Tammy Ven Dange of Roundbox Consulting chats with Brett Andrew, CEO and Founder of Mition about their Association Management System or CRM for Associations.
In this interview, we learn about:
- 00:15 About Mition
- 03:06 Mition product features
- 05:03 Marketing and Communications capabilities
- 05:41 Building websites and integrations
- 08:29 Managing CPD points
- 10:19 Mition pricing model
- 12:03 Ideal clients?
- 13:53 Final thoughts
- 14:48 More about Mition
Links and Resources:
- More info about Mition.
Other Vendor Videos:
Our Vendor Video Library is growing every month. If you liked this video, you might find these other vendor videos useful too:
Tammy regularly helps Associations and other 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 Mition (Minor modifications have been made for clarity
Tammy Ven Dange
Today I welcome Brett Andrew. Director and Founder of Mition. Brett, welcome.
Brett Andrew
Thanks, Tammy.
About Mition
Tammy Ven Dange
Well, let’s talk more about Mition. Tell me more about the company.
Brett Andrew
So Mition is a product that we started building five years ago. It’s created by a company called ForMition. ForMition we actually started 10 years ago, predominantly doing consulting and working with a lot of Australia’s largest associations and predominantly medical associations as well.
Tammy Ven Dange
And so you all started a few years ago, where do you have staff? Tell us more about the product.
Brett Andrew
Well, we’re really focused on being an Australian-based product. So we’re Australian based and owned and all of our staff are all onshore. We don’t do any offshore development or support services.
Tammy Ven Dange
So, Brett, tell me more about how you got involved in Mition.
Brett Andrew
So I got involved in Mition as the founder. So me and a group of our staff got together and essentially, we were working with the largest medical associations in Australia and going from one to the other. We kept finding the exact same problems dealing with membership, websites, subscriptions, payments, marketing, managing events, managing education.
And each client had a completely different tech stack. So we would build solutions to help integrate some of those products, replace some of those core products and basically leave them in a better situation. But as we kept going from one to the other and finding that each of them had a really complex set of tools, it just didn’t seem to work.
And the membership environment and the technology that was around, it was like going back to the 80s. So we decided we were really tired of putting so much effort into making these organisations better when they mostly do 90% the same thing. And the biggest expense we found was like integrating different products.
So they’d have 10 different products and silos of information everywhere. It was just not a great solution. So we decided to build Mition from the ground up.
And we really took our time to make this the most perfect Australian-based association platform to capture everything that they all need. And we started off slowly bringing on smaller associations and really production hardening it, listening to our clients and working at what features work, what don’t. But essentially we’ve now covered that entire stack of features and the product’s complete.
We’ve had 100% uptime since 2019. And we’re now about improving and making that product better and stronger and our clients already love it.
Tammy Ven Dange
I haven’t seen many products of any software, any industry, where the founder was an enterprise architect. It actually talks about the major problem we have, like you said, with integration.
Mition product features
Tammy Ven Dange
Now let’s talk about the product features.
I’d love to know more about what the product actually does, since you’ve already created something that’s been for purpose. So can it do both individual and corporate members?
Brett Andrew
Yes. We’ve put a lot of effort into making sure you can manage both B2B and B2C and really helping those suppliers or organisations then manage their members within your portal as well.
Tammy Ven Dange
So if you have a corporate membership and you have a bunch of individuals underneath that, does that mean that the corporate can actually manage their own members?
Brett Andrew
They can manage their own members. And there’s lots of different ways that you can get them to connect to that organisation. You can match it via domain extension.
If one of your companies is Microsoft and any employee that has a Microsoft email address signs up and they verify that email address, they get connected into that pool and get that free subscription to get additional access. And several other features similar to that to really work with them.
Tammy Ven Dange
And I assume the renewals will also be very similar, that you’ve worked it out for both individual members and for corporate members as well?
Brett Andrew
Yeah. So in our lifetime, we’ve seen fixed, we’ve seen rolling subscriptions, and then that organisation has one subscription, and that represents that whole company. It still needs to be attached to a person, but that can be the CFO or the CEO.
Tammy Ven Dange
Okay. And what about other things like events?
