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