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.

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.

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.

Mick and I went over to Melbourne Uni today to visit with Dr Mile Terziovski, Associate Professor in Innovation & Entrepreneurship at Melbourne Uni and he is also the Executive Director of the Centre for Global Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Mile was our lecturer last year at AIM on the subject of managing operational improvement and he is a highly regarded expert on the topics of process centered organisations, learning organisations and innovation - all cornerstones of business excellence frameworks including our own iMIS Business Excellence Framework (iBEF) and the 7 business drivers of high performance non-profits.

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.

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.

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.

With the changes we are making at ASI to become a global company I know some of you are questioning why. I think over the years ASI has generally proven itself to be ahead of what customers need in technology trends, and the latest moves on globalisation are no different. Some of our customers are now truly global organisations - and in many cases are dealing with issues between the international head office and the country offices, that we are typically used to seeing between a national office and the state offices. For us to continue to be successful in this changing environment we need to have a global product and a global company supporting it - just being US focused is not going to cut it any more.

I posted previously about the Australian market and our market share estimates. In that post I highlighted a key part of our growth potential will come from Asia. I have some more facts now on the overall market opportunity with regard to general economic importance (the data is from CIA / IBIS World and was reproduced in the April 2008 edition of the Company Director journal published by AICD).

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 week Jay made his first appearance on live radio, becoming part of the panel on the "Byte Into It" program on 3RRR FM www.rrr.org.au. 3RRR (3 Triple R) is Australia's most well known community broadcasting station and they are based out of Melbourne. The Byte Into It program runs weekly on Wednesday evenings from 7-8pm - get all the program info here, including RSS feeds for the podcast of the show. Or download the MP3 file from Jay's first on-air appearance here: http://media.libsyn.com/media/rrrfm/Byte-Into-It-20080305.mp3.

Jay's main piece starts just before the 30 minute mark. Very impressive Jay!

Bob gave his latest quarterly CEO address to US staff late Friday night our time, and it was recorded and played back for 18 of the Melbourne office staff over a pizza lunch yesterday (Monday). If you haven't listened to the presentation, you can download the MP3 audio recording from the ASI staff portal (www.advsol.com/staff). Note you need to be logged in as ASI staff to access the recording. Bob covered topics including global BSC results, year end financial results, Value award winners (including a high proportion of AP staff - congrats to everyone!), some feedback on what senior ASI managers are looking forward to in 2008, and finally an overview of the Marketing department.

I video-taped the seminar run by Philip King of Artez that I posted about a couple of weeks ago. This has now been converted into Quicktime movie format and available for download below. Note that the file is 289 Mb in size and will take 15-30 minutes to download depending on your internet speed. It is a Quicktime file so you need to have Quicktime installed on your PC if you don't already (or download it from here).