Inside ASI-AP

Here are a few photos from our last Melbourne boardroom lunch for 2009 - held on Tuesday 1st December.

Today we hosted a group of Membership Execs from the iMIS Community - here are some pictures from today:

Here are the photos from last week's iBEF Executive Forum held in Sydney, Australia (including professional shots.

We held our first luncheon of the year with our CEO and general manager contacts last Wednesday under the iMIS Business Excellence branding. It was our largest lunch so far and I think reflective of the importance of non-profits, and in particular our customers, understanding the importance of business excellence, and in particular iMIS Business Excellence, in the current environment.

To have 24 CEO's and GM's in the room listening to our message is a great outcome and on top of that, we just get better and better at delivering the message. Similar to the last few lunches, I did the opening 10 minutes, and then after main course Mick spoke for just under 10 minutes, and then Mick spoke again after desert.

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.

We held the June boardroom luncheon in the Melbourne office today Tuesday 23 June. 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, with the first Sydney lunch coming up later this week.

For today's lunch Mick Varga was the featured speaker, and the audience was marketing and development managers / executives from both customers and prospective customers. 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.

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.

Home page for the monthly boardroom luncheons. Links to blog postings and speech transcripts for each luncheon:

2009

This week was spent in 2 halves. Monday and Tuesday were spent primarily working with Jane and Nick, outlining to them how we run the Roadmap sessions, agreeing on how we are going to work as a global team and putting together some of the logistics for how and when we are going to communicate. There were lots of questions and it was a real eye opener for me as to exactly how much work I need to do in the detail of IBEF – the real step-by-step processes for delivery of every component of the program.

And this turned out to be a great lead in to what lay ahead in the second iBEF executive forum, which was held in Orlando, Florida. We attached our meeting onto the end of a NiUG chapter meeting that was in Orlando from Monday – Wednesday. It was certainly a popular idea because most of the attendees travelled in to the session to get out of the cold, from places like Detroit and Chicago. It had been -12 in Chicago!

First, my trite observation for the week: An Australian gives a presentation, says it will take 30 minutes and finishes early. An American gives a presentation, says it will take 30 minutes and runs over. They both think they’ve exceeded expectations.

I got here Monday night after the usual 30 hour trial. There just has to be a better way of doing this trip. All I could think of was the guys who get sent into space in 2001 and get put into suspended animation for the entire trip. And it is cold here. Every night it’s got down to at least -5. There’s been snow, sleet and ice. I thought I’d go for a run to blow off the cobwebs when I got here, walked out the door, ran about 20 metres and turned around.

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.

On Thursday 24 July we hosted our 2nd IT Round Table event in the Melbourne office. This is an invitation-only event for the IT managers of our largest customers and customers in the iMIS Business Excellence Framework (iBEF) program. It followed on from the Executive Forum we ran for the same group of customers earlier in the year (for the Exec Forum the invitations are for COO's and senior executives). I posted some notes on our preparation here.

Based on feedback from the IT round table last year we are going to run these 1 day events every 6 months. The next one is scheduled for November and we will move to Sydney for that event.

Jay, Marla and myself are off to Perth this week to do the iBEF strategic roadmap workshops with IFAP (www.ifap.asn.au). IFAP have been using iMIS for almost 2 years now and are ready to look ahead and plan next steps to leverage their investment in iMIS. The iBEF (iMIS Business Excellence Framework) program is just the right framework to start that journey.

To date the iBEF strategic roadmap workshops have been run by Mick and myself. But with the iBEF program expanding we need to engage other senior ASI'ers to host these workshops and give us more coverage. This week it will be Jay assisting me lead the strategic discussions, and Marla being introduced to the role of project co-ordinator which will ensure execution of iBEF outcomes.

The expansion of the iMIS Business Excellence Framework (iBEF) program to the North American market gets serious in the coming months with the first events now scheduled. The iBEF launch was announced back in June with this press release.

The first iBEF event is the iBEF Executive Forum - which follows the same format as the executive forum we ran here in May - and this is scheduled for September 11-12 in Alexandria, VA.