As you may know, we launched the Persi Awards a few years ago to recognize the incredible accomplishments that our clients have made over the past year and to highlight their success stories.

Persi Award Winners for Innovation

With this category of awards, we recognized organizations using innovative approaches to acquire and engage their members, donors, attendees, exhibitors and more.

The American Pharmacists Association received the Persi Award for Innovation in the Association segment because of their efforts to restructure their membership process over the past year and transform the way that they engage their members. APhA shifted away from having traditional membership types to membership levels that focus on the benefits received and simplify the new membership and renewal process. They also restructured their IT department and made changes in how they manage financial records within Personify360.

In the nonprofit and community category, we selected the American Society of Safety Professionals for the Persi Award for Innovation. ASSP developed a Champions program to empower nonprofit leaders to drive conversations and engagement in their online Community. These champions have created more than 250 conversations between leaders, stakeholders and members in the organizations, and over 20 groups are led by Champions. Within a year of the program launching, more than 1,400 members were added to the community, 30 Champions are currently in the program and there have 400,000 pageviews in the community.

In the Health and wellness category, our Persi Award Innovation winner is the YMCA of the Twin Cities. They engaged Personify, NetPulse and eGym to leverage an Apple technology program for their members. Members can now check into facility by scanning their Apple Watch and log into equipment at facility that track metrics and progress in wellness programs. Members are also able to renew their YMCA membership using their Apple Watch, which is integrated with all of the member’s information in Personify. The YMCA of the Twin Cities is innovative in many ways. Their third-party vendors use Personify’s APIs for receipts that can be used to calculate the cost of childcare expenses for tax filing. They also have vendors that use Personify eBusiness to manage camp reservations, choose meals and more.

We introduced a new Persi Award category for event professionals and show organizers in 2020. Our Innovation award winner for this category is Emerald, a leader in business-to-business trade shows and conferences and each year they connect over 1.9 million customers across 142 events using A2Z Events. Emerald continues to innovate by providing unparalleled experiences to connect buyers and suppliers using the entire platform. They lead the way in adoption and sales of enhanced digital content, and they increase the value for exhibitors and improve the attendee experience.

Additionally, Emerald is currently launching a new events Community for a recently canceled event due to COVID-19. The team works collaboratively with Personify to remain at the forefront of creating rich event experiences.

Our final Persi Award Innovation winner is the Newcomer Friends of Greater Plano. This volunteer-run organization has been an active member of Wild Apricot for over 5 years. They have a busy and ever-growing calendar of events and a website that constantly needs updating, all while having board members on constant rotation. With Wild Apricot being a necessity to this organization achieving their goals, the board made the decision to assign nearly 15 tasks a month to one of our partners, releasing over 200 hours. This has allowed members to shift their focus back to their mission and focus on what matters most.

Persi Awards Winners for Impact

The Impact Awards are for organizations who have leveraged Personify’s solutions to drive their mission forward and meet their organization’s goals. They have fostered advocacy, vibrancy and collaboration through the use of technology.

The American Water Works Association was chosen as the Impact winner for the Association segment. They provide video training content to members and wanted to move to a Netflix-style video subscription. The AWWA team worked with Personify partner webcastcloud to develop a branded video channel and hosting to deliver training videos to members in a process that is seamlessly integrated with Personify360 via Personify’s single sign-on interface. AWWA also recently went through an upgrade process with Personify360 and is now able to take advantage of the latest updates and enhancements to better serve their members.

The next Impact recipient is the Citizens Climate Lobby, our winner in the nonprofit and community category. When this organization’s founder passed away in 2019, members created a space within the community to memorialize him. Across the world, people shared news clippings, video and reflections within the community. The founder’s wife even became involved in thanking members. This is a very large community, but the organization’s leaders were able to make this very personal for members.

During this time, the community had 420,000 pageviews, which is an all-time high for this community and the memorial made up 78% of all pageviews during that time. While we are sad about this organization’s loss, we want to applaud the Citizens Climate Lobby for the great work that they have done to keep members connected.

Our Impact winner for the Health and wellness segment is the YMCA of Metropolitan Chattanooga for their commitment and engagement in their recent implementation of Personify360. They reached out to Personify to help them build an online presence for members and sell memberships online.

After going live, they sold 15% of memberships online in the first month and did this with no advertising. This allows members to sign up for memberships much quickly and freed up staff time to focus on programming and other activities.

Our Impact winner in the new event professionals and show organizer category is Taffy Event Strategies who has a team of top-notch industry experts from some of the most well-known and respected tradeshows and companies globally. Taffy uses A2Z Events as their platform of choice for show and conference management as well as mobile solutions. They were also the first client to add the Virtual Connect Suite for one of their largest show management clients when the event was canceled due to COVID-19. The event is the largest international tile and stone show in North America and is on the Gold 100 List.

