Alves: Our focus has always been on enabling customers to achieve great things through innovative solutions. We believe that the work of non-profits is of vital importance to the world and our software allows organizations in this industry to focus on their mission, not their technology.
Nonprofit Technology News: How has this focus changed in the last 2 years?
Alves: While our focus has remained the same, our strategy for delivering innovative solutions has evolved. We are working more and more with developers in our partner channel and customer base to provide them with the tools and resources they need to develop more tailored applications for iMIS without breaking the upgrade path.
Nonprofit Technology News: What are your current initiatives?
Alves: Internally, we have recently implemented a performance management initiative called the Balanced Scorecard. Basically, this allows us to quantifiably evaluate our business beyond financial measures in areas such as customer satisfaction, service delivery, and product development. This method of measurement has been a perfect fit, as it allows us to drive every aspect of the company mission: creating customers for life.
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Nonprofit Technology News: How has your market segment changed over the last year?
Alves: We are seeing a trend, especially among larger non-profits, of organizations wanting to move away from multiple specialized software packages for departmental use to more of a single software system for the entire enterprise.
Nonprofit Technology News: What are the greatest challenges for your customers in adopting and implementing technology?
Alves: The greatest challenges our potential customers face is managing integration between multiple software applications and gathering useful information from multiple databases.
Nonprofit Technology News: How are you helping your customers address these challenges?
Alves: We address this challenge by providing customers with what we consider solutions that are core to most non-profit organizations while also keeping our product as open and flexible as possible. This allows our customers to effectively manage constituents, raise money, manage their websites, and conduct e-marketing with one database but also gives them the tools to create custom applications specific to their organization or integrate with other popular commercial applications.
Nonprofit Technology News: Describe your company's position in the industry with regard to the solutions you deliver.
Alves: We believe we are the only solution available to the non-profit industry that provides the core functionality non-profits need in one database with a single location for name, address, and historical constituent information. This unique combination of constituent relationship management, fundraising management, website management, e-philanthropy, and e-marketing eliminates costly integration management and provides the kind of real-time reporting non-profits need to make strategic decisions.
Nonprofit Technology News: What do you believe to be the state of the industry in terms of growth, maturity, and availability of viable products to address the technology needs of the nonprofit community?
Alves: While there are a lot of great solutions out there, it seems too few products are truly suited for large non-profits. Often, what makes a product attractive to a non-profit is the uniqueness of its application (the “niche factor”) and the ease of implementation (the “non-techie factor”). The factors most affecting the cost of operation and agility of the organization – like comprehensive integration between applications, upgradeability, availability of support and a viable product roadmap – tend to get ignored. Very few vendors separate themselves by appealing to these business-oriented concepts.
Nonprofit Technology News: What advice would you offer to organizations attempting to implement any technology projects?
Alves:
- Be sure you understand the scope of your organization’s pain points – are you trying to solve one problem, or significantly changing the way you intend to operate? You’ll see the maximum benefit from technology when you’ve fully defined the desired outcome before even considering a solution. A surprising number of organizations handle this the other way around.
- Be able to measure the intended outcome. Whether it’s increased fundraising, better donor retention, or reduced administrative overhead, assign a desired ROI for each aspect of the project – this way, you’ll have a point of reference for feasible planning, as well as a way to determine your success afterward.
- Get buy-in from the entire organization. A good way to do this is to select project “champions” from each department and solicit their input at every step along the way. In addition, make project success a part of employee performance reviews. This will not only create a sense of ownership for the project but will also give you valuable insight into areas of your organization in need of attention in the future.
- Consider the big three factors – upgradeability, integration capability, and training/support – when choosing a solution. These three things are going to have the largest long-term impact on the total cost (in terms of both money and productivity) of your project.
Bob Alves, Chairman and CEO of Advanced Solutions International (ASI), began his work in the non-profit industry as founder and President of DISC in 1982, a non-profit technology consulting company. DISC was acquired by software developer Smith Abbott in 1987, where Bob served as Vice President of Corporate Development.
Bob has always had a strong entrepreneurial spirit, and after wrestling with the general lack of proper customer service and uniform products for the non-profit technology marketplace he was inspired to found ASI in 1991. Driven by the mission of "keeping customers for life", ASI developed iMIS to be easily upgradeable while also creating a world-class, global network of trained customer support staff. Bob relishes the opportunity to talk with anyone who has questions about ASI or its products.
