Tammy Ven Dange of Roundbox Consulting chats with David Hickling, the co-founder and director of Bond Software Group about the company and their Bond CRM for Membership Associations.
Topics from this interview about the Bond CRM:
In this interview, we learn about:
- 00:00 About Bond Software Group
- 01:29 More about David Hickling
- 03:21 Bond CRM for Membership Associations
- 07:08 Why they decided on a server rather than cloud-based approach
- 09:38 System functionality
- 12:31 Phone numbers as membership IDs
- 14:14 Moving away from email addresses and EDMs
- 20:03 Engagement scoring
- 22:35 Roadmap for the Bond CRM
- 33:30 How to contact Bond and David Hickling
Links & Resources:
- More info about the Bond CRM – https://bond.software/
- Contact David Hickling on their website or on LinkedIn
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Tammy regularly helps Not for Profits make IT investment decisions. Let her know if you need some help.
Tammy Ven Dange is a former charity CEO, Association President, Not for Profit Board Member and IT Executive. Today she helps NFPs with strategic IT decisions as an independent consultant. She does not take commissions nor sign partnership arrangements with vendors.
Video Transcript with Bond Software Group (Minor modifications have been made for clarity)
Tammy Ven Dange – Today I welcome Dave Hickling. He is co-founder and director of the Bond Software Group. Thank you for joining me today.
Dave Hickling – Thank you so much for having me, Tammy, happy to be here.
Tammy Ven Dange – First of all, tell us more about Bond software.
About Bond Software Group
Dave Hickling – Well, how do I start Bond Software? We’ve been around for 23 years now. We were born out of the requirement from our clients to build a platform to nurture and help any kind of member-based organisation get online essentially.
So in the early 2000, that’s what we did. We started building platforms that help member based organisations, whether it be unions, professional association, private sector, all types of weird and wonderful member based organisations who need to build a presence online and manage their data better, get true reporting and improve the member experience. So that’s why we exist.
More about David Hickling
Tammy Ven Dange – And so as co-founder, what was your background?
Dave Hickling – Before I started out in about 1993, I was actually a large format signage, graphic designer, and one day a lady walked in and said, I need you to design me a website. She gave me a book because, obviously, I had no idea back then, and I learned how to push pixels around.
From there I went off and became a web designer with this particular lady and we started a business and I was the web designer and the creative director at that point.
And then from there it just kind of evolved. I just got heavily engrossed in everything web. It just became a real passion of mine. And I guess I’m showing my age. It shows how long I’ve been doing this.
But that’s how it all started. And then after a while I just had a real passion for the member experience side of things. I got so passionate about designing websites that I started my own company.
Then from there we kind of evolved as the needs did from our clients that wanted more from their website. They didn’t want it just to be a website. They wanted a database behind it with member access and all those types of things. And that’s how Bond was born.
Tammy Ven Dange – I think you told me before that Bond is a Microsoft shop, so I assume that it’s based on some sort of SQL back-end.
Dave Hickling – That’s correct, yeah. Yeah. Both for Microsoft’s stack at this stage and yet we’ll probably talk about it a little bit more later. Yeah, we use Azure and all the Microsoft tools.
Bond Membership Association CRM solution
Tammy Ven Dange – Okay, great. Well, so let’s talk specifically about Bond, because it’s one that you don’t hear about quite as often in the marketplace. I see it as a system for an organisation or association that really needs something that’s highly customised and also probably more concerned about the security aspects of how they control that. Could you talk a little bit more about the software?
Dave Hickling – I think when people think about a membership system, they think two ways, they think “I either need a CRM system” or they think “I need a membership system”.
We are essentially a hybrid of both of those things. We call ourselves an ‘MCRM’ for Member and Customer Relationship Management. We’re not a Dynamics that is trying to be forced to be a membership system, And we’re not a SAS out of the box membership system that only manages members.
We had an interesting journey along the way and we’re trying to figure out who we were as a product, but where it landed is we are really more of a platform.
So we have a base set of tools and modules, that you would probably expect to find in in a membership platform. But we also plug into all kinds of other systems as well.
We play nice with anyone and everybody’s best in breed products. We will bring in and integrate them tightly into our ecosystem to give not only our clients but the members a really true member experience as well.
