Saturday, July 3 rd, Afternoon Session

Transcription

1 Update on Technology Saturday, July 3 rd, Afternoon Session Eric Vonhoff Director of Information Systems Good Afternoon Brothers and welcome to Nashville. It is a pleasure to be speaking with you so early in this convention. Over the last several years I have always had to speak later during the convention and seem to always have to follow the Executive Director of Mooseheart, Mr. Scott Hart. For those of you that know me, you know that I get very nervous about speaking to such a large group as this, and can t wait until it is over. Three out of the last four years, due to the wonderful report, or as many of us back at Moose International say, the presentation that goes on forever by Mr. Hart, I have been bumped by Scott each year to later in the session, or even to the next days session, but this time Scott, I get to talk before you and while I can t talk until tomorrow afternoon when you speak to bump you, at least you can t bump me this year. I only feel sorry for whoever is behind you this year. This afternoon, I am going to give you an update on some of the tools that we have implemented over the last year using technology to make this fraternity grow together. The first area that I would like to update you on is automatic e mails. Moose International currently has several automatic e mail systems that have been put in place over the last year to provide communication directly to you the members on a regular basis. Starting in May of 2009, we implemented our first automatic e mail program that runs every night on the MMMS system at Moose International. MMMS stands for Moose Membership Management System. I will talk more about this system a little later, probably sometime tomorrow right before I bump Scott Hart from his time slot. Just kidding Scott. This first e mail system generates an e mail to all new members that we receive an e mail address for. It is simply a Welcome to the Moose message, letting them know that they will be

2 receiving their membership card soon and thanking them for becoming a member. To date, we have sent out 56,367 Welcome to the Moose e mail messages to our new members. The next system we implemented in July of 2009, is an automatic system that runs each night and sends a Happy Birthday e mail greeting to any member that we have on file that has both an e mail address and a birth date on file. Believe it or not, we do have some members without a birth date on file. The current LCL.net requires you to enter a birth date for any new member, or if any change is made to a member s record, but I encourage you to check your LCL.net data and make sure that you have all your members birthdates on file. To date, in the first year we have send out 191,799 birthday greetings to our members at no cost to the fraternity. In October of 2009, we implemented the next e mail system, which automatically e mails any member, whose dues have been expired for 60 days, reminding that they have not paid their dues. This system also allows the member to provide feedback to the membership department about why they may have chosen to not renew their dues. To date, we have sent out 63,445 reminder messages. At Christmas time we sent out 198,000 holiday greetings to all our Members with an e mail address. Again, this was done at no cost to the Fraternity. When you received your convention pack here at Nashville, it had a green card in it asking you to update your record with us. Please take the time to fill it out, if you haven t already, and drop it in the box at the Information Booth area located in the lower level of this building. In December of last year, we released something we call Moose Pages. Moose Pages was developed by the staff at Moose International and is a program that we are very proud of. This system is free to our Fraternal Units, very easy to use, provides Fraternal Units with a way to communicate will all its members and did I mention, it s free. Kurt Wehrmeister, our Director of Communications and Public Affairs, who will speak with you next will be discussing Moose Pages in more detail. Kurt and I will be holding a panel session to demonstrate this free tool to you on Monday, July 5 th at 1:30 p.m., at the Nashville Convention Center. Please take the time to stop by and see first hand how easy this system is to use. I would like to take a moment to thank the group of people that were involved in testing and providing input into this system. Providing tools for our Fraternity to use can only be accomplished with the help and testing of the end user of the system, which is the entire Fraternity. The members of this Fraternity that helped with this project are as follows: Gordon Dailey from Dubuque, IA Lodge #355 Jim Henderson from East Mesa, AZ Lodge #2082

3 Patti Cavanaugh from White Mountain, AZ Chapter #2325 Roy Leeman from Hamilton, ON Lodge #1142 Ray Chafin from Mableton, GA Lodge #1314 Frank and Debbie Berry from El Monte, Ca Lodge #1097 Ed Sharp from Port St. Lucie, Fl Lodge #513 Daniel Humphrey from the Tenn. Moose Association Neil Bitting from Corpus Christi, TX Lodge #734 And Gary Frieden from Greenfield, IN Lodge #987 Let s give them a round of applauses for assisting in the development of Moose Pages. We released a new version of LCL.net in October. While this release didn t have major changes to the program, some of the enhancements that we made were: adding a cell phone field, changed the birth date as a required field when entering an applicant into the system, added e mail format validation into the system which allows us to make automatic corrections even if you type in an e mail address such as Eric@yahee.com, it will change it We had almost 9 % of our e mail addresses that we received from the Fraternal Units with a domain name incorrectly entered. Currently less than 1% of the e mail addresses that we have on file have an invalid formatted address. We added to the daily transmit report. Any deceased members that we send down to you, are now highlighted in red so that they stand out. We also made LCL.net compatible with the Windows 7 operation system. The current version of LCL is still compatible with Windows XP and Windows Vista. These are just a few of the enhancements that we made to the latest release of LCL. Currently, only 59 of the Fraternal Units have not upgraded to this latest release, and the Regional Managers are provide with a list of these units on a regular basis. There was much discussion in recent months about what Moose International going to do about the older QuickBooks 2007 software that it was requiring all the Fraternal Units to use. Fraternal Units that went out and purchased the payroll module for this software were being told by Intuit, the company that makes QuickBooks, that they would no longer receive updates for this older software version, and must upgrade by May 31, 2010, to QuickBooks We tested QuickBooks 2010 with LCL.net as well as all the versions of the Microsoft operating systems and determined that a Fraternal Unit could upgrade to QuickBooks 2010

4 and it would still function with the current version of LCL.net. We sent out a bulk e mail on April 19th and notified all the Fraternal Units that if they were running the Payroll module of QuickBooks they could upgrade to 2010 at their own expense and provided them with a contact at Intuit where we had negotiated a 40% discount off the price of the software. Moose International still believes that QuickBooks 2007 has all the functionality that a Fraternal Unit needs to do their daily bookkeeping functions. Unless you re using the payroll module, we encourage you to stay with the current version of QuickBooks and save your money. For the first time at an International Convention we utilized the magnetic strip that is on the back of your membership card. When you picked up your pre registration package, your membership card was swiped into a card reader that recorded your name and membership ID number. This information was then fed into the new convention (Event) registration system that we are using for the first time here at convention to record that you attended. In the past, Moose International staff members would have to type all this information into the old system. Just this simple little function is saving us several hours at the end of each day during the convention in man hours to complete this task. The magnetic strip on the back of your card contains your name, your MID number, your dues expiration date, as well as your fraternal unit number. You can use these cards in your Lodge to replace your current key card door system with a system that will use the membership card for the same purpose and save some money. We have several lodges doing this now and they have told me that by using their membership cards instead of buying key cards for each member, they have saved as much as 9.00 dollars per member per card. While Moose International has not partnered with any one vendor for a system like this, if you e mail me I can put you in contact with other lodges that have implemented a system using the membership card and the money that they have saved. While we are talking about membership cards, we have made changes to the program so that as of June 14 th, the mailing of both new member cards and regular membership cards for any member that pays their dues are now mailed on a daily basis to the member. This is just another way that we are using the technology to provide better service to our members Speaking of paying your dues, for those of you that live in Canada, we have added to the Quick pay dues systems on the Moose International web site the ability for Moose Members across Canada to now pay there dues on line. This system went into effect on Thursday, July 1. We encourage all of you to pay your dues on line. It is as simple as going to the Moose International website, entering you MID number, and then paying your dues. There is no account to be created, no password to remember, just enter your MID number and pay your dues. Currently, we have on average 154,091 members that pay their dues on line each year. That is only 15% of our Fraternity. We need this number to grow. As I just mentioned, we are using a new registration system here at Convention for the first time, however this system is really an entire new event management system. This system is currently on line on our web site at Mooseintl.org, for our members to register for the

5 Triple Play event we will be having in November, the 2 nd annual Texas Hold em event that we will be having in January of next year and we have also developed an On Line Registration system for the Circus that is coming to Mooseheart in August of this year. You can go to and purchase your tickets on line for that event now. Scott Hart will be providing you with more details about this event coming to Mooseheart when he talks with you tomorrow. All of these programs that we have developed are to make it more convenient for our members to sign up for events that we have going on throughout the year in this Fraternity. In the future, you will see this system used to register members for all of the Sports events that we have each year. I mentioned earlier the MMMS system. The Moose Membership Management System is the backbone to our entire computer operation. All member information, including the paying of dues, sponsor information, etc., is stored in the MMMS system. As I mentioned several years ago, this is the replacement to our old mainframe system that we have had for over 25 years nicknamed Hal. We have been working real hard behind the scenes over the last couple of years to re write all of the programs that have been on Hal and move them over to MMMS. I am happy to say that this task has almost been completed. We are in the final stages of completing all of the program re writes and eliminating Hal as part of our infrastructure. The common question for me at each Supreme Council meeting over the last several years from many of the Gentlemen seated on this stage today has been when are we going to get the Hell off of Hal. It has been decided by them, that if Information System s, specifically me, is not the Hell off of Hal by the end of this year, that I would not be around to see the end of Hal. Well, I am here to tell you that we will be the hell off of Hal by the end of this year and begin to focus on developing new technologies for this fraternity. What does this mean to you? It means that starting this fall we will be able to again start focusing on programs and new tools that will be more visible to you the members of this fraternity and the leaders of our lodges. Future communication tools you will be seeing over the next year will be the e mailing of your monthly statements once we have implemented the new A/R system for our Finance Department. You will see a change to the dues payment system where you will be able to pay any amount of dues in a shopping cart fashion, not just the amount we post for you to pay. You will see the size of your MooseUnits.org e mail box increase to 500 MB, This is a 33% increase in size to each of your e mail accounts at no cost to you. While we will be increasing the size to hold more information, we still expect you to read your e mail every day as it contains the official communications from Moose International. In mid 2011 we will begin developing the next release of LCL.net, which will be a web based system as well as a replacement to the current QuickBooks program. We will be setting up an area on the Moose International web site for you the users of LCL and QuickBooks to

6 provide us with input as to what you would like to see added to the next release of this system. You re the end users of this system. It is developed for you. Let us know what you would like to see. We will notify you in an official communication when we have this site set up. Encourage all your members to pay their dues on line. Promote it in your newsletters, on your web sites. Let your members know that we have an on line tool on Moose International s web site for every member to keep their address and e mail address current. It is the easiest way for you and us to have up to date information about our members. It is very important to this fraternity that we gather each and every e mail address for all of our members. This task begins with you. Currently we only have 186,764 active members with e mail addresses on file. This is only 18% of our entire membership Wouldn t it be nice if we could start e mailing the renewal notices to all our members. Moose International currently spends more than 1 million dollars per year mailing out these notices to the members. Just think what Mooseheart and Moosehaven could do with that money. You have a direct connection to Moose International through your LCL.net system. Make sure that you have an e mail address on file for all your members. Make sure that every application that you receive and input into LCL has an e mail address. Make sure to go back and gather an e mail address for all your existing members. This simple little task can save this fraternity millions of dollars in operating expenses each year. The Time is now to gather this information. The Time is now to begin saving money by using these tools. The Time is now to begin communicating to each other. All of us at Moose International thank all of you for the wonderful job that you do to make the moose fraternity the great organization that it is. Thank you, God bless and enjoy the rest of your convention.