I have moved my blog to www.insideasiap.com, a new operations community for ASI AP staff and anyone else that is interested in what's going on inside of ASI AP on a daily basis.

Over the last year we have had a list of 'rainy day' things to do with iMIS. These are basically quick tasks that an iMIS consultant, or an iMIS system administrator, can do if they have a few hours spare (generally when it is raining for some reason - hence the name 'rainy day' list).

This list floats around on email and generally comes up again when consultants have some free time.

It occurred to me that this is not just something that we do in Australia. In fact, the list is a perfect candidate for a wiki that can be accessed by consultants and system administrators globally.

Our corporate mobile plan in AP was updated a few weeks ago so that all mobile calls between any phone on the plan is now free. Previously, we were paying upwards of 30 cents/minute for these calls.

Today, I was working remotely, and spent about 3 hours on the phone - all for free. Last month that would have cost me $80 in call charges.

I thought this was interesting in light of the new VoIP offerings that are now available in their many forms, including the internal ASI system and well known public systems like Skype. Is this a response from the large telco's to make sure we continue to use their services? Our telco is Telstra - the largest in Australia - and I believe they are also making similar moves for home phones so that you get unlimited calls for a fixed monthly fee.

Over 10 years ago Julie Willett started working for me on the back veranda of my home in Brisbane, Australia. That was in 1995 and iMIS was just starting out in Australia. We had about 6 customers at the time, and Julie actually worked at one of them - BOMA - and her dad was the Executive Director there. He was also a life member of AuSAE so it was in Julie's blood to become an active participant in the association and fundraising sector and help our customers achieve great things through innovative solutions.

The Asia-Pacific management team met last week in Melbourne for the annual strategy review meeting. AP is currently on a 5 year strategy plan (2004-2009) and the team meets each year to review the 2009 goals and the annual steps required to get there.

A great story in the Melbourne Age and Sydney Morning Herald today - half page - on the success of iMIS at Caritas Australia. The story is called 'Turning Disaster into Triumph'. Links below:

http://www.theage.com.au/news/biztech/turning-disaster-into-triumph/2006...

http://www.smh.com.au/news/biztech/turning-disaster-into-triumph/2006/07...

I visited a customer last week and met with the new CEO and some of the managers. They had been using iMIS for about 5 years and were stuck, unsure of what they had and where they should be going. Although they were on the latest version (10.6), different departments had gone ahead and setup their own fields and codes, and some departments - like events - who needed something desperately, didn't even know they had the module in iMIS to run all of their events and training.

A recent survey of iMIS customers in Australia and New Zealand found that 87% of respondents gave iMIS the thumbs up answering that they were satisfied with their iMIS software solution.

More than 220 not for profit organisations using iMIS were surveyed by independent agency BMS Telecorp on behalf of ASI during May.

The annual survey’s focus was to look at customers’ use of iMIS and gauge the level of satisfaction with their iMIS software solution and the level of service and support from ASI and Authorised iMIS Solution Providers.

The Fund received applications requesting over $60,000 in funding in our June round and the panel faced some challenging decisions in making the final selections. We are pleased to confirm a total of 12 Scholarships were awarded with a total value of $11,000. A further $9,000 will now be made available for the remainder of 2006 (September and December rounds).

The Scholarship recipients are as follows:

Our major campaign to gather prospect email addresses has hit the streets today. More than 10,000 prospects in Australia and New Zealand have been sent this postcard encouraging them to sign up for email contact with ASI (rather than postal mail).

For each valid email address we receive ASI will give $2 to charity (a customer of course!). We are supporting 6 charities in total, depending on the state or country.