Brett Andrew
Yeah, so we have a massive events module, and we’re constantly refining that. So we’ve had a few conferences launch with our customers, and we listen to how it’s working. Some of them have multiple events running at the same time.
So it’s all about that automation of communication, being able to send emails out, collect different ticket prices, and self-subscribing.
Marketing and Communications capabilities
Tammy Ven Dange
So it sounds like you also have like a marketing communications module.
Brett Andrew
Yes, email templates built in. So essentially, you can create really beautiful email templates with name tags or tags, field tags. So do your first name, and then the email template will replace that with the person’s actual name.
And you publish those, and your staff can then use them to send them out on demand, or you can actually tie them automatically into an event. So if someone just paid their subscription for the very first time, or if it’s a week after they’ve just paid that subscription, or a renewal is coming up. So all these automation points, we can actually just set that template to run automatically.
Building websites and integrations
Tammy Ven Dange
And what about building websites?
Brett Andrew
Yeah, so our website editor is always improving. So we’re competing with WordPress, which is quite slick and nice, and 80% of the world is running it. But yeah, I guess the main benefit is we can actually, you can expose a lot of the features from our portal, or the members portal, out through that website.
So you can create secure pages for different member categories, and you can put on that page a list of other members. Like it could be a board member, and here’s a page just for board members. And you can put a list of here are the other board members, and the social tools built into that, where they can communicate and connect.
You can put a document library for board members that only they have access to on that page, and they can add documents to that if you want them to, or you can make it read-only, and you can have different access for different types of roles within your organisation.
Tammy Ven Dange
And if they want to have their current public website integrated with their system, is that a problem?
Brett Andrew
We’ve got, the way we built our system is API first. So essentially there’s nothing that you can’t do from a third-party system, as in connect to the system, get information out, or put information in. And all the APIs are actually very well automatically documented as well for admins, so they can see that.
So if you had a WordPress site, and you had a developer, and you said, I want you to connect to the Mition form and upload data, or retrieve data, or authenticate someone, you could do all of that through APIs. So we don’t recommend you do that directly from JavaScript. It’s not the best architecture.
You’d actually have a server or a service in the background that would connect to Mition, and they would communicate and send data back to that client. But ultimately, we try and tell people it’s more cost-effective to use our web platform because of the benefits and features. And we’re constantly enhancing that.
And if there’s a feature inside WordPress that we don’t have, we would build it for you. It’s that straightforward. The biggest problem with websites that are out there is that 80% of the world’s on WordPress, 80% of them are already out of date and out of support, and people know about the vulnerabilities.
So we monitor our websites constantly, and we see so many bots trying to hit those WordPress known links to see what version of WordPress are you on. So we kind of pride ourselves on being at the forefront of security and technology, and all of our clients are always on the latest version. So it’s a true cloud solution.
Managing CPD points
Tammy Ven Dange
Let’s talk about CPD points because in my experience, that’s one of the hardest things to find.
Brett Andrew
Yeah, so all of our previous clients had CPD when we were in that consulting space. So the whole education factor, like we went through massive IT projects trying to find the right education system and products like Desire2Learn and Moodle and all these other products. And again, integration was expensive, and using them was expensive, so we built our own.
So essentially, you can use the website to put a video on it or a form that you have to fill out. We haven’t done quizzes yet, but that’s probably something in the future. As someone watches that video, you can automatically allocate points towards your education or whatever is part of that curriculum.
So you can define that whole program. So it might be year one. So essentially, think of a five-year medical specialist degree.
Year one, you have to get points in all these areas. So you then define the activities. They can manually add those activities, and then they can see where they’re up to as well.
So that whole program management and CPD management, it’s complex, as you know, but it’s so much easier when you’ve already got all the user’s information there, and you can actually use the website to display the activities that you need to do with links off to them, and they can actually complete them then and there.
Tammy Ven Dange
And can you also automatically assign CPD points when there is a, let’s say, a webinar, like a live webinar?
Brett Andrew
Yeah, absolutely. So if you go through our events module, and you can see who attended, you can go through and mark all the people who attended and add an activity, which would be CPD points for attending a webinar.
Tammy Ven Dange
Perfect. Okay.
Mition pricing model
Well, tell me more about your pricing model, because when we spoke about this earlier, I thought that was the most unique thing about the full functional association management system that has pretty much everything.
But your pricing model is unique.
Brett Andrew
Yeah, so we always came from the association side of the fence. So that’s how we’ve been working for a decade. So when we set up our pricing, we didn’t want to have this endless add-on, add-on, upsell kind of methodology.
It’s like, no, we’re building one system, one platform, and you can use all of the features or one of the features. So it’s essentially every feature is included. And as we add new features, they’re included.
If you’re an organisation that runs off Excel today, and you’re struggling, you have a WordPress site, if you started using Mition Tomorrow, you have access to the website, events, document libraries. You could do holiday home rental bookings or a resource booking tool. It’s, yeah, there’s 18 different modules.
So essentially, we replace a lot of those add-on products that people are trying to stitch together and make work. And, yeah, from our experience, it’s working. We’ve got a seamless product that has all those things integrated.
Everything’s in the right place. And you go to one person, whether it’s a staff or a member, and you can see everything about them, what they’ve attended, what emails they’ve opened, have they paid their subscriptions, how long have they been a member for, oh, they were a board member for three years, and things like that. So that whole history of that person, which is how it should be.
It’s centered around a person, and whether it’s a member or a staff member or a supplier, it’s about keeping that information and that centered data around a person and making sure everyone’s happy. So I think it’s working.
Ideal clients?
Tammy Ven Dange
Now, I know you’re working with a lot of medical associations. Who would be your ideal client?
Brett Andrew
So in the stage that we’re in now, our ideal client is someone who has three to four full-time staff, a turnover of something like half a million dollars a year, and they have the problems that we see that we’re trying to solve. So they would appreciate the fact that our system is integrated, can manage members’ events, email marketing, and those sort of things. So that’s kind of our ideal client.
I think in the future as we grow, we’ll be able to help out some of the smaller associations that are volunteer, but until we kind of improve our DIY process where people can do it without a lot of our help. A lot of our clients aren’t technical, so we’re learning from them how do we make it so that you can actually do this yourself. And we’re doing a lot of testing at the moment and trialing that.
It’s like let’s let you do it by yourself, and we kind of oversee it to make sure that everything goes smoothly. Where can we improve our product, and how can we make it so that we can scale this out for more associations? But at the moment, we can’t kind of manage smaller associations, really small ones, with the price that we’re on.
Tammy Ven Dange
What about bigger ones?
Brett Andrew
Yeah, large associations, it’s the same. So we find that three months of intensive training and onboarding, and clients don’t need to contact us. They’re comfortable with it.
So we help them press that first send button to 30,000 emails. We help them send that because it’s nerve-wracking doing that. So we’re there holding their hands.
They’ve got their template set up. They’ve got their member data tested. We’ve been going through this for three months now.
You’re all comfortable, and I press that first email button, and we’re there with them. But yeah, three months after that, they don’t need us anymore. They’ve got this.
Final thoughts
Tammy Ven Dange
All right. Is there anything else you want to share, Brett?
Brett Andrew
I think some of the feature improvements that we’ve just launched last night, so if you search a member’s website and there’s a document somewhere on the website that’s being shared, we can actually search the contents of that document now. It’s kind of cool. And we’re working on some AI improvements.
So we’re really cautious when it comes to AI. We’re not letting it go and get access to your entire system. Essentially, we’re doing this at arm’s length and doing it through third-party systems, similar to how you do a YouTube embed.
You can do AI embeds to provide services that you can really tightly control what access that conversation can have. So we’re looking at that at the moment for one of our clients. It’s all very exciting.
Tammy Ven Dange
Terrific. Well, I’m looking forward to seeing what else is on your roadmap in the future.
More about Mition
In the meantime, how can people find out more about Mition?
Brett Andrew
Yes. All the information about Mition is on our website, Mition.com.
Tammy Ven Dange
And it’s spelled with a T, not an S?
Brett Andrew
With a T, yes. And we also accept Miteon as well. A lot of people call it Miteon.
But, yeah, Mition is its branding name.
Tammy Ven Dange
Excellent. Brett, thanks for your time today, and thanks for sharing more about Mition.
Brett Andrew
Thanks, Tammy. Lovely to see you.