2014 Innovation Awards Submissions

Winner!

Customized E-Newsletter

New Jersey Society of CPAs

HighRoad connects its Newsletter Xpress +Plus product to its transactional email marketing and integrates this to the association’s content management system and AMS. HighRoad designs a smart email newsletter template that reads the member preferences stored in Aptify on the members’ record and matches content tagged to member preferences in the content management system. Content is dynamically compiled into the email and sent out without any staff intervention. Hyper-personalized email causes open rates & conversions to skyrocket.

Other Great Submissions:

Aptify WebPages

American Society of Appraisers

The American Society of Appraisers conducts officer elections annually to fill open leadership positions on our Executive Committee, Board of Governors, and Discipline Committees. During some years, our membership also votes on constitutional amendments. In the past, we had contracted with an online service to administer our elections. With configuration assistance from Aptify to leverage the Committee functionality, we were able to bring this process in-house, saving significant money annually. We needed to provide a secure and confidential process for voting that allowed only eligible members to vote only on ballots/positions for which they were authorized.

Archival of Entity Record History

APICS

Our entity record history had grown to more than 180GB, and we wanted to be able to archive the data off of the main database so as to help performance and make the overall size of the database more manageable as far as backups and disk usage. Working with Aptify, I found a way to archive the three main record history tables onto a separate database but still have the information be accessible. Our users needed to be able to continue to see the record history, so I had to devise a way to “trick” Aptify into thinking the information was still stored locally. I was able to achieve this by modifying the stored procedure and specifying a union to the archive database. At the end of the day, when a user clicks on the Record History button on a record, they can see all record history as if it were still in the database.

ASAE Mobile

ASAE

Using Aptify’s web interface technology, ASAE wanted to make the user experience for staff mobile. Staff are on the move—working from home and on the road. The one thing they consistently have in their hand is a mobile device. The goal was to give them a tool that would allow them to look up a customer, access their contact info, and view a snapshot of their engagement. We wanted to use network accounts and permissions, which was not a problem going through Aptify This first iteration needed to be well thought out, easy to use, and robust for it to be successful. Finally, we wanted to leverage web and mobile functionality that is common in other sites and apps, like mapping an address, one-click phone calls and emails, and intuitive navigation.

Enhanced Registration

Association of Washington Cities

We completely rebuilt the meeting registration module. New features include:

• The ability for a person to register multiple people for the event without leaving the registration page. 

• The ability to register for a hotel room on the same page. 

• Content on the page is customized based on attributes within the meeting and housing records.

Choosing a different employee from the dropdownbox causes the person to be changed in the OrderLine, and the various textbox fields get updated automatically. We have added a complete housing section. The majority of the text on our registration page has default values in the .ascx.vb file, but they can be overridden using attributes in the Meeting product record. The housing section will not appear if there is not a Housing attribute added to the Meeting record. These features allow us to fully customize each meeting registration to the particular meeting/audience, all from within the Aptify client.

Case Time Entries with Support for Third-Party Tracking Tool Synchronizations

New Jersey Society of CPAs

We needed a way for our Systems Developer to easily track development time so we could properly determine financial expensing. We wanted to also try and keep all the data for development projects together and within Aptify as much as possible. By having the data in Aptify, we could also run reports and statistics as we needed and it would also allow us to add addition developers or other staff to time tracking. Instead of re-inventing a time tracking tool, our developer looked to existing tracking tools. After a few trials, our developer settled on Toggl, a free online Time Tracking Tool that is very easy to use and provides decent reporting abilities. Another other big plus was that Toggl also has an API that we could use to develop a synchronization tool. This lead to the idea of developing the solution with the idea that any third-party tracking tool could be used have a synchronization tool built for it. But at the same time we need to possibly track employees not on Toggl and possibly non-staff members such as consultants and volunteers. Then we had to figure out how the data was going to get stored in Aptify, be open enough to support syncing tools without the need to extensively code for each new tool. Finally it just had to be easy to use, easy to report off of, and expandable.

We implemented Aptify case time entries with support from the Toggl tracking tool synchronizations this past August. Case time entries are now easily tracked with almost no manual interaction needed at all. We have quick and easy basic reporting of hours, and because the data is now in Aptify, we can start looking into advance reporting. We also have the ability to have any number of staff work on cases and track their hours. We can easily develop additional synchronizations between other tracking applications, if needed. And we have the ability to add entries of internal staff time, external consultants, and sync tools. With all bases covered, the sky’s the limit now.

Random List Trick-Volunteer Management

Parenteral Drug Association

PDA’s Volunteer Coordinator often receives external lists of volunteers who need to be added to committees in Aptify, the largest of which was composed of around 1,400 individual volunteers. First, at least three columns of in-common data (i.e. email, last name, and phone number) are found, and an “Aptify Linked Data” spreadsheet in Excel is created. Then, the index and match functions are used to find each volunteer’s ID using each of the three common pieces of information. After the results are cross-referenced, they are organized into a list using the concatenate function. With this list, we can create custom Aptify views using a list filter and add them all to a given committee. This process saves a lot of time because it changes the time-limiting step from the individual volunteer count to the committee count. This job used to require a lot of man power to do the data entry, but now, one person can do it in 15 to 30 minutes.

Fundraising Tools

Parents as Teachers

Parents as Teachers has created several reports, views, and a dashboard to support the fundraising staff in our organization. Using some standard reports from the fundraising field, we’ve been able to create a dashboard with two charts, one for personal pledges and one for Corporate Pledges. In addition, the dashboard includes buttons to run the AFP Effectiveness Report, an Annual Campaign report (view), a donor distribution pie chart (% corporate vs. individual), and more.

PCMA Award Form Builder

Professional Convention Management Association

The PCMA Award form builder was developed in response to the numerous awards, grant requests, scholarships, and board nomination processes that PCMA conducts each year. The system works in conjunction with the awards module and allows a staff member to create a nomination, application, and reference submