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MemberConnex CRM by Cyberglue

Tammy Ven Dange
Vendor Brief Cover with MemberConnex

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Tammy Ven Dange of Roundbox Consulting chats with Craig McCullough, the CEO of Cyberglue about the company and their MemberConnex CRM for Membership Associations.

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In this interview, we learn about:

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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 Higher Logic (minor modifications have been made for clarity)

Tammy Ven Dange – So today I’m speaking with Craig McCullough. He is the CEO of Cyber Blue. And today we’re going to be talking about their membership association around product called MemberConnex.

Craig McCullough – Hello. Thank you for having me. Cyberglue, the company based in New Zealand

Cyberglue, the company based in New Zealand

Tammy Ven Dange – For those that don’t know anything about Cyberglue, can you give us a brief overview of the company?

Craig McCullough – Thanks. So we’re based in Auckland, New Zealand. We focus on the membership market exclusively. We’ve been building web based products since 1998. We started and through till about 2005, we did a little bit of everything for anybody.

We had e-commerce offerings, e-business, e-learning, we could stick on front of just about anything and deliver a solution for we had lawyers, we had primary schools, secondary schools, finance companies, just all sorts.

Around 2005, we narrowed this down into two separate products. One was an emergency management notification system that actually won a national award here for the software innovation. And the other was MemberConnex.

MemberConnex took all the IP that we had from everything we’d done up until that date. And basically membership customers were the ones that used our software the best because they had events and they had renewals, so they had any business component, they would often sell things, they had subscription management. It was a whole lot of things that we had individually that could combine into a single product.

The emergency management notifications system was very exciting and we had some governments interested in it, but they were going to be sort of long term if we waited ten years, the government may have purchased it for $10 million, but we just didn’t have the ability to to last that long.

We were bootstrapped so we needed revenue and we had membership customers who were paying us regularly. So we decided to focus on that membership space from 2005 onwards. So that’s been our core focus ever since.

We still have a couple of legacy customers. Our first ever customer from 1998 is still with us, who’s not on MemberConnex is on that sort of prior version of the software. But all of our other customers are MemberConnex membership, customers specifically.

Craig McCullough – and how he became involved in Cyberglue

Tammy Ven Dange – Okay. And how did you get involved with the business?

Craig McCullough – And so I was for my sins, a lawyer for 16 years. I was a barrister doing civil litigation and also I was an IT consultant largely for other lawyers. I was advising legal firms and lawyers on practice management systems and document management systems and essentially where the web was going.

And I had met the two guys who had started a prior business to MemberConnex and been very impressed with the technology that they had developed in the broadcasting space. I did a little bit of legal work for them and we solved the problem that they had and we stayed in touch.

So I went to see them in 1999 to say, here’s what I’m telling my legal customers or clients where the web is going. It won’t just be a glossy brochure telling where it park, it’ll be a business communication tool which I’m scared to death out of most lawyers.

But I went to see these guys who were in the industry to see is what I’m saying, Correct. And they showed me a product that they had built called Cyberglue, and it blew my mind with what it could do.

It was basically an early content management system before content management existed as a as an industry sector. We started calling them dynamic websites because you could you could change anything on the website. And it was basically a very powerful enabling tool for businesses to run in a lot of different sectors.

So I got excited and immediately started contacting people I knew and soon after that we signed up the Direct Marketing Association, an early customer, the Automobile Association, the New Zealand’s largest membership organization at the time. And we just started growing from there.

So the two initial developers I joined with them and we’ve been developing things since then. I’ve since bought them out and I own the business together with a current business partner since about 2010. I continued being a lawyer for another year or so, but gradually eased out of it and have been focused on this ever since. It’s more fun.

Tammy Ven Dange – I have to say that it’s a bit ironic because I find that lawyers are probably the least technical out of most industries that you deal with professionally. So, it’s kind of funny that you came from that environment into a software vendor.

Craig McCullough – Exactly. I understand. And that’s why I was sought after, as it were, as a as a consultant to the lawyers, because they were clueless. We did sign up a couple of law firms early on when we were doing a little bit of everything for everybody. But we don’t have any of them anymore because they don’t have the need for the membership management

Some of their clients using the MemberConnex CRM solution in both Australia and New Zealand

Tammy Ven Dange – Well, let’s talk more about MemberConnex. It’s a product that obviously is quite popular in New Zealand. And is just gaining traction, I think, in Australia. How many clients do you actually have in Australia right now?

Craig McCullough – So we’ve got half a dozen or so. we had some early adopter clients in Australia, probably seven or eight years ago and we were looking to make a big push into Australia at that time. But we got a couple of customers, but then we just sort of stayed at that level for a while.

There was an Australian Government initiative worth something like $250 million that was promoting what they called industry growth centers. They chose five or six sectors of the economy that they wanted to focus on particularly, and they needed what would have defined as stakeholder engagement systems, and they had attempted to do it in one of those sectors early on and had spent an enormous amount of money and not got a successful result.

They were moving on to the second sector, which was mining and they were going to go down the same route. And the mining people said, Well, we’d like to investigate our own solution and they happened to find Memberconnex.

And after a lot of due diligence, because we were a small New Zealand company trying to help the Australian economy grow, they gave us a pilot program

I’ve seen some internal documents which suggest that they didn’t think we would achieve, but in the 12 week turnaround, we delivered on all of the KPI’s they had for delivery of that and, and we signed up five of those growth centers, which was quite an achievement.

Unfortunately, with a change of government and a change of government policy, government funding for those has just ended. So we’ve been with them for four or five years, but we’ve just heard that the government funding for them has ceased and one of those is indicated that they are not continuing.

Several of the others are still looking to see if they can continue on an industry pay model rather than a government funding model. So we’re still hopeful of continuing with those.

But we’ve got other Australian customers in the Myotherapy Association, they’re a form of physiotherapy and in the nursery and garden industry, but looking to have more of a presence in the Australian market after a bit of a downturn with COVID, we couldn’t get across to Australia and made it a little bit harder to address that market.

Tammy Ven Dange – Who is your largest customer right now? Just to get a sense how big you might scale to so.

Craig McCullough – Well, we have had up until recently the New Zealand National Party, a political party. So generally, our customers are what we call commercial membership organizations, so industry bodies, association societies, that sort. But we can also address other organizations that have a membership component, so even down to a club level, although we tend not to and we, we tend to be a little bit too expensive for the clubs themselves.

But churches, for example, unions, political parties, loyalty programs, we’ve had those using MemberConnex. So there’s a range of different sectors that can use MemberConnex. Primarily it’s industry associations.

The National Party, they had something like 90,000 people on their database and would regularly email them or a reasonably significant portion of those.

Generally our customers have anything from a few hundred to say 10,000 people in the database. And, in general, the turnover of our customers is at the low end, under $100,000, but mostly in the several hundreds of thousands, up to say 20 million or so.

Probably our sweet spot for that is half a million to three million of turnover. So organizations that sort of fit into that, have the best success MemberConnex, those that are smaller still do well, but they tend to have fewer resources. We charge them less, which is a good and we’ve got a good team here that will help those.

But you know our business model is based on supporting our customers, using the software to achieve their business goals rather than forming their business goals for them. So we’re not sort of a service-oriented in the sense that we will charge for additional services that we perform on behalf of organizations in delivering services. We will assist them to deliver them by using our software, if that makes sense.

Tammy Ven Dange – Yeah. And can you cater for Australian business hours, given you’re in New Zealand?

Craig McCullough – Yes, we do. The so we’ve found that’s worked reasonably well. Obviously we are here earlier than most of the in the day and generally there’s people here that work beyond the normal sort of 9 to 5 anyway.

So there is there’s help with this support and direct developer support through the normal Australian business hours. For many years we’ve been a business that’s essentially operated 24 hours. So, if an issue arises, we just take the time needed whenever it might be.

You know, we’ve been doing support at 3:00 in the morning. Sometimes we don’t encourage it, but you know, we will just do the necessary work to achieve a goal for a customer at the time it’s required. So, if a support request comes in after hours, we get notified and we assess it to see and deal with it as appropriate.

The functionality of MemberConnex

Tammy Ven Dange – Well, let’s talk about the product a little bit and just cover off some basic functionality. Again, MemberConnex, do manage certification and CPD Points?

Craig McCullough – Yes it’s we think one of its real strengths is its sophisticated CPD management.

Back in the mid 2000 and naughts what you call them and having simple CBD points being generated by people attending events for example.

We’ve since added to that with some really quite sophisticated capability using what we call competencies. So, what we like to think with our CPD system is that it’s specific. It’s really well designed for organization that want to cater for excellence in the CPD.

Over the years we’ve had some organizations, all they want to do is allow their members to record their CPD and frankly they don’t care about it or not or, you know, it’s really just a management tool to allow the members to manage the CPD so and aggregate it such that they can then report to the CPD reporting body, whoever it might be.

But more and more we’re finding organizations are wanting to add value to that and make it that the courses and the material that they’re delivering is of a quality that enhances the members careers.

So they are wanting to ensure that it is delivered at a level that is achieved excellence. And we’re finding the competencies, the separation and the competency. So rather than just a bare point to say you’ve got 4 hours or four points for achieve it for attending the seminar or this event that can be separated into the different competencies for the areas that you want to address in the career of one of your members.

So we think that’s a real strength of MemberConnex.

Their Learning Management System (LMS) functionality

Tammy Ven Dange – And with that, you have a learning management system?

Craig McCullough – We have what we call a LMS, so it enables an organization to maintain a record of learning for their members.

So it’s separated into elements of learning, which we call unit standards and they are then built up as modules of qualifications so a person can have a record with a number of unit standards and a number of qualifications and a status as to where their at in that learning journey so that at any point they can go in and see or an administrator can go in and have a look to see where they are along there, that sort of learning pathway.

And so that record of learning can be updated by them, completing quizzes, by them submitting material for human to mark and put a mark in against their it can also be tied to CPD points related to that so they can run in parallel with and completely separate from the CPD, or it can run sort of hand in hand when CPD points are granted it will also gives them a certain status on their qualifications.

So those organizations who need just a little bit more sophistication in their learning management then we do integrate with Moodle and with Totara and with BrainCog and with another one whose name I have forgotten.

And so if is a need for one of those more sophisticated learning management tools, we are happy to integrate with it and we’ll allow single sign on for the member to go and complete their learning in that third party system, and then when they achieve a certain status that will come back into MemberConnex so the membership record will have that they’ve achieved a certain thing, but the learning management system might tell you what you got to test or something of that sort.

Events management functionality

Tammy Ven Dange – And can you do events management?

Craig McCullough – Yes, I’ve been doing events since day one. So those events can be in-person events that people attend or they can be external webinars or they can be online videos, video on demand that can be accessed at any time essentially.

And they are all tied into the CPD system as well. So quite a powerful event management system. We notify the events coordinator when people are booking for the event so the organizer can see how they’re tracking against budgets of numbers of tickets sold and ad revenue achieved against those events.

We’ve got some tools for the actual management of the event itself, so extracting data into Excel for purposes of creating, for example, runsheets and communication to the event attendees through MemberConnex itself and printing of name badges, those sorts of things,

Tammy Ven Dange – I’m trying to remember. But I think from one of the demos I’ve seen, at MemberConnex you’re also able to easily incorporate sponsors and speakers to the events. Is that right?

Craig McCullough – Yes, that’s right. So as part of the event management, there’s a lot of things that you can tie to an event, including presentation materials, speakers with speaker profiles.

So for a speaker to be noted on an event, they become a person within the database. So there’s a record of them in the database. They may be a member or someone already in the database or they can be added in to MemberConnex and you create a speaker profile about them and that can differ from regular bio profile.

They can also have an author profile because they, they write articles for the knowledge base.

But in terms of the events, they get a speaker profile which profiles them on the events page and it can also be corporate profiles for sponsors of events. So they can all be showcased on the on the events page.

Tammy Ven Dange – If I remember it’s kind of like you just pretty much clicked and said that was going to be the speaker and that was going to be the sponsor. It was pretty simple.

Craig McCullough – We’ve done lots, lots of work over many years to try and make sophisticated software work as easily as possible. We consider this as enterprise-grade software, but made in such a way that it’s easy for regular people to use.

And so the ability to add a speaker is in the event editor to go and say ‘add speaker’ to search for the speaker profiles and add them in and they’ll immediately appear on the event page.

Same with the sponsors. Go and ‘add sponsor’; select from the sponsors for that event. And you can also detail them that they’re a premiere sponsor or a gold sponsor or there’s a coffee cart sponsor or whatever they might be for that particular event or more broadly a conference

CMS or websites functionality or integrations

Tammy Ven Dange – And what about those that might need a website or they might have on the worksheet. How do you integrate those websites?

Craig McCullough – Primarily, they will use MemberConnex as their website as well. So the MemberConnex is both a back-end website for the administrators to go in and manage the association or the membership organization, but it can also present a front end website which is public and or member facing.

We can also integrate. We do have some customers who have retained their old websites. Generally, though, the integrated nature of MemberConnex is such that there’s benefits in having the website delivered via MemberConnex as well.