We chose Microsoft a long time ago because the security side of things was really important. Obviously, we deal with a lot of medium to large unions and associations and some private sector businesses that really require specifics from their membership system.
So an out of the box solution will never suffice for those types of clients. And a CRM system. It can be just too difficult to try to force that to be a membership platform. Not to mention the fact that the whole kind of member experience sort of things gets left behind.
When you’re dealing with a CRM company, though they’ll probably be fabulous at trying to make the data great and rolling out a system that manages data really well.
But then we kind of have left the whole member experience behind. So the client will have to go out and find someone who does member experience as well.
We’re pretty unique. People come to us when they possibly haven’t been able to make another platform work. But essentially, we are a software house, so we can highly configure and customize our software. We can build it up, we can build an out, we can integrate it, and we can have really specific security guidelines built into our platform to manage the most secure of data.
Why they decided on a server rather than cloud-based approach
Tammy Ven Dange – Now, it’s interesting, you’re actually, rather than going down the software as a service approach, you really are a server based solution, and I should say highly customized.
That’s so different from what most of the industry is offering. Even in the Microsoft Dynamics Suites are now in the cloud. Why did you choose to go down that pathway?
Dave Hickling – Well, I guess it’s just built into our DNA a little bit from where we started, cloud based platforms were really around all the way back then. So we did stick with what we knew, I think is probably part of the reason why.
But on top of that, there is still some merit in being able to manage very, very closely a server and then some clients who are very specific about their security requirements need to have the product hosted on Prem, which I know a lot of people probably still scratching their heads about that.
Some of this data is really super sensitive and we’ve had to be able to lock certain things down. We’re obviously not very afraid of cloud based solutions. We are moving slowly towards that. Parts of our products are cloud based.
We use Azure for certain parts of our product. Most typically we still host all of our client data In Australia – mandated by some of our clients actually that all data stays on shore, nothing goes offshore at all. So no overseas development. We can’t even route certain pieces of data via the states, for instance.
So I think we just have to have that level of security.
Tammy Ven Dange – And I assume also that you’ll manage the servers for them if someone decides to accept our solution.
Dave Hickling – Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. All of the, the products that we integrate into our system, we manage on behalf of the client. So, if there’s anything wrong with any part of the platform, the client just picks up the phone and speaks to us. We completely manage the whole digital ecosystem for our clients.
Bond’s functions for an Association
Tammy Ven Dange – Let’s go through a list of the typical functions that an association might need some membership management. We kind of discussed that a little bit. What about CPD?
Dave Hickling – We have not only CPD management built into our member experience side of things, but we do a lot of things like micro qualification. That’s just such a booming industry right now.
So accreditation, certification, any kind of micro qualification, CPD management, career pathway mapping tools, we’ve even got a B2B marketplace so people external from an organisation can list activities within a platform.
The networking side of things is a big part of what we do. We certainly have that really well covered.
Learning Management
Tammy Ven Dange What about a Learning Management Systems?
Dave Hickling – We don’t have our own learning management system, as we mentioned a little bit earlier, we plug in to best in breed products.
That is being, I guess, a more flexible approach for our clients because they might have one that they’ve already built all of their programs into. And then what we do is we integrate that in the background, but the client or the member never has to leave our system to access any of those programs. So it’s a completely seamless experience for them.
They log into the member experience platform and the browse the CPD, they purchase it, they then access the program without having to leave the system, all done by a single sign on.
Then everything all the data is passed back. All of the points and the points tallies and the certificates and all those type of things are all issued directly via our system.
Tammy Ven Dange – Can you also do it for a webinar like via Zoom?
Dave Hickling – Absolutely. Yep. We can completely integrate Zoom or access to webinars that are passed and it can be offered at different price points or for free if you are a member or gold, silver, bronze type of set up for different price points for each.
The whole concept in our platform is as soon as the member logs in their first in the community and they get access to all member benefits from the one spot without having to go to any other systems or even then feel like they’re logging into the other system.
So they essentially just need to remember their phone number and their date of birth, which we hope that most of them do. And you get access to everything without even remembering their username or password these days.
Moving towards digital
Tammy Ven Dange – Now, I like the fact that you guys are using mobile numbers. I talked to a lot of my clients, and they always have this view about how to have a membership ID, but all retail uses phone numbers because we know that that’s the one thing you don’t change very well.
Dave Hickling – Don’t get me started. Tell me, because I’ve had 25 years of forgotten passwords going missing. So I’m a massive advocate for moving everything, any kind of reliance on email addresses or email in general, and moving to a complete digital ecosystem in that respect, moving away from even the EDM’s, dare I even say it and reading to direct messaging.
Push notifications is obviously going to get the most cut through in app messaging between the client and the member areas. Definitely, we need to factor authentication and everything now, unfortunately. But that’s just the way it is. But the one thing that people don’t forget is their mobile number and their date of birth.
Tammy Ven Dange – It’s interesting that you talked about SMS and it’s moving more into digital because that’s kind of still an afterthought in most of the marketplace and interesting, especially for a two-way interaction via text messaging. You might get a one-way, but not a two-way.
Talk to me more about your solution around that.
Dave Hickling – Well, one thing that we’ve noticed over this journey is the reliance on email marketing. I just don’t think it’s an effective delivery mechanism anymore to get important information to in front of the right people.
We’ve partnered with a product called Twilio, which is part of our ecosystem. Twilio is a customer engagement platform. So while they still do emails via Send Grid , which is one of the largest kind of email platforms on the planet, it also includes SMS conversation bots, not dissimilar to when you’re on a Telstra or Foxtel website or whatever it might be, and it also does SMS on top of that gives them reporting.
The whole kind of concept of relying on email or definitely email will never go away because we need it for BAU, but slowly it will diminish and it will be replaced by direct messaging.
People are very familiar these days with Teams, Slack, those types of things. Every single person is talking to people on WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, so why wouldn’t we introduce that into like a membership platform?
If I need to ask a question of an association or union or whatever it is really, I’d like to go in there and be able to ask potentially a person if there’s an agent available, but if there’s not an agent available, it goes into a conversation.
Not everyone expects the answer right away. You typically will write a message or a question, and then when someone’s ready, they’ll get back to you.
So we’ve integrated Twillio as our engagement tool. So not only can members talk to one another in front of communities or forums or groups, but they can actually speak directly to the association via a short message.
And then when that membership officer, finance office or CPD manager, whoever it is, needs to get back to that member with an answer, they simply go into their MCRM and type an answer directly via the MCRM platform, and that goes back and forth as a direct message.
It’s far more effective way, It’s more conversational. You don’t have to wait for the email that might not get there. It really is the future of what people can do. Moving away from email addresses and EDMs
Moving less tech-savvy members towards digital
Tammy Ven Dange – But I totally agree about the future. But I can still hear a bunch of associations say, “But my members are older. They are not used to this technology.”
How do you respond to that and how to meet those needs?
Dave Hickling – Well, look, I want to use my mom as an example here. My mom is 78. And look, it did take her a little while to get onto Facebook Messenger. But now we can’t stop her from sending messages.
You know, I feel like it. She doesn’t need to pick up the phone anymore. She can just message. So I think it’s a generational thing.
We deal with a lot of, dare I say, stoic organisations. And yeah, there’s always going to be a component or a group of those that might not be that willing to adopt that type of technology.
And hey, I can still send an email or write a letter or whatever they need to do, but the platform needs to continually evolve to really capture the expectations of the younger generation that we need to bring into the association world.
But there’s been no time like this in the past that we really need to relook at the way that we market an association or a union to the younger generation.
So having sophisticated modern tools to do that and the expectation in our opinion for any type of membership that I have, whether it be a gym or Uber or whatever it is, is that there is a really sophisticated way of communicating with the organisation and managing my membership, that way, I don’t want to have to rely on emails, I’ve already got enough emails in my inbox, but any anything that I’m paying and want to get member benefits, I want it quick,
I want the benefits of the membership to be pushed to me. I want really highly profiled content to be pushed to me. I don’t have time to go looking for it anymore.
If I log into my membership platform, I want to see anything that’s relevant to me. That is the expectation of systems these days.
So we are really spearheading an innovation in this space. And while there is a bit of that kind of questioning around about how our members might be having an older demographic, the really innovative organisations are like, “No we totally get it, and we’re going to go in that direction,” because in ten years they want to have those tools already in place.
BondMX for Bond Member Experience
Tammy Ven Dange – For the engagement pieces can I assume that you have dashboards and things that can show the engagement scorecards?
Dave Hickling – The beauty of our platform, Tammy is we, we separate out the website. So the consumer facing website, in my personal opinion needs to be a different channel for messaging to a different group of people, other than members,.
I don’t believe a member should go to the website and look for something that is related to their membership. For two reasons:
One, it is a bit of confusion about what a membership website is for. Is it for consumers? is it prospect for new members? Is it the current members?
We have a purpose built and designed member experience platform, so as soon as a member is on board, rather than going to a website that needs to be more focused on prospecting for new members or advocating to the government or whatever it needs to be.
People come in and log in to the platform we call BondMX for Bond Member Experience, and that is the member centric hub of everything to do with their member.
So therefore, once they’ve logged in, they use either on the phone or via an app or iOS or Android or a browse base. as soon as they’re logged in, we start tracking everything they do.
Not only do we track how often they come through, what they’re looking at with a download the CPD, we can get some really true insights into how engaged they are as a member.and how often they they post in a community group, you know how often they look at anything within the platform.
You lose a lot of that in the website because in the website you don’t have to log in necessarily to look for a resource. But in the member experience platform they are always logged in so we can get not only scorecards, we can give some really true reporting on trends and anything else that the client needs to say now.
Bond Roadmap
Tammy Ven Dange – So Dave, what about this, the general road map? Is there anything else you want to share about the future?
I mean, you obviously have done a lot of things. You talked about this platform, which I don’t think people realize that how it’s not just a plug in.
You know, some people will say, “Oh, well, you know, my CRM does that, too.” But what you’ve explained to me previously was that even though the plug is Eventbrite for all your events, it’s not obvious that it’s in Eventbrite, is that right?
Dave Hickling – That’s exactly right. So, okay, okay. Banging on about this member experience, but I’m a really true believer that there are so many products out there that the member experience is an afterthought.
You have to get your tech in order. You know, you have to have a sophisticated, powerful, scalable tech platform. Of course you need to do that.
But what we’re creating is it’s a completely integrated ecosystem of the way you can leverage all the best in breed products. And then using that, we can provide a premium member experience.
So in the background, yeah, we, we may be using Eventbrite via API so they can use all the power of a product like that, maybe even yeah like Zoom or Teams or any of those other learning management systems.
If someone, someone has to bring one along or we can plug into the ones that we’ve already integrated with the client, the member never ever feels like they are going out to another source. It’s all completely integrated, so they get that really true member experience.
The interface looks like a product that’s really easy to use, and as I mentioned a little bit earlier, it’s very easy for them to get into the product itself. They can just use their face or a thumb or biometrics to get into the app, or they can use their browser base.
It’s the same experience both, it’s one source of data, we are a single source database.
So yeah, I think we’ve really nailed the not only the back end side of thing that would work for the 20-plus years on, but the front end side of things as well is so important to give the member a really polished user experience, so it’s easy in the expectation for them to find things more easily, be push stuff that’s relevant to them and get really immersed in a whole community of anything that’s related to their area of interest.
Lifely as a platform
There is another thing that we’re building and we’re really excited about releasing in the second half of this year. It’s not only our member experience platform, but we’re reimagining this to match and give some more flexibility for other clients that may have a really deep rooted CRM already we’ve got a product being released called Lifely.
Lifely is a new platform that can either be completely rolled out, including MRM, all the CRM stuff, all the all the wonderful stuff that I’ve been talking about. Somebody can replace a CRM or membership product or whatever it may be. But if there is a really complex CRM system such as a government or an enterprise CRM that has been there for 100 years, it’s not easy to to shift.
We can actually lay our Lifely product as a as a platform on top of that and do a lite integration with the CRM, allowing all these wonderful tools that we’ve got to be accessible to the members, so rather than having to completely replace their CRM, they can use all the power of our platform, but use that really beautiful member experienced layer that offers all of the micro certifications, the communities, the events, the events, resource management, all those sorts of things as well.
And the really cool thing about this is we are going to release what we call a portable profile.
This is really going to probably bend a few people’s minds, I think, but I’m going to put it out into the world. The ability for an individual to become the custodian of their own membership data.
Not only will it help the member themselves protect the data that they want to share with all organisations, but what it will do is allow them to more easily join communities, which is what we want.
