What can I say? Life can’t all be about work!

For my birthday this week I had the opportunity to join the Porsche club for a driver training day. This included a couple of joy rides in the passenger seat. The highlight being this awesome Porsche Panamera. For a 2 tonne, 4 door running as an automatic, it did very nicely topping 200kph on the short straights. All in leather appointed luxury.

Watch the video below to join me around the track. It looks quite civilised until you notice the vibration and the way the camera suddenly getting much closer to the front as we approached the corners.

A big thanks to Peter and the guys. I had a great time.

A few months ago I wrote about 2D or QR barcodes and how important they are in connecting the real and virtual worlds. This month I am going to give you a bit of insight in to what will come after using this technique...the answer is image search.

I’m not talking about searching for an image, like when you need that piece of clip art or photograph to insert in your document, perhaps this is best explained by an example.

Let’s say you are considering buying a new car; you have a rough idea of what you’re looking for and you’re walking down the street and see just the thing. It’s cute, the right colour, five seats, everything you’re looking for; you pull out your mobile phone, take a quick photograph of it and you are taken immediately to a website from the manufacturer giving you details on the model, features, performance and of course your local dealer.

That evening you go out to dinner with friends, you see what looks like and interesting restaurant. A quick photograph with your mobile of the shop front and Google returns a restaurant review, menu and pricelist. You enjoy an excellent dinner including a bottle of wine, a quick photograph of the label on the bottle and you are able to order yourself a case to be delivered to your home in minutes.

That weekend, you’re at the beach with the kids, you see a bit of drama unfold as the lifesavers pull a man from the surf and get him back on his feet. On the way back to the car, you walk past the watchtower, take a photo of the logo and are taken to their website so you can make a contribution to the great work they do.

While all this might sound a bit farfetched, it’s actually a lot closer than you realise. In fact Google has had an experimental project called Google Goggles running for some time now. While this feature is currently only available to those using Google’s Android powered smart phones it is only a matter of time before this sort of capability is rolled out to all phones.

Recent tests that I’ve seen have shown it being used on logos, shop fronts, products, barcodes, book covers, paintings and people.

Now I’m not suggesting that you run out and start changing your website to support this capability right now - widespread adoption of this sort of technology is still a little way off and a few of the shortcomings still need to be ironed out. The problem is these days you don’t know whether “the future” is still a few years off or just a matter of months.

2010 I believe is going to be an incredible year, there are a huge range of technologies that I have been watching for some time now that look like they are reaching maturity, widespread adoption or new levels of being combined with other technologies. The rate of change or our world in the last decade was pretty amazing but I suspect we are in for even greater changes in this decade.

Ten years after the term Customer Relationship Management (CRM) was coined, it still amazes me how many organisations just don’t get what it really means. Whether you are a commercial organisation with traditional customers, a not-for-profit with donors, or a government department serving constituents, CRM is about having the right attitude towards the individuals and organisations that support your organisation by providing your revenue.

Regardless of the terminology, they are your customers. CRM is about providing those customers with due respect in order to develop an ongoing and productive relationship with them. Why do so many organisations think of CRM simply as a software product, or as a means to developing short term venue gains?

Yes, software has an important role to play. With the right software in your organisation’s hands it can act as a tremendous facilitator in developing and maintaining those relationships. Just as we all rely on calendars and automated reminders to remember our friend’s birthdays and other special events, CRM is a facilitator to support our inherent good will towards our clients. Without that good will CRM, regardless of your software, is useless.

These days too many corporate policies, procedures, and yes, even software products, are developed only with short term gains in mind. Focus has been lost in the long term objective of the relationship. But many organisations are starting to learn that in this modern, well connected world this is not always conducive to the best business outcome. These days, organisations have to be very careful about how they manage their customer relationships. Here is an example of the type of repercussions that an organisation’s short-sightedness can produce.

In 2008, a guy by the name of Dave Carroll flew United Airlines from Nova Scotia to Nebraska with his band. Along the way his $3,500 guitar was broken. In fact, when they were on the ground at Chicago’s O’Hare airport Carroll, one of his band mates and other passengers saw baggage handlers throwing guitars around the tarmac.

Carroll says he immediately raised the issue with the three flight attendants on the plane, but his concerns were disregarded. When they arrived at the destination, sure enough, his beloved Tailor acoustic guitar was smashed.

Carroll complained but United Airlines’ policies left their customer speechless and unsatisfied. That is until he found a new voice by vowing to write not one, but three songs about his saga. The first song “United Breaks Guitars” has already received over 5 million hits on YouTube and has quickly spread virally around the world. Recently the second song was added YouTube and iTunes as well.

United Airline has since tried to repair the damage by offering to pay for the repairs to his guitar, but Carroll has refused their belated offer. Needless to say this whole costly exercise, which is no doubt affecting not just their relationship with Carroll and his band but now probably tens of thousands of other current and potential clients as well, could have been so easily avoided if United had their customers in their best interests at heart.

So when you are thinking about your CRM system yes, selecting the right software and vendor is most important but so too is having the right mind set and corporate adjectives. These of course will play a significant role in dictating both, your software and vendor choice as well as your own business processes and policies. Indeed every part of the character of your organisation should be directed by these decisions. Only organisations that truly understand this will truly get the most out of Customer Relationship Management.

So here for you viewing pleasure are Dave’s first two songs. I will come back and add the third when it has been released.

Do you know what a Datamatrix Barcode is?

You can just refer to them as “those funny square barcodes” if you wish.

So what are they? They’re actually a type of barcode that can be read by many mobile phones. The way it works is these barcodes can store different information such as a website URL or product names and details. Some can even store short videos and animations.

What you do is include one of these Datamatrix barcodes embedded with data in a printed advertisement, brochure, billboard; we’ve even got a customer planning on putting one on a horse.

Anyone who’s interested and has a camera phone (most phones these days are capable) with the appropriate software can simply point their phone at the barcode and instantly be taken to the website you have encoded in it.

Quite simply it’s a way of taking people immediately to a website without asking them to open their browser, enter in a URL etc. Instead it’s just point the phone and click and they are at your website.

Datamatrix barcodes have been huge in some markets for a number of years; in particular Japan where they were invented and have been extremely popular since 1998 (that’s over 10 years).

In Australia and the US and many other markets they are only just now starting to gain traction, but expect to see these Datamatrix barcodes more frequently.

Telstra have just shipped free versions of the software required and are including it on many new mobiles from HTC and others (Click here to find out more). Other carriers are doing the same. There are iPhone apps for it. Google’s Android phones have them. They’re popping up everywhere.

DMS has a tradition of taking advantage of the latest trends and technologies and we are already helping our customers put this great new technology to use in their campaigns.

If you want to know more about Datamatrix barcodes and how they can be integrated with your marketing messages and websites, email or call me now.

DMS have been making a lot of headlines recently with their Charity Champions system, an online fundraising tool that has been used by a number of charities to raise funds and profiles with tremendous success.

While other similar systems like Everyday Hero are available, none can offer the degree of flexibility or integration that the MAILman Charity Campion system does.

As many of you know already, Riding for the Disabled Association of Australia has had tremendous success with the website that DMS has developed for them (www.rda.org.au). Already this website has contributed significantly to raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for the organisation and boosting their profile amongst clients, supporters and associated organisations tremendously.

Some months ago they approached us and asked ask us to put together a new campaign based around the story of the Fantom Rider (aka Robert Willy Fantom), and his attempt to raise $1million for RDA.

RDA is not alone in being a Not-For-Profit organisation that has very little in the way of IT proficiency or capabilities. But they do have a great story to tell, a great cause to support, and strong desire to work hard to spread their message.

The Fantom Rider campaign has allowed DMS once again show its prowess at customising its systems for their particular requirements that our customers bring us. We have combined some of the latest online technologies with clever creative to produce this wonderful website. While their campaign is yet to get into full swing, the RDA are very excited by what has been produced by DMS for them.

We wish RDA and Willy Fantom every success. Check it out at www.fantomrider.com now.

I stopped doing blog entries from November, 2008 to March, 2009 and we continued to monitor site activity and rankings over that period. I then recommenced adding blog entries in March, 2009 and again we have continued to monitor site activity and rankings.

 

In times like this, real results are more important than ever, and DMS knows how to produce results. 

It seems like only yesterday that the biggest problem that many Australian organisations faced was “how do I keep up with the growth?” Outsourcing was seen by many as an ideal way of allowing an organisation to manage the issues of staff turnover, scalability and staying focused on the core business.

Now, suddenly, many are facing a new challenge. Staff, or even entire business units, are being trimmed. At the same time they are trying to maintain their levels of service and marketing in order to retain existing customers and keep income flowing. The equation has suddenly shifted from “how to I do more with the same?” to one of “how do I do the same with less?”

Once again outsourcing non-core business functions may be the solution. Let’s look at the example of one of our customers who run a typical marketing department.

Like many organisations, they are large enough to have a marketing department and yet small enough that even at the peak of the economy, they struggled to have specialised people in each of the roles of campaign manager, copy writer, Google analyst, graphic artist, website designer, programmer, IT administrator etc. And yet they require each of these roles in order to do their job properly.

Now, as budgets across the board are being trimmed, suddenly there are holes opening up in what the department can do.

At DMS we have developed a solution based strategy for many of our clients. It’s not one size fits all, it’s tailored to provide just the services that each client requires.

While many of our larger clients only require our software products, for an increasing number our services resources are becoming an important addition to their own in-house team.  DMS has provided marketing, software development, copy writing, graphic design, even the hosting of servers and infrastructure to various clients. Some organisations choose to outsource almost their entire marketing and/or fundraising processes to DMS, while others like my example client, pick only certain areas like the hosting of server infrastructure and technical services to outsource.

This client now runs a reduced team who work closely with DMS staff as though they were their own employees. We provide the services and expertise they require, often exceeding their previous levels of capability because we have staff dedicated to roles like server administration, Google analytics, website development etc. For them, it has been an ideal solution, meeting their twin objectives of reducing cost while maintaining capabilities.

At DMS, we give our clients complete freedom as to what they want to outsource and for how long. For example, an organisation who choices to outsource their server infrastructure now, is fully able to bring it in house again when things pick up.

The bottom line is that DMS is a dependable, well resourced organisation that can provide a robustness to sections of your organisation that are suffering under the economic strain.

If you find that your business or charity suddenly has holes in its capabilities or resources, call us now and let’s talk. There may be a solution that we can offer that will not only help you survive the recession, but put you in an excellent position for growth once it’s over.

As most of you know, DMS are very good at building websites. Over the last several years we have built a significant team of developers, interface designers, graphic artists, copy writers and others who, together, have produced some amazing results for our customers.

One of our biggest difficulties when developing a new site for our clients is often getting content from the client.

Last year we noticed a trend; the most successful client sites that we had were ones where the customers heavily involved themselves in the development and publication of content on their site, not just upfront, but on an ongoing basis. Other customers worked well with us in developing the interface and design of their website but failed to muster the resources to produce useful, relevant and timely content, either for the initial site launch or on an ongoing basis, thus keeping their site fresh. These customers invariably suffered through poorer results in terms of both traffic and conversions.

To highlight this I decided to conduct an experiment with this blog.

Every site that DMS has been involved with in the last several years, including this blog, we have monitored and tracked the site’s traffic and rankings. For example, here is what happened to the www.rda.org.au site when we redeveloped and relaunched it, for Riding for Disabled Australia.

So approximately three months ago, I stopped producing content for this blog.