Because it is very easy for example, with the events to say add a speaker, add a sponsor, present appropriate responses, pricing based on who we know about the member and what their pricing profile is.

Those sorts of things just come as part of the integration of MemberConnex with its own It can be done with external CMS’s, but it will require more design and web development work by the web developer to use our API to pull data from MemberConnex onto the website. Generally that’s at the higher end where there’s sufficient budget to enable the customer to justify that expense.

So most of the customers in that sort of sweet spot that I mentioned before, it’s far more cost effective to use either our standard templates and style them or create a custom design, but have it applied as a the face of a MemberConnex website. Because of integrated data is easily pulled through.

The MemberConnex CRM roadmap

Tammy Ven Dange – Well, it’s good to know how broad the functionality is. I think there are quite a few small membership associations that do provide a really broad range of services considering the number of staff that we actually have available.

What’s on a roadmap for MemberConnex?

Craig McCullough – We have a long roadmap, probably both evolutionary and revolutionary stuff what we’re hoping to achieve. We will be looking to prioritize those ourselves through the course of the next 6 to 9 months of development work.

But also we work in conjunction with our current customers and potentially new customers if they have some needs, but typically our existing customers to say of the things that we have that are on our roadmap, are there any of these that you would like to see us prioritize?

So we do like to listen to our customers and direct things in areas that they would like to do.

Most of the work that we’re looking to do over the course of the next 3 to 6 months are improvements to the interface, easier management of everything within MemberConnex for our customers. More broadly the slightly further away road map things are in the areas, for example of the ChatGPT, AI that is becoming very prevalent these days. So we’re doing some work on developing areas that will assist our customers to deliver better services to their members, what I’d call general improvements.

MemberConnex, as you’re seeing is a very broad product already. We’ve been doing this for quite a while now, so it already covers a lot of features that membership organizations need to do. So what we’re looking to do is just make that better all the time. So a lot of it is in areas that already exist.

And one thing that we’ve got on the go is a user interface for the administrators. Just general improvements around that to make things easier and more intuitive. And so that’s probably what our focus is over the next sort of 3 to 6 months.

Tammy Ven Dange – Well, Craig, it’s interesting. I’ll be very interested to know what you do with ChatGPT, I have all sorts of ideas of how I can see that improving any membership association CRM product for that matter. But I specifically could see things around, you know, creating new events and things like that, how that makes life easier.

So is there anything else you’d like to share about what you’re working on or about the company itself?

More about MemberConnex’s strengths

Craig McCullough – In terms of some of the strengths of MemberConnex. It’s kind of some of the boring stuff, but it’s, the nuts and bolts of membership organization. So different types of, of membership classes or membership types, for both corporate and individual or a mix of them and also the annual renewals, we do those things really, really well and make it really easy for membership organizations to do those core functions without stressing them and without taking undue time.

And one of the things I was going to share with you actually was a customer who had been with us for about five years, sadly left us. There was some features that they thought they saw on another product that they wanted to go with.

These sort of things happen is it’s a bit of a turn as people move but actually they kept MemberConnex running in the background for a while because they couldn’t do the billing properly because they couldn’t replicate theirs. Not overly complex, but it’s probably more complex than regular membership structures.

And so for about two years they were running with this other membership system, but continued to have MemberConnex running in the background to do their billing. And in the end they decided that that was silly.

So they really needed billing as that core function of what they were doing and therefore came back to us for everything else as well and found that actually the features that they thought MemberConnex didn’t have, we could deliver quite adequately for them.

They’ve been back with us for about four years since then, which is quite good. We’re going to continue to focus on this space. We want to be recognized as the premium or one of the one of the best membership offerings in New Zealand, and Australia, and that’s our goal over the coming years.

How to find out more about MemberConnex

Tammy Ven Dange – Craig, thanks for sharing today and sharing more about MemberConnex and where you plan on heading. If people want to find out more about your product, where should you go?

Craig McCullough – Okay, so they can go to memberconnex.com. You can request a demo through that or you can just submit an online inquiry and there’s an email address. hello@memberconnex.com, which will come through to our friendly support team so look forward to hearing from anybody.

Tammy Ven Dange – I’ll make sure I put it on the website so people can find that information easily and as well as on this video. Craig, thanks for your time today. Thanks for sharing what you have done with MemberConnex and about Cyberglue. And I’m sure I’ll see you in a future selection process for one of my clients.

Craig McCullough – Lovely, Thanks very much for the time, Tammy.

 

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