We want to encourage them to be able to join communities, groups, sports clubs, education facilities, councils, whatever it may be, and be able to have data that they want stored in their app where it’s all completely encrypted and give them the ability to then decide if they don’t want to share data with a particular group in the future.
It’s really giving some of the power back. And especially in this climate at the moment, with every time you turn on the TV, there’s a new data hack. This is looking to address that and giving them more flexibility.
And the other value point on top of this is once we get some momentum and some volume Lifely, will be able to consolidate your messaging from all of these different platforms into a single platform.
So anyone out there that’s got kids that are in different sports clubs, they might have obviously the school sports stuff, they might be part of professional associations, even councils or government institutions.
They’ll be able to rather than having to get messages from all different platforms, we’ll be able to push them all through a single platform to consolidate that messaging calendars, news and events to make it easier.
Very, very excited about this innovation. And it’s getting a lot of interest. People can see a lot of value in being able to essentially manage their own data.
Sectors like health and education are really of high interest to us, but it just makes perfect sense for associations as well, because if people want to join associations in the future, I think there might be a bit of a new interest in maybe joining an association for however long you need to.
So I might want to join an association and get trained up, do some certification stuff with one association, but then jump to another one because some of the associations that we work with, especially in the health sector, they all have their strengths and as a professional in whatever field you might want to join more than once you get the value out of those. So yeah, watch this space.
Tammy Ven Dange – Yeah. You know, I think that’s really interesting because you guys are certainly thinking well ahead of the even the consumer you know. Yes, there are aspects of what you just mentioned that are certainly out of the metaverse.
There are other aspects that you can see a very useful immediately with having a single messaging platform when most of us probably have four or five on our phones right now.
Tammy Ven Dange – The one thing that I found interesting, though, was when you were talking about Lifely over the top of the CRM, does that mean that basically an old CRM, where the data is being stored to remain as a data storage? What you’re doing is putting the platform on top to create the user experience or the member’s portal, is that right?
Dave Hickling – That’s exactly right, Tammy, because, be it as it may, we love to go out and replace everyone’s old CRM. It’s a tough process, you know.
Sometimes people might have already spent $1-$2 million and rolling out a gigantic implementation of a CRM and they might like Salesforce. And Salesforce might do really well for part of their business, but they do want to offer that member experience sort of thing that they might have to go out to an agency to get them to try to build something.
Why rebuild something when they’ve got a purpose-built platform for that, We can lay it out at the top so we can just suck out whatever data we need via API to get that part of core membership data. And then things like the segmentation.
So for us – special interest groups, the events or leveraging Eventbrite or whatever other learning management platform, we can do all that in our layer, and then the company can just keep the CRM and that can crunch the raw data, but we can provide all those wonderful insights from our layer as well.
Tammy Ven Dange – I find that most CRM replacements, it’s probably a good time to do a massive data class anyway, so you’re actually hoping to avoid that.
Dave Hickling – We can do either, if they need help with a digital evolution, as we call it. We can do that or we can just be that layer and then yeah, if it’s a timely thing and over time maybe Bond can replace their CRM over time as well so that might be a speed to market type of exercise.
Tammy Ven Dange – Well look it’s been a fascinating conversation, Dave, and thank you for sharing so much about your product.
It is certainly very different than what you see in the marketplace. And obviously, with something heavily configured and customized, you’re going to expect it to be in the higher cost range than some of the ones that are off the shelf SAS solutions.
How to contact Bond and David Hickling
Tammy Ven Dange – If people want to know more about your solution, get a full review. Where should we send them?
Dave Hickling – We’re just about to release our new website, which is exciting so you can just send them to bond.software.
Tammy Ven Dange – Dave, it has been a great conversation, I really enjoyed learning more about your product and I’m sure people that are going to be watching this video later, we’ll see how unique your solution is.
I’m looking forward to seeing how it evolves and how the take up is, especially with some of the more advanced like a portable membership type thing, because that kind of is aligned with how especially younger people are changing careers so frequently.
So it will be very, very interesting to see how that take up is over time to see if that’s evolving as people’s careers are changing as well.
Dave, thank you for your time today and best of luck on everything.
Dave Hickling – Thanks so much, Tammy. Thanks so much for your time too.