or so customers was held last Wednesday and Thursday at the Peppers Torquay Sands Resort, south west of Melbourne.

I have added a Twitter block to the left hand side of the insideasiap.com web site taking feeds from staff Twitter accounts on an hourly basis. So far myself, Jay and Kelly are being aggregated and displayed. If you would like yours added, just let me know.

You may also be interested in following Twitter search feeds for "iMIS" and "NiUG". Try these:

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=imis

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=niug

If you are using a Twitter client such as Tweetdeck or Seesmic it is easy to add in search views for these automatically. They also let you monitor specific user accounts and create groups like "work" and "home".

We held the first boardroom luncheon in Melbourne office last week on Thursday 21 May. For the last 2 years these have been called the "Managing Director's Boardroom Luncheon Series" and they ran only in Melbourne. For 2009, we have refined the format and renamed them to the "iMIS Business Excellence Luncheon Series"; and for the format, we are introducing other speakers besides just me, and will be running them in both Melbourne and Sydney.

For the lunch last week Mick Varga was the featured speaker, and the audience was IT managers and IT executives from both customers and prospective customers. We also changed the format and made the presentation style a little more hard hitting, less high level and giving more practical advice that can be put into action right away. I spoke for the first 10 minutes to provide the introduction and overview, then Mick spoke for 10 minutes between main course and dessert, and again for 10 minutes after dessert.

I hosted our final boardroom lunch of the year this week - 29th October - and we had an invited audience of membership department executives.

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 have adopted a new theme based on the business drivers of high-performance non-profits and the iMIS Business Excellence Framework (iBEF). The focus for this presentation was on process management rather than functional management using the "join now" process as the example. See more in the copy of the speech below.

I hosted our fourth boardroom lunch of the year this week - 1st October - and we had an invited audience of CEO's and senior executives.

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 have adopted a new theme based on the 7 business drivers of high-performance non-profits and the iMIS Business Excellence Framework (iBEF). The focus for this presentation was on process management rather than functional management using the "join now" process as the example. See more in the copy of the speech below.

Last but not least in a big few weeks of iMIS Friendraising launches (see posts on Pink Ribbon Breakfast and Light the Night), the Cancer Council Victoria (CCV - www.cancervic.org.au) launched their latest fundraising event "Girls Night In" at www.girlsnightin.com.au. The Victorian home page is shown below:

CCV is part of the national Cancer Council group that are deploying the Artez online fundraising solution all around Australia. In Victoria, since CCV are also iMIS customers, they are also implementing the iMIS Friendraising bridge.

For the past 7 years we have run an annual executive briefing/forum for our top 15 association customers, and since last year we have also added a twice yearly IT round table for that same group of customers. For the first time we are taking the executive forum program to our top fundraising customers.

While we have had a number of large fundraising customers for the past few years, with strong sales in the last year into large fundraising organisations we now have a core group of at least 20 organisations that give us the numbers to run our first executive forum.

The executive forum is scheduled for Wednesday 3 September to be held in our temporary Sydney office. A save the date email has just been sent out - copy below. This is an invitation only event where we have invited the senior executive responsible for iMIS in each of our top fundraising customers. The agenda will be high level and based around the concepts of the iMIS Business Excellence Framework program and the 7 business drivers of high performance non-profits.

The first event run by our new iMIS 15 customer - the National Breast Cancer Foundation (NBCF) www.nbcf.org.au - is now live online and ready for registrations, sponsors and donations. The Pink Ribbon Breakfast is a well known annual event with many high profile stars as ambassadors led by chief ambassador Sarah Murdoch.

The Pink Ribbon Breakfast website www.pinkribbonbreakfast.org.au went live this week using the iMIS Friendraising module. The registration home page is shown above.

Recently we purchased a Google Search Appliance to beef up the search functionality of the various ASI websites - and we have named it the Googlebox. It is currently available internally at the URL http://googlebox/.

The Googlebox is not just able to index website content but in fact anything in our systems - including SQL databases and Exchange email boxes. As most of you know we do have a lot of information stored in our own iMIS SQL database including all SMRs, community postings, consulting project postings, enhancement requests and other things. This will now go into a single search index on the Googlebox along with all of our websites, the docs.imis.com online manuals and files from Clarity.

In getting ready for the iMIS Business Excellence Framework (iBEF) IT Round Table next week (see Marla's previous post here for details) Jay, Mick and myself have been discussing the role of the IT manager at a medium-to-large iMIS customer, and what their role should be in supporting iMIS.

In the past, the iMIS IT role was a technical role providing sound infrastructure (availability of systems and backups), a form of help desk, and technical services like report writing and data extractions. But with iMIS 15 continually evolving the IT role is changing too. So I asked the question - does the IT role stay the same, or is their opportunity for the IT management role to expand as iMIS expands? Into areas like process management, analytics and business automation. Should the IT manager role play an active role in the executive management team of our customers - like a CIO would do? To help drive business improvement and to help introduce concepts like the 7 business drivers of high performance non-profits?

I hosted our third boardroom lunch of the year last week - 9th July - and we had an invited audience of sales and marketing executives. We tried a new boardroom layout this month with a single long table setup in true boardroom style rather than our 3 separate lunch tables.

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 have adopted 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 "segmentation" and "automation". See more in the copy of the speech below.

One of our newest iMIS Friendraising customers took their first event live on the Friendraising platform last week. The event called "Light the Night" can be found here. You can tell it is an iMIS Friendraising site by looking at the URL - note the secure.imisfriendraising.com.au domain once you go past the initial landing page.

Vanessa spoke very highly of the LF team who have been running Friendraising-style events for over 6 years (World's Greatest Shave being their biggest!) and are very experienced in what they want and how they want it. The implementation was completed in just a few weeks.

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.