Now the blog is not the only piece of content on this site. There are numerous resources that clients are directed to and of course there’s my biography, but it is the weekly blog that I believed was responsible for the majority of the traffic generation. Not only because people see new content as important but search engines do too. If Google sees that a website is frequently being updated and added to, it will visit that site more frequently and increase the site’s relevance when searches are performed.

Unfortunately, to fool Google I had to but the pause button on for some months, so it would see a changed pattern of behaviour and adjust its actions accordingly. Here‘s what happened…

As you can see there has been a gradually decline over the last couple of months after a continuous rise in rankings, prior to that point.

Despite how busy we are in the office (aren’t we all?), I am now going to make concerted effort to make sure that new content is posted this blog on the usual weekly basis. Let’s watch and see what happens…

This year DMS has had the opportunity to build websites for a number of clients. In many cases, we have been given complete control over the site’s design, but in others we have been asked to work with external graphic artists who have been given overall control of the site’s look and feel, while we were given responsibility for the technical aspects of the site.

Direct Marketing Software turned 21 today!

When I registered a business in 1987, I was a sole developer specialising in large scale database development for the PC platform. I had no idea that I would still be running the same company 21 years later and providing mission critical software solutions to many of Australia’s leading Not for Profits, local government and direct marketing organisations.

DMS is now one of Queensland’s top 400 privately owned companies and for many of the 1000 Australian businesses that rely on us, we have become a one stop solution for their marketing technology needs.

In 1987, hardly anybody outside of the research community had even heard of the internet. Now, DMS is one of Australia’s leading providers of internet marketing solutions, particularly in the Not for Profit sector. We have estimated that nearly half a billion dollars worth of transactions have been processed through our CRM systems, with nearly 300 million of those dollars being donations and other contributions to charities like Mission Australia, CBMI, the Salvation Army, the Endeavour Foundation and many more.

I’m not even going to try and think about the hundreds of millions of direct mail pieces and other direct marketing communications that have gone through our data quality, list management, and postal barcoding tools. But I do know that organisations like AMP, Vodafone, Telstra, Brisbane City Council and many others believe our products to be among the best available anywhere in the world.

My proudest achievement however has to be the building of a great team of people. DMS is an organisation where people enjoy being at work. We do things here that are innovative, of the highest standard, and that make a real difference - even after 21 years. The people here at DMS and the great customers I have come to know will continue to motivate me to drive the business forward. In fact, this is probably the most exciting period of time in DMS’s history and we’re enjoying a fantastic period of innovation and growth.

But for today, I just wish to thank everybody who has had a hand in the last 21 years, either as a member of our team, a customer, a partner or a friend. Thank you and I hope you are as proud of this great Australian company as I am.

On July 11^th 2008, Telstra, Optus and Vodafone - three of Australia’s largest carriers, will officially release Apple Corp’s iPhone 3G into the Australian market.

Of course, the release of a new telephone is not normally such a big deal. But the iPhone is very different for two reasons.

1. It has that hot, sexy “must have” vibe that resonates particularly well with Generation Y. In the USA alone, half a million iPhones were sold in the first weekend and have sold in excess of six million to date, with shipments expected to more than double to 13 million units before the year’s end.

2. The iPhone is changing how people surf the web. Now, many young people are not even bothering to purchase a PC. In the same way they use mobiles instead of fixed phones, they do all of their web browsing, instant messaging and more through their 3G enabled phone. While many handsets have had this capability for a while, the iPhone is making this practice far more prevalent.

So why is this important to you? Let’s look further into some of these trends. As a general rule, Google gets to see web trends occur far earlier than the rest of the internet. This is mainly due to the sheer volume of traffic to and ubiquity of this site. They are also known for their tracking and measurement of virtually everything that can be tracked and measured on the internet, and Google also maintains massive databases or usage characteristics which they trawl through regularly.

In February 2008, Google found what they thought was a significant error in their analysis. The use of hand-held devices to access the search engine had increased by more than 50 fold over the previous couple of months. However, further analysis showed that they weren’t wrong; these numbers were almost entirely due to iPhone users.

Analysts are now expecting that by the end of 2008, up to 7% of internet users will be browsing the web via iPhones and other similar devices.

Well, “so what?” you might be asking. This hand-held internet access is a problem for you and your customers if your website is not easily accessed and used on these small screen devices. Have you ever tried browsing your website and entering a donation or order using a hand-held device? If not, can I suggest you give it a go?

The bottom line is, if your organisation is receiving any number of donations, lottery ticket purchases or other transactions, or if you provide services, information or even just PR via your website, you need to start thinking about the design and technical implications that mobile devices raise.

The internet is full of hype and amazing promises, the majority of which end up being nothing more than a lot of hot air.  I suspect that this one has some real substance to it.

At DMS we have been playing with hand-held device interfaces for websites for several months. They certainly pose some interesting issues, particularly if you want to do it well.

While I don’t recommend you drop everything and charge off to redesign your website for the iPhone, it is something you need to start thinking about in your planning over the next six to twelve months. That is of course, unless you aren’t interested in the Gen-Y market.

If you’ve ever watched an iron man surf competition you know what the term “catching a wave” means. Competitors struggle out to a buoy trying to gain an edge of just one or two meters on their competitors but, if they are lucky, on the return journey that one or two meter advantage can make the difference between catching a wave back to shore or not. A body length’s difference can mean they are suddenly propelled to a twenty meter advantage while their opponents are left languishing in the surf.

Last week I was brainstorming on some development ideas for the Rural Fire Brigade Association of Queensland after they attended our Hi-Tech, High Tea presentation on utilising the internet in fundraising. It struck me that the promotion of many organisations is very much like an iron man competition.

Few organisations are blessed with limitless funds for self-promotion and the acquisition of new donors. But every now and then, a wave of related PR washes through our society. The question you have to ask yourself is; ‘Is my organisation ready to catch that wave when it comes, or will it fall off the back and be left almost where it began?’

In May 2005, Kylie Minogue was diagnosed with breast cancer. During the weeks after the diagnosis, there was a twenty fold increase in news coverage of breast cancer. This translated directly into an increase of women getting breast screenings by over 40%, with a more than doubling in the number of non-previously screened women in the critical 40-69 year age group.

A similar increase in awareness of prostate cancer occurred when footballing celebrity Sam Newman publicised his battle in a 60 Minutes programme earlier this year, and support for associated charities surged on both occasions.

So how does this relate to the Rural Fire Brigade? Well the RFB are more fortunate than most in that their wave of PR comes almost every summer. But I have three questions for them;

1. How are they going to catch the wave i.e. how are they going to generate the traffic to their website for example? If somebody Google’s ‘Queensland Bushfires’, are they going to end up at RFB’s website?
2. How are they going to stay on the wave? That is, how are they going to convert those initial visits into returning traffic and most importantly financial support? Do you have a process ready to involve and engage these hot prospects? For example blogs and news pages where articles, photos and even videos from the RFB volunteers can be posted, and a conversion strategy in place. Done right, they could become the media source for TV news items and more.
3. Will they survive the wave if the wave is ten-feet tall or will they get “dumped”? In other words, what happens if their website traffic goes from hundreds of visitors a day to hundreds of thousands of visitors a day, will their infrastructure be up to the task?

While not every organisation is in a position like the Red Cross to literally take advantage of actual tsunami size waves when they occur, having a well thought out and established strategy for catching social waves when they occur is absolutely vital. If you’re left scampering about when it hits you, it will simply pass you by leaving you to fall back on that much more difficult process of winning new donors one by one.

 Most of us by now are aware of YouTube. It's been used to send funny clips and music videos to colleagues and friends millions of times over. So popular is it in fact that by the end of 2008 it is estimated that over 50% of the entire traffic across the internet will be video streaming from the now Google owned YouTube.com

YouTube can be more than just a source of amusement though. It provides a powerful emotive medium that fundraisers and marketers can take advantage of. Whether it is explaining concepts or connecting people with the faces of those bearing hardship or tragedy, video is unequalled as a communication medium.

For fundraisers in particular, it is important that you are able to establish an emotional connection between your audience and your cause. YouTube provides a method for you to do that.

Here is a great example of what is possible. This video tells the story of Richard Hoyt who has a son, Rick, who has Cerebral Palsy. Over the years they have produced many videos telling their story and have been portrayed in many articles, interviews and new items. Richard was originally an unfit man when Rick asked if he could take part in a fun run. They are now seasoned competitors in tri-athlete  and marathons the world over. Why? Because after that first run Rick told his dad that when running he “didn’t feel disabled any more”. It’s a truly emotional story.

Now imagine harnessing videos like this to make connections with your customers and supports? Don’t you think that would make a difference to your message?

Yesterday DMS ran its HI TECH High Tea presentation to a number of Brisbane’s leading fundraisers. During the presentation I promised attendees that I would be updating my blog that afternoon but I’m only just getting to it, so fantastic has the response been. I should have known given that we originally planned for 20 to 30 attendees and had nearly 60 and further, had to cap that after only ten days of promotion.

Since the presentation, we’ve already had dozens of emails and phone calls thanking us, complimenting us on both the execution of the event and its content and asking us for repeat presentations to board members, demonstrations of our products and quotes for web development.

The Hi-Tech High Tea was run by DMS at Brisbane’s famous Joseph Alexander’s restaurant on Coronation Drive. It was a great networking event for all of us there and judging by the feedback we received, it was extremely topical.

DMS have been working on extending our MAILman fundraising and CRM applications for the last twelve months so that organisations no longer have separate website and in-house software systems. We were able to show this off as well demonstrate how social networking sites, Web 2 technologies and a whole variety of other internet related issues are changing the landscape for not-for-profits and commercial organisations alike.

DMS are now planning to run repeat presentations in the coming months in Brisbane again, as well as Sydney and Melbourne. If you would like to register your interest in attending this event or you know colleagues who might be interested send me an email and I’ll make sure you’re included in the invitations list.

Here’s some of the feedback we received from the event.

Finally, I’d like to thank everybody involved, in particular my fantastic staff who did an amazing job. So much so that we had professional event managers in the audience praising how well the event was run. Thank you also to everyone who attended and helped make it such a success. And we appreciate all the kind words you’ve given us.

This morning DMS ran a highly successful presentation on the use of
Web 2.0 technology for fundraisers.  Nearly 60 people from over 30 different
Not For Profit organisations attended. 
DMS would like to thank all attendees and we hope this session has been highly informative.

There are a lot of organisations out there looking for product or products to solve their web marketing problems. They often get caught up in feature comparisons and wish lists and looking at how they might solve their current internet marketing issues.

When I talk to clients I try to speak in terms of strategy rather than solution.

The problem with a solution based offering is that it can only encompass the issues that your organisation is facing right now, or at least those it can envisage it will face in the near future. With the internet moving so quickly however, this is not enough.

For example, who, six months ago would have factored Facebook into their marketing strategy? And yet today it needs to be given at least consideration.

The internet is such a dynamic environment at the moment and it is likely to continue to be so for the foreseeable future. I’m encouraging customers to look not for products that can solve particular products but for an organisation to partner with over the long term.

I’m also suggesting that they also need to budget with this in mind. An internet solution is not like buying an accounting system. Your requirements in a few months’ time might be very different to what they are today. Yes an initial investment is required to get going but so too is an on-going commitment to keep pace important. This doesn’t mean that you need to be on the bleeding edge. For most clients we strongly recommend against that. Let us and others face that expensive battle. But it does mean that you need to be prepared and resources sufficiently to take advantage of the proven new opportunities as they present themselves.

At DMS we have a team of people constantly researching a variety of technologies and assessing their viability; comparing how they might be used to leverage our various clients’ positions, looking at the cost of implementation, trying to work out how to make them easier to use and a whole variety of other things. On an almost daily basis, we encounter new problems and opportunities and it’s not just in the area of software development.

In addition to our development team, we also have Google experts, graphic artists, copy writers and we take advice from other external experts who focus on specific areas like RSS, Blogging, Twitter, Facebook and many others. Add to that the people who work on the areas like changes in SMS marketing, direct mail and print advertisements and various combinations and becomes quite a complex ever changing process.

To give you an idea of what this is like I thought I might list just some of the areas we’ve worked on just this last week:

-          Facebook marketing campaign results which resulted in thousands of new contacts but only a couple hundred dollars of revenue.

-          Rendering of emails; many organisations have looked at the issue of how their web pages are rendered differently in different browsers and computers, but what about those HTML emails you send out? How do they look on a 3G cell phone or Blackberry which is where an increasing number of people are reading them.

-          What is the best method of delivery of donation receipts or art union/lottery tickets, email with a PDF attachment or a physical mail piece? The emails often get blocked and some people don’t have the same confidence in having a PDF in their inbox versus a physical piece of paper in their hands. On the other hand, email gives you that immediate response and lower fulfilment costs but can result also in higher customer service costs if they go astray. Is it better to select one or the other for on-line orders or offer a choice? Should the same choice be offered to telephone and mail orders? So far we’ve been unable to find any research on this interesting topic.

-          We have a new best practices document for credit card data storage for our customers.

-          We have been discussing a variety of new attack vectors being utilised by hackers.

-          We’ve been experimenting with server performance and how it is affected by some of these new technologies when implementing on a large scale.

-          How do we improve Google’s ability to see data published through content management systems and how do we increase the frequency of search engine spiders crawling our website?

These and many other subjects have been worked on in just the last five days here at DMS. This is on top of all of the other things that we have to do of course.

It’s a never ending challenge but one that we as a team love. No one operates as a silo and each of us has work that influences the others. Then we have to package it all up and show what we’ve learnt to our customers delivering both products and expertise.

This is what a serious organisation needs to do in order to do well in today’s market. And this is what we offer to our clients. As you can see we’ve come a long way from shipping prepacked software.

Here at DMS we try to practice what we preach. For example, we use our own software for all of our customer relationship management, data quality, postal barcoding, campaign management etc. But we also like to employ the same techniques and approaches that we recommend to our customers when doing our own marketing.

A couple of weeks ago, we decided to run a road show to promote our new MAILman web integration. This road-show was targeted initially towards Brisbane (Sydney and Melbourne coming soon) based Not for Profit organisations that met our particular criteria for size, ability to purchase and interest level. Of course having relevant and topical subject matter to present and good marketing creative was important. But what we felt was most important was who we contacted and how.

We decided to use a variety of methods both to contact people and allow them to respond. For example, we used both our own contact lists and rented contact lists to communicate with different sectors of our target market via e-mail, post, telephone and networking. As expected, our experience showed us that a prospect that, for example, had received an e-mail and/or a mail piece from us regarding the presentation was much more likely to respond positively to us when we called them.

So too did customers appreciate the variety of methods with which they could respond. Many registered on-line or via e-mail. Others chose to phone us and we even had a couple of responses via fax even though we hadn’t included our fax number (we thought people wouldn’t want this option but we were wrong).

The crucial thing that both this campaign and those our customers have been running has been that customers want choice. They will choose which media they respond to and which method they will use to respond.

Campaign managers must think in terms of multiple simultaneous media and this in turn means that they must have infrastructure and systems in place both to roll out multi-stream campaigns and to handle responses in a variety of methods. In fact we have seen an increase in campaign managers focusing less on split testing of various creative and more on split testing of different combinations of solicitation method.

In many cases this has meant a complete change of direction and in many cases (if interest in MAILman is anything to go by) often a change of systems and infrastructure as well. Those who are making these changes successfully are seeing immediate returns, higher response rates, new market opportunities, increased customer communication and retention and lower overall business costs.

These are exciting times in fundraising and marketing; don’t be left behind.

In February 2008 Australia Post made a draft submission to the ACCC seeking permission to increase postal charges across the board. Copy of this draft proposal from Australia Post regarding the price increases can be downloaded from the ACCC website.

The proposed price increases from Australia Post cover most of their letter services from an increase in the price of a single stamp of 10% from 50 cents to 55 cents through all of the barcoded mail, charity mail, clean mail and other letter services.

While these moves are being opposed by industry groups such as the Major Mail Users Association (MMUA),and the Fundraising Institute of Australia (FIA),history has shown us that Australia Post are generally successful at getting requests for price increases through the federal government, albeit sometimes with modifications as happened in 2002 when the last increases occurred.

I’m not going to comment on whether or not I think Australia Post is justified in seeking the postage price increases, however their planned implementation in July 2008 is going to be critical for many.

Organisations across Australia, both Not-for-Profit and commercial, are already starting to see the effects of the changes in our slowing economy; as interest rates have risen, business is starting to tighten as consumer confidence drops. Most organisations have put a hold on, or reduced, their hiring, expenditure and income and profit forecasts. The rising price of credit and commodities such as fuel are already putting price pressure on Australian organisations. These looming price increases from Australia Post will only serve to add further pressure to those organisations already starting to struggle.

One of the key arguments put forward by groups like the MMUA and the FIA to the ACCC against a price increase is their belief that Australia Post has not yet fully taken advantage of the cost benefits of their FuturePost program (postal barcoding) which was introduced in 1997. Australia Post will surely try to address this in an effort to nullify this argument.

It appears to me that regardless of the outcome of Australia Post’s submission to the ACCC, one thing is certain; it is even more important than ever for organisations to assess their use of Australia Post’s postal barcoding services to determine whether or not they are getting the full discounts on offer; and if they are not utilising postal barcoding already, a strong consideration should be given to implementing postal barcoding technologies as soon as possible.