Our final winner in the Impact category is the Fort Worth Mothers of Multiples, a new Wild Apricot member. They utilized the all-in-one software to double their membership in the last 12 months. They have since seen an increase in sponsorship, engagement from stakeholders and members and have acquired a budget increase allowing them to go into 2020 thriving.

Trailblazer Awards

Our next category is the Trailblazers category. These are organizations that use several of Personify’s solutions to take their constituent management and engagement approach to a new level. They leverage technology in innovative ways and are making significant strides to better acquire, engage and retain their constituents.

Our first winner, the Council for Advancement and Support of Education, went through a significant upgrade in 2019. CASE had previously used a customized system but wanted to benefit from the latest product enhancements. By upgrading their technology, they lowered their spend on customizations and reinvested those dollars into the programming.

Additionally, CASE has affiliates across the world and leverage multi-currency functionality to interact with affiliates in different countries. They are a new A2Z Events client and will have many events take place across the globe this year and next. While some of their events may be postponed or canceled due to COVID-19, they will be positioned well to deliver strong events in the future and can tie all the data back into Personify360.

The final Trailblazer is the American College of Physicians, an organization that has been a longtime client that also recently went through a technology upgrade. This upgrade was well executed and organized on their side. They are very methodical about their process and committed to making the best use of their technology.

ACP leverages A2Z Events to manage their online booth space application, reservation contracts and sponsorship contracts. They take advantage of the revenue acceleration program to deliver more value to their exhibitors before, during and after the show. While their show was canceled this year, ACP will be able to create and execute amazing event experiences for their clients in the future.

Congratulations to all of our 2020 Persi Award winners! This is just a sample of the great things our clients are doing every day and truly what the PersoniFest user conference is all about. We’re thrilled to be able to recognize the work that they do to grow their organizations and increase their impact!

The post Meet the 2020 Persi Award Winners appeared first on Personify.

The Society of Hospital Medicine is a membership organization dedicated to promoting exceptional care for hospitalized patients. SHM serves hospitalists, or members of care teams, that care for hospitalized patients and the organization currently has over 18,000 members. Hospitalists include physicians, hospital executives, physicians’ assistants, nurse practitioners and practice administrators. SHM has been using Personify’s technology to manage member information, grow engagement across chapters and improve member communication since 2017.

Creating A New Member Experience

One of the most notable areas of improvement after launching Personify360 is the online member experience. Previously, prospective members would have to call SHM to purchase a multi-year membership, often deterring people from membership altogether. With Personify360, hospitalists can do it all online- purchase a membership, update their account information and more. Allowing members this new level of self-service has paved the way for revenue growth and improved member satisfaction. Kim shared that, “Personify360 has been a real game changer in how we service our members and has given us a lot of opportunities we didn’t have before.”

Improving Data Integrity

According to Kim, Personify’s robust reporting tools and dashboards have allowed SHM to ramp up their data integrity efforts and improve visibility across their departments.

They use Personify’s reporting tools to easily pull and schedule a variety of reports. This ranges from having the latest registration numbers sent to the meeting planner every morning to real-time data integrity reports identifying potential data errors or duplicates.

Engaging Members Across 60 Chapters

Like many membership organizations, SHM struggled to engage their members and keep them engaged throughout the lifetime of their membership. With 18,000 members across 60 chapters, it can be a challenge to preserve that feeling of connection and belonging. After implementing Personify360 and Personify Community, they were able to come up with several solutions that they wouldn’t have been able to achieve before.

SHM now bundles special interest groups with certain membership types to improve long-term engagement. For example, if someone becomes a student member, they are automatically added to the relevant student member special interest groups, which also syncs with special interest groups within the online community. Upon joining, the new student member has direct and immediate access to the content, news and information most relevant to them.

Additionally, SHM encourages chapter leaders to use the various online communities to talk with their members (not just at them), share relevant information, encourage speaking proposals for the annual conference and more. “We are striving to make community the number one method of communication with our members,” explains Kim.

Perhaps one of the biggest member benefits to be found within SHM’s online community is the Open Members Forum, which is a private space available only to members to discuss a wide range of topics relevant to their day-to-day jobs or to the overall industry. Discussions topics range from Medicare cording to scheduling procedures and billing practices.

Optimizing Operations at Conferences and Events

In addition to managing their day-to-day business, SHM also uses Personify360 at conferences and industry events. The flexibility of the Personify SaaS interface makes it an ideal platform to facilitate onsite sales and quickly access member information.

This is particularly beneficial as SHM hosts a large annual conference with thousands of attendees each year and often need to access their database from a tablet device onsite to better serve their attendees. In fact, SHM’s annual conference “Hospital Medicine” is the largest national gathering of hospitalists in the United States and offers a broad program of educational and networking opportunities specifically for hospital medicine professionals and SHM members.

We were thrilled to learn about all that ways that the Society of Hospital Medicine is using technology to further their mission. We’ll let Kim tell you more herself about SHM and how they’re changing the game and driving digital transformation for their organization.

Hear Kim’s Story

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The goal of our community is to make sure that “no post goes unanswered.”

Earlier this year, my colleagues and I had a chance to sit down with Lacey Horta, a Senior Support Specialist at the Canadian Cancer Society, and this statement about how they approach managing their online community really stuck with me.

About the Canadian Cancer Society

The Canadian Cancer Society (CCS) is a national, community-based organization dedicated to improving and saving the lives of people affected by cancer. They have taken a comprehensive approach to fight cancer, including:

• Funding research on all types of cancer
• Educating Canadians about early diagnosis and prevention
• Providing support services
• Serve as a political advocate on cancer-related issues

Additionally, CCS is Canada’s largest national charitable fundraiser of research into all types of cancer. At CCS, Lacey and her team enable connections and support among the organization’s members across the country. One of the ways in which they do this is through their online support community, Cancer Connection, which is powered by Personify Community.

About Cancer Connection

This community was created to support not only people with a cancer diagnosis but also their loved ones and currently has more than 8,000 members. Community members can start or join existing discussions categorized by topic or cancer stage, join groups to find like-minded members and have a safe space to discuss difficult issues, exchange messages of support with other community members and even share personal journals in the form of blog posts.

Recently, CCS launched a community mentor program that empowers superusers within the community to gain more education about the platform and welcome new members and help them navigate through the different resources available online. CCS recently conducted a survey among community members and found that 97 percent felt that the community was a place they could trust. This is a tremendous accomplishment and speaks to the value that the organization has created in its online community.

The mission of the Cancer Connection community is to make sure that people who are experiencing cancer do not have to go through it alone. It’s crucial to connect them to other people who are going through something similar so that they can feel supported and hear stories of hope.

One of the things I love about working at Personify is that every day I get to help our nonprofit and association clients achieve their missions and better serve their members. While I’m certainly familiar with the impact an online community can make – as it drives much of what we do – I don’t always get to hear the personal stories of how these communities can truly transform lives.

Online Community Misperceptions

We were especially grateful to have had the opportunity to sit down with Lacey recently as she shared stories of hope she’s witnessed within Cancer Connection. She shared that a common misperception about online communities for specific health concerns is that community members don’t have a support network outside of the community. However, that’s usually not true. Members of Cancer Connection often have a support network filled with friends and family members.

They turn to the online community because they don’t have people in their support network that are going through the same experience of having a cancer diagnosis. So, the community can be really powerful in connecting individuals that would otherwise have a challenging time finding one another.

Lacey sat down with us at PersoniFest to share how the organization uses Personify Community to connect those affected by cancer to one another and shared a powerful story of acceptance and inclusivity.

Hear Lacey’s Story

The post Meet our Latest Game Changer: the Canadian Cancer Society appeared first on Personify.

Game Changer Spotlight: The Climate Reality Project

Speaking of global change… Let us introduce you to one of our newest Game Changers: The Climate Reality Project! The Climate Reality Project was founded in 2006 by former US Vice President Al Gore after the release of the Academy Award-winning film An Inconvenient Truth. While the film’s goal was to get the world talking about climate change, the creation of the Climate Reality Project helped move the conversation forward to inspire activists, organizers and scientists alike.   

The Climate Reality Leadership Corps, Climate Reality’s flagship program, set out to empower everyday people to become activists. Technology, or the lack thereof, was a key challenge as Climate Reality set out to build a foundation of tools, resources and training for their Leaders. Reality Hub powered by Personify Community became their one-stop-shop for delivering training tools, hosting presentations, planning and promoting local events, and more. Not only did the Community allow Climate Reality to empower and support their Leaders and activists, it also allowed the community members to interact and engage with each other. Read more about how Climate Reality continues to grow their reach with a network of more than 19,000 Leaders in 152 countries using Personify Community.  

And the award goes to…  

Along with being a Personify Game Changer, the Climate Reality Project was recently awarded a 2019 PERSI Award in the “Impact” category for their use of Personify technology to catalyze a global solution to the climate crisis. Each year, the Climate Reality Project’s constituents commit to completing Acts of Leadership, such as organizing or speaking at events, writing articles or participating in campaigns. Since the community launched, the number of annual Acts of Leadership has grown an astonishing 270 percent from about 11,000 to 30,000. 

See the full list of PERSI Award winners.  

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