Responding to your questions...

As staff and board members have shared details about the New Initiatives plan with other AGEHR members, several questions and suggestions have come up. As we post on the blog, we will try to address as many of these as we can.

In today's post, I will respond to several who have asked for more information and testimonials about the company providing part of our new technology, Z2Systems and the NEON database. For a brief history of the company and their philosophy in working with the non-profit sector, see this page on their website - http://www.z2systems.com/en-US/aboutus.html. To me, the most compelling statement on this page is the process they used to create the first version of NEON - working directly with non-profit clients and understanding that each has slightly different needs. As a result, they have created a highly adaptable, user-friendly system at a price that is within the reach of smaller non-profits like AGEHR.

Z2Systems maintains a 95% retention rate with their client base. One interesting tidbit - their VP of sales used to be a client. He was so impressed with the system he wanted to help get the word out to other non-profits. Here are a few testimonials from other customers:

"NEON is the single best investment our organization has made in technology. Any charity that is considering improving how it interfaces with donors and other constituents would do well to consider NEON. I will gladly speak personally with anyone who wants information from a highly satisfied user." - Bill Bro, CEO, Kidney Cancer Association, www.kidneycancer.org

"Thanks for all of your hard work! Your quick responsiveness, attention to detail, and genuine caring about our needs and concerns are a testament to the quality of the people at Z2. It's a pleasure doing business with you." - Ed Mally, Treasurer, Lotus Outreach. www.lotusoutreach.org.

"Again, you guys are rock stars! Seriously, how is everyone not using the system?" - Kate Avallone, Development Assistant, Paragon Theatre Company, www.paragontheatre.com.

"Of all the databases we compared, NEON was far and away the most user-friendly. Everyone who has worked on it agrees that the learning curve is much shorter than any other member/donor database they have worked on before." - The Rev. Fletcher Harper, Executive Director, Green Faith, Interfaith Partners for the Environment, www.greenfaith.org.

"Z2Systems is an amazing company. I have been working with them for about 2 1/2 years now and have never met a company with better service higher integrity!" - Lucy Accardo, Webmaster, Queens Falcons, www.queensfalcons.net

Personally, I will add that I have been exploring NEON's capabilities, through a robust demo of the system, and communicating with their staff for the past several months. They are professional, responsive, and have an excellent grasp of the unique challenges facing organizations like AGEHR. The system is easy to use and integrates seamlessly with the AGEHR website. Once implementation is complete, you will all get to see the great things I've been experiencing with NEON.

21 Century here we come!

"I applied for membership online using my credit card on Sunday. I was
hoping to get on-line into the members only section of the website. When can I expect to receive access???"

All too often, I come into the office on Monday morning and find an email or voicemail like the one above. I can hear the frustration and completely understand. However, until we are able to manually process their membership in the office, this new member is out of luck. Has this happened to you? Nice way to treat new members, huh. {sigh}

This issue is not limited to new members. If your membership expires even by a few hours and you renew your membership online, you are still stuck until the staff gets into the office and has time to process your membership. What about this, has it happened to you? If not can you imagine the frustration? Again, nice way to treat our loyal members, huh! :<(

Needless to say, this is NOT how we in the office want to treat our members. In fact we pride ourselves on serving our community of handbell and handchime ringers to the best of our abilities. Unfortunately, that means that our best is all too often weighed down by the albatross of our current technology.

So, I am VERY excited about the new Neon member management system. By combining all of our records down into one singular data management system, we are able to join the 21st century and finally meet the basic expectation that if you can take my money right now I should have access right now and the ability to begin enjoying my member benefits right now!

The coolest part is that this is only one small part of all the exciting new opportunities opening up to us via the Neon system because of your generosity via the New Initiatives Campaign. What part of the New Initiatives Campaign are you excited about and why??

New Technology for the Future

The national office has been working hard all summer to develop implementation plans for the New Initiatives announced at Pinnacle in Nashville. The first to launch is the comprehensive technology update that will be complete by June 2011. Over the next few months, J.R. (publications director), Katie (director of membership), and I will be posting more information about what the technology update will entail.

Today, I will share the rationale and process we used in selecting the new database management system that is once piece of this initiative.

The implementation of this system will be a major step to resolving one of the biggest challenges facing the national office on a daily basis. It will also solve the frustrations many of you experience every time you navigate to the AGEHR website and try to login into the member’s only section or make a purchase in our on-line store.

At this time, the national office maintains multiple databases for our daily operations. These include a primary membership database that is used in the office every day to maintain all our membership records and related membership functions. Because of the way this was set-up when initially implemented (before any of the current staff were in the national office), this database cannot communicate directly with our website. As a result, we must operate a separate set of database tables to manage website functions like member’s-only access, the on-line store, and the forums. To make matters more complicated, none of these tables communicate with each other. Yet another service manages our e-newsletters and e-mail blasts. This is why you have separate log-in credentials for each of these functions, and why changes you make to your account in one place don’t immediately get updated to other places.

From the staff side, when a member makes a change to their account, we must go to each of these separate services to manually update the record. You can imagine the amount of time this takes away from other tasks we could and should be doing to serve our membership. We have worked with consultants and programmers to develop a variety of stop-gap resolutions to meet this challenge using the existing technologies available to us, but all have just been weak band-aids and not true solutions. Additionally, our current technology is a barrier to anything new we want to offer our members or potential members.

A real solution to these challenges has been identified and implementation is under way. To make the choice, we worked with a well-respected consultant in Centerville, Ohio (home of the national office). With the consultant’s help, we identified a list of features we must have to achieve our goals. We then divided them into must-haves, should-haves and wish-we-hads. With this information in hand, the consultant did a comprehensive search of available database solutions and returned to us with a detailed list of nearly 20 options along with their recommendations and opinions about each. That list was narrowed to three top choices which were evaluated in more detail by the staff through web demos and long phone conversations with sales representatives and programmers.

The solution we selected is called NEON – Non-profit Enterprise On-line Network. The creators of NEON were software developers in the for-profit sector that saw many small non-profits struggling like we are with finding an all-in-one software solution to manage the growing demands of an increasingly on-line society. So they created NEON which takes technologies used successfully in for-profit business models and adapts them for non-profit needs.

NEON is loaded with features that will make the national office staff more efficient, and your on-line member interaction more rewarding and robust. I'll be providing much more detail about these features in upcoming posts.

Until then - post your questions, comments, and ideas about what I've shared today or about any of the New Initiatives.