Tammy Ven Dange of Roundbox Consulting chats with Merryn Parks, the Asia Pacific General Manager of ToucanTech about the company and their Membership Association CRM solution.
Topics from this interview with ToucanTech:
In this interview, we learn about:
- 00:00 – About ToucanTech CRM
- 1:00 – More about Merryn Parks
- 1:53 – Who is a typical client?
- 4:30 – ToucanTech CRM functionality
- 6:25 – ToucanTech’s Roadmap
- 7:48 – Partnering with other companies
- 8:25 – How to find out more about ToucanTech CRM
Links & Resources:
- Learn more about the ToucanTech CRM on their website – https://toucantech.com/
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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 (minor modifications have been made for clarity)
Tammy Ven Dange Today I welcome Merryn Parks. She’s ToucanTech’s general manager for Asia Pacific. Merryn, thank you for joining me today.
Merryn Parks Yeah, thank you for having me. Really looking forward to sharing a little bit more about ToucanTech with your audience.
About ToucanTech
Tammy Ven Dange Oh, great, let’s start there, then. Tell us more about ToucanTech.
Merryn Parks Well, ToucanTech is a cloud-based service as a software that supports member engagement and also management of those members.
We have close to 300 customers globally and the bulk of the Asia Pacific base are definitely located within Australia.
Next year, we will be 10 years young and very proud to report that we have the highest-rated association management software and customer rating on a number of software review sites. And that rating is 4.9 stars.
More about Merryn Parks
Tammy Ven Dange So tell us more about how you got involved in ToucanTech.
Merryn Parks Yeah, I was a customer first. I was working for an Australian educational institution managing their community for a number of years and needed some extra tools to help build engagement and certainly manage the data better. And eventually I found ToucanTech on that search.
As a user of the product for a number of years and really enjoyed using that product. So when the opportunity came to work for ToucanTech I made the switch. In particular, I really like the flexibility of the tools for a variety of different use cases.
And now I really enjoy working to see if we can be a good fit for a particular organisation’s needs as well as supporting them ongoing when they become a customer to maximise their investment of the software itself.
Who is a typical client?
Tammy Ven Dange So tell me more about the types of customers that ToucanTech has now.
Merryn Parks Our client base definitely have an educational bent to them. One of our longest retained customers locally is Sydney Boys High School, the union. They run a paid membership model. They manage a large range of engagement activities, events, provide resources to their membership base to keep them engaged and retain that and grow that base.
Our main contact for that organisation does happen to be a volunteer. His name is Paul Harapin and he actually is the head of Stripe Payment Company. Stripe is a mover and a shaker in the payment space. So, he’s head of Stripe for the Asia Pacific region.
We have a number of other associations, quite a few health related, rural health pharmacy, Digital Health Association from New Zealand. We really have a broad brush of others, Analytics Institute, Shell Pensioners Association and one that’s a little bit out there, the Worldwide Australian Labradoodle Association.
Tammy Ven Dange But how many members does your typical client have?
Merryn Parks Most of our customers are really maximising their people resources and so looking to get efficiencies. Staff teams are definitely less than 10 administrators.
You know, on the software itself, our commercial model is pretty generous though, it has really high usage caps. So there have been examples where I’ve spoken to other organisations that with their current solutions, they’re managing to a number of records in order to keep costs down.
We philosophically think that we don’t necessarily want you to do that. There’s a great value in retaining data, particularly lapsed members. You hope that perhaps they might return as current members. And to see that history of engagement over time and not necessarily lose some of that information, we think is really important.
A number of our customers also maintain distribution lists for just newsletters to the public. And so it allows for all those different types of use cases in terms of specific database sizes.
It can vary a lot from those that are very specifically focused on just their paid membership base. So that can be a couple of thousand, but then we have quite a number of customers that manage tens of thousands of database records.
ToucanTech CRM functionality
Tammy Ven Dange And so let’s talk about the functionality of ToucanTech. Being a membership based technology, it obviously can manage members and probably renewals as well. What about events?
Merryn Parks Yeah, we do have events and probably part of our appeal is that we do provide a number of common tools that associations may need.
So a website with a connected database, the CRM, the membership management, payment processing, email engine to segment for different audiences and also events and certainly a lot more that sort of sits under that one single banner, which is ToucanTech.
We feel like this means that there are less integrations that need to be maintained because all of those different elements are products that we essentially build and maintain ourselves. And so, you know, they’re not going to break with those integrations. We certainly also believe that supports a faster implementation timeline as well.
Tammy Ven Dange And just to be certain because I know that a lot of associations and membership based organisations require other things. Do you manage CPD points?
Merryn Parks CPD points, we definitely can track them. We don’t have a separate CPD module from a commercial point of view. So, our product is always evolving and definitely encourage you to share what requirements you have around CPD points to see if we can be a good fit for any requirements in that space.
Tammy Ven Dange And then what about the Learning Management System? Do you have that or integrations to others?
Merryn Parks Yeah, learning management system definitely is one of those things that isn’t necessarily always a requirement for our associations. So we haven’t built out that functionality but can talk to you about single sign-on options between existing Learning Management Systems that you may be using and ToucanTech.
ToucanTech’s Roadmap
Tammy Ven Dange And what’s on the roadmap for ToucanTech?
Merryn Parks Our near term focus, particularly around product development, is on events. We are doing some work on multi-stream events, conferencing-style events being able to bundle in add-on sales for event tickets. So thinking about packages beyond a core ticket price. That’s being done there.
We certainly are building out some nuances around membership payments and growing the number of different channels that you might want to present for processing membership payments and certainly capabilities around reporting for accounting exports and the like.
Speaking of enhancements, we do provide and make changes to the product all the time. There’s hundreds of different smaller changes to the product each year.
It might be just a filter that a customer has recommended or a new reporting field. And as a cloud-based technology, we actually make available all of these new features and functions to you without requiring you to pay more.
We’ve recently added AI functionality, which is the hot topic of the moment – specifically around the email engines, some generative AI tools around being able to create images for your emails, refine the headlines and reworking copy for total changes.
Partnering with other companies
Tammy Ven Dange Alright. Is there anything else you want to share, Merryn?
Merryn Parks While we do have essentially a product that has a number of different tools, we’re certainly aware that we do need to partner or have some integrations with other organisations to make our product relevant.
In particular, we partner with Amazon Web Services to host data locally and securely. And we have lots of other features built in around payment gateway processing for payments, accounting, single sign-on options and an open API for data exchange.
How to find out more about ToucanTech CRM
Tammy Ven Dange And if people want to know more about ToucanTech, where should we send them?
Merryn Parks Like others, we have a website. It is ToucanTech as in toucan the bird. So, toucantech.com.
And if you do reach out to me, if you’re investigating different options, certainly we have a philosophy on focusing on sustainable growth. So, we are really focused on ensuring we get good-fit customers.
So, it is a two-way street making sure that we understand your requirements in order to see if we’re going to be a good fit. And you certainly will have a conversation about that.
Tammy Ven Dange Alright, Merryn, thank you so much for your time today and for sharing more about ToucanTech.
Merryn Parks Wonderful. Thank you.