Naturally, DMS has a vested interest in promoting postal barcoding as DMS develops the largest range of postal barcoding software available with products ranging from those suitable for small businesses through to those capable of running the mail lodgement operations of major councils. However the numbers speak for themselves.

Even at today’s current pricing levels, a quick check of DMS’s Postal Savings Whitepaper or Postage Savings Calculator will show that if an organisation spends $5,000 or more annually on postage, considerable cost reductions can be made with postal barcoding.

I would encourage you to do the maths yourselves before the price increases are introduced.

DMS will be watching the Australia Post submission closely and will provide customers with an updated whitepaper and calculator once the ACCC provides the market with their recommendations. Australia Post is hoping to makes the changes in July though, so with the end of financial year looming, there isn’t much time.

These days most organisations realise that when they put a new fundraising or CRM system in-house that they need to allocate budget to train their staff. But what happens after that? What happens when your staff members leave or new staff members are brought in? What happens when your organisation moves forward from where you first made your software purchase?

Recently we have had a number of our customers struggle with these questions. I can not tell you what a difference some additional training has done to those organisations that have gone ahead with it. Meanwhile, others who still have not made up their minds have continued to struggle and turnover staff.

Let’s look at a couple of scenarios;

Each of these organisations are real organisations that are suffering going through very real everyday issues. We have suppressed their names for privacy sake.

Organisation A is a small not-for-profit with approximately a dozen staff in their fund-raising team. Over the last three years, they have turned over a number of staff and now there is nobody currently on staff who originally underwent software training. Their management is hoping to stabilise their staff situation and then put everybody through the training simultaneously in order to keep their costs down. The problem with this is that it has taken many months so far and there is still no end in sight. Staff members are telling us directly that if they do not get training, they also will leave. Meanwhile, serious mistakes are being made in their database because staff aren’t sure how to handle various situations. Even when staff are properly trained, it is going to take them months to go back and try to address the errors that have been introduced into their database in the meantime.

Now compare that to Organisation B. Once again, this organisation has lost several staff over the last couple of years. Staff members were feeling dissatisfied with their jobs and the organisation were certainly dissatisfied with their computer system. After I spoke directly with their Managing Director, the decision was made immediately to bring a DMS trainer on-site to both train staff and to review the state of their database to address any issues. Within a week the training had been completed and the total cost to the organisation was under $4,000. The staff members now feel confident with their fundraising system and as a result are far happier with their jobs. The whole demeanour of the organisation has changed from one of reluctance to touch the database to one where they are actively formulating new ways to raise funds and run events.

Organisation C is a large charity close to DMS that has made a significant investment in DMS software applications. They have an active policy to invest in their staff on an on-going basis. Even existing staff that have been using the software for a while and are well versed in its operations are given the opportunity to speak directly to DMS consultants from time to time. These sorts of engagements are half training and half consultative and they allow the organisation to fully explore and utilise the software to its full potential. For the price of as couple days consulting every six months, the organisation stays right up to date with the latest in DMS technology and best practices. They have been able to find out new ways to use our software eliminating the need for other separate systems. Most importantly though, they have been able to leverage upon the softwares capabilities and even have input into new features and developments to ensure that their overall fundraising practices are state of the art.

As I said, these are all very real situations with very real customers. We are hoping that Customer A will come round soon and make the investments in their staff that they really need to. Software alone cannot run an organisation.

I want to leave you with a quote from Tom O’Toole of Beachworth Bakery fame. Tom is famous for not only turning a small, rundown bakery into a major tourist destination but in turning the economy of the whole surrounding community around as a result as well. Tom is respected as a fairly simple kind of bloke who gets his business acumen from common sense rather than an MBA. On the subject of training, his accountant once asked him “Tom what happens if you train them and they leave?” Tom considered this for a moment and said “What happens if I don’t train them and they stay?”

Your people are your most valuable asset. Give them the support that they deserve. You and your organisation will be rewarded many times over.

Despite the huge success many organisations are having with on-line marketing, the fact remains that for many organisations (particularly charities), direct mail, telemarketing and other traditional forms of marketing still play a crucial role in generating income.

Many consumers are not yet comfortable with on-line commerce and others simply place very low value on internet based marketing or are not even connected to the internet. Often organisations also find that using one media or another is not as effective as combining media. For example, an e-mail broadcast just before or after a direct mail shot to the same clients will almost always out-perform an e-mail broadcast or direct mail shot alone.

So let’s face it, orders and donations will continue to come in via direct mail, fax and telephone for many years to come. So how do we process these transactions in the most cost effective and efficient way?

At DMS we have for many years worked with our clients on this very problem. This week I would like to demonstrate a couple of ways in which MAILman makes this process as efficient as can be.

In the videos below, you will see how MAILman integrates with a number of devices and techniques such as barcode scanning, cheque reading and intelligent data entry forms to dramatically reduce the time it takes for an operator to key a transaction. In fact in a test we ran some years ago with The Salvation Army, we were able to reduce the average transaction from approximately 50 keystrokes and 72 seconds down to an average of 14 key strokes and 35 seconds. That's over a 50% productivity improvement!

Check out the videos below to learn more:

Donation Entry

Returned Mail Processing

What a fantastic weekend, the highlight was an acrobatic tiger moth flight that took me on loops, barrel rolls and nose dives in the skies over the Gold Coast. Check out some of the video below;

In last week’s blog I introduced RSS feeds. Since then I’ve had a number of people ask me what RSS feeds are and why they are important.

In essence, RSS feeds are a way of pushing news and content from your website to interested parties without using e-mail. E-mail as you know is great but these days a lot of e-mails are blocked by spam filters and customers are tending towards communications processes where they are in control. When receiving e-mail newsletters customers sometimes feel like they are having information thrust upon them whereas RSS feeds work by the customer pulling information from your website to their in-box.

Perhaps the easiest way to show what RSS feeds are and how they work is to watch this short video.

If you’ve been following this blog, you’ll know that DMS is making a big splash this year around its web development capabilities. This push has raised two common questions from amongst our customers; “Why now?” And; “what makes DMS different from our existing web site developers?”

Let’s first look at the question of “why now?” The internet isn’t exactly new after all. Many companies and organisations have gone out and already developed web sites or web enabling technologies.

DMS has always seen itself as a company focused first and foremost on building customer relationships & developing relationship enabling technologies and secondly, as a technical innovator.

So why is it important to us that we place these items in this order? Well, a lot of new technologies don’t exactly pan out the way people expected. There are unexpected side effects, often there are high costs in being early adopters for very little return. Some even turn customers off. Take telephone voice recognition for example, a very promising technology, but if you have ever used Telstra’s white pages voice recognition to find a phone number over the phone, you’ll know that it’s a far cry from speaking to a real life operator.

DMS have watched as the term CRM (Customer Relationship Management) has been dragged through the mud by hundreds of technology focused companies trying to adopt the latest buzz words as their own. Very few have truly understood how to build a customer relationship though, and this for us is the defining factor. There’s no point in producing cutting edge technology if it doesn’t result in a real improvement in customer relationships. Over the last several years DMS have quietly been working with many of our clients to develop technologies and marketing techniques, many of which have been based around the web, that truly do deliver in terms of relationship benefits. This has meant that we have explored hundreds of various technologies and gained real first hand experience in deploying them in customer facing environments before taking them to our clients to deploy.

Take a look at this site for example. We have intentionally chosen to include technologies such as RSS Feeds and Google Ads as a way of showing our customers these technologies being used in a real customer focused environment. What’s more, we can give you the benefit of our experience in terms of expectations and how these technologies fit into the rest of your business. We can tell you what technologies you should employ for your particular business requirements. In other words, we’re not just selling software but real business enabling techniques and applications.

Of course behind the scenes we have a whole team of developers constantly experimenting and researching to make sure that DMS is at the leading edge in terms of our technical capabilities but at the end of the day, this alone is not enough. If these technologies cannot deliver to our customers the real business benefits that they expect, then we are not doing our job.

Now as for the second question, “why us and not some other website developer?”; particularly when just about anybody can paint a web page these days. Well, I expect I’ve answered that question as well.

For years now, DMS has been recognised as one of the leading developers of fundraising and campaign management solutions, and over the last few weeks I have been talking about the exciting new improvements that we have made to these product offerings recently.

This week’s big announcement is not about technology, but about a new range of services now available at DMS.

We can now provide our not for profit clients with the opportunity to work with one vendor to solve virtually all of their business, infrastructure and resource problems.

Many charities suffer from the problem of simply not being big enough or sufficiently resourced. They may not have in-house IT staff let alone an IT team. They might have somebody who can write website copy sometimes, but they don’t have ready access to graphic artists or specialists in areas like search engine optimisation and Google Ad-word account management.

Some organisations even struggle to hold together the server infrastructure they need to run their database. These are now areas that DMS can help you with;

- Industry leading fundraising and campaign management software

- Postal barcoding, rapid data entry and data quality solutions

- Hosting of fundraising databases and websites

- Copywriting, graphic arts and campaign production skills

- Search engine optimisation, Google Ad-word account management

- E-mail and mail campaign production

- VoIP systems and integrated telephony

- Electronic clearance of credit card transactions

- Customer and donor profiling and targeting

What does all this mean to you?

Well, put simply, it means we can solve a lot of your problems. We can provide you with an entire fundraising infrastructure including hosting, software, people and processes. Everything you need to develop and expand your fundraising efforts.

Already have some of that stuff? No problem. You can choose what you do in house and what you get us to do for you. You can even use many of our services on an ad hoc basis, for example when your copy writer is on maternity leave, your data entry personnel are over-loaded and your web site designer can’t get your new site design up in time for your big campaign.

We’ve worked with Australian not-for-profits for over a decade now and we can’t tell you how excited we are to be the first company to be able to provide such a broad ranging solution.

If you’d like to know more, please call Ethan on (07) 3510 955 or e-mail him on efc@dmsw.com.au

Last weekend three of our staff travelled to Perth for the annual Fundraising Industry Conference. By all reports it was a fantastic conference with an even larger number of attendees than in previous years and great enthusiasm for our MAILman and POSTman product lines. Of particular interest was the MAILman website integration that is delivering new opportunities to our not-for-profit clients.

A number of individuals took advantage of our on-site iridologist for a personal health check and many organisations have signed up for the free database health check that we offered at the show.

The quality of your customer database is absolutely vital to the success of your marketing and customer service. We hate to see our charities wasting money so we offered database health checks worth nearly $2,000 to FIA attendees completely free of charge.

We perform a rigorous testing process looking for duplication, inconsistencies in your data, postal barcoding rates, missing data elements and a range of other factors that compromise you marketing campaigns and cost your business money and customers. Past users of our database health checks have saved tens of thousands of dollars since.

If you would like to know more about our database health checks, or if you missed out on the FIA conference and would like one just the same, give Fiona a call on (07) 3510 9555 and ask her nicely. You can also email her via f.douglas@dmsw.com.au

Last week I introduced you to the on-line donation page at themillenniumfoundation.org.au. One of the key features of this page is the validation of data as it is entered.

So many websites I see have poor validation of customer details. Of course if the details are entered lazily or incorrectly by the customer, they are going to be wrong. This means returned mail, low postal barcoding rates and more importantly, the possibility of losing the customer that you thought you just gained.

DMS has done a lot of research in this area over the last couple of years. One of the key things that we have done is building in our POSTman application support to our client’s sites.

For those of you not familiar with it, POSTman is an AMAS certified application that incorporates a database from Australia Post of all deliverable addresses in Australia. It can be used to validate address data and detects when customers have made a misspelling or got the postcode/suburb incorrect, or even just entered a completely bogus address!

POSTman automatically corrects minor errors or assist the client by taking them to a list of “near matches”. Websites are notorious for the poor quality of data that they produce and POSTman has been a great solution for many of our clients including the likes of Vodafone.

But here’s the exciting part; we are now introducing an even easier way to add this capability to your website. DMS are now offering the POSTman application as an online web service that you can subscribe to for as little as $49.95 per month. We’ll even give you example source code to show you how to build this address validation into your website.

Offering POSTman address validation via a web service means that customers can get up and running very quickly with no need to install any software, no need to apply the quarterly updates from Australia Post and no need to worry about security issues or where to publish the POSTman web application.

If you would like to know more about the POSTman Web Service, please give Andrew a call on (07) 3510 9555 or e-mail him at a.douglas@dmsw.com.au

More great news for MAILman customers this week; over the last few weeks I’ve been talking about the new Content Management and website integration capabilities in the upcoming release of MAILman. This week we’ll be going live with the first site that incorporates live transaction processing.

Go visit the Millennium Foundation’s website; they raise funds for research at the Westmead Hospital in Sydney.

We’ve developed for them an on-line donation page in our secure environment here at DMS that is directly linked to their pre-existing website and their MAILman database. That means strong validation of your customers’ and donors’ details, duplicate detection, automatic updating of accounts and best of all no file transfers. On-line contributions are saved straight in their MAILman database.

Over the next few weeks, we have a number of other sites that will be going live as well with the same technology. Currently we can do event registrations, donations, pledges and the updating of donor details. In the next month or two we’ll be delivering the same ability for merchandise sales and lottery ticket sales. We can even do custom transaction types so if you have some really unusual requirements, let us know.

This is just one more step to tie MAILman to customer websites. The big focus is on eliminating the gap between what is done on your website and what is done on your in-house CRM or fundraising system. The days of heavy compromises and totally separate systems are over.

If you want to know more about what we have done with MAILman and web integration, download this white paper now.

Last week I explained that the new DMS website is now being driven by our MAILman CRM application. This week I’m going to explain a little more. In particular what we have done in respect to content management. For most organisations’ web-sites are developed by external developers and the process of producing, authenticating and then publishing content is a difficult one. There is so much going backwards and forwards between your copywriters and graphic artists, the website developers and the website hosts.

To build relationships with your clients, communications via your website is a vital tool. To enable this, DMS have developed a complete content management system and built it right into the MAILman application. Much of the content on the dmsw.com.au site and all of the content on the MikeFrench.info site is now produced and published entirely within the MAILman CRM application.

The few lucky clients who have been privy to this so far tell us that they have been really impressed with how easy it is to produce content and publish it through MAILman. You may have already seen on the 28th of January posting an example of the range of multimedia content we are capable of publishing as well.

I’m going to post here a few more articles that show some of the other types of content that we can publish as well. Things like Google Maps, photographs and more are all managed through the one easy to use interface. With proper quality control and security mechanisms, you can even control when content is to be published automatically, so that you can have pages pre-set to appear and be revoked at set times making your website truly dynamic.

There are two reasons why this is important. One, of course, is simply to make the process of communicating with your clients fast and efficient but the second is because Google and other web search engines like to see new content appearing all the time. If they see that your site is dynamic, they will crawl it more frequently and lift your ranking in your prospects search results.

Have a look now at some of the example postings I’m putting up on this blog to see the sorts of content possible through the MAILman website integration.

After months of development, the new DMS website is on-line. A huge amount of time has been invested in this, but there’s more to it than you may think.

Web capabilities feature heavily in DMS’s product plan for 2008, in particular, a series of new web-services for our data products customers and web integration for our MAILman customers. Before I tell you too much about that though, let’s look at some of the things that we’ve done with the new website;

To start with, we needed to find a way to communicate our complex product line simply to our clients and prospects. When you are a small company that has nearly twenty different products and services that it sells to dozens of different industries, it is hard to communicate that to the outside world in a simple, clear and consistent manner.

I think our design team have done a fantastic job in doing this with our new site. Have a look at how we have simplified the menu structure and used the products and industries pages to make it easy both for existing clients looking for information about their products or other specific products that they know about, and for new prospects coming to our site who want to know who we are and what we do and more importantly what products we have that might be of relevance to them.

Another big change on the new site is our new support area. This area requires registration but allows both prospects evaluating products and our existing clients to quickly access product updates, evaluation products and a range of other resources that we make available.

Perhaps the biggest shift though is the fact that the new web-site is completely driven by our own MAILman CRM software. MAILman now has the ability to integrate directly with websites to assist in such processes as client logins, security, access rights and much more.

This is just a small taste of what we’ll be rolling out over the next few months though, so stay tuned for much, much more.

I am back from a fantastic holiday in New Zealand and I can’t tell you how excited I am by the new products and technologies our labs have developed for release in 2008. These are things that aren’t just incremental improvements to our product line but major technological advances that will change the way our customers do business!

I can’t give you all the details just yet, but suffice to say that there will be some wonderful new stuff for our CRM and fundraising clients as well as our POSTman and Data product clients. Stay tuned to this blog and over the next few months. I’ll be explaining some of the new features and capabilities that we will be releasing in 2008.

As always, a big emphasis for us is bring complex technologies into our customers’ hands in very easy and simple to use ways. And it’s something we appreciate seeing from others as well. For example, it has been possible to put video content on the web for years; however it was YouTube that made that process accessible to everyone through its ease of use.

One of the things that we have done recently is make it is easy to create and maintain the content of sites like this one, including the ability to incorporate content from places like YouTube.

Here’s an example of a movie I took in Doubtful Sound in New Zealand. Some of these waterfalls are over half a kilometre high. The day before we had beautiful sunshine and went swimming in the Fjord, that evening the heavens opened and we were greeted with this spectacular sight.

Keep an eye on this blog. In the coming months you’ll see business changing products as spectacular as the New Zealand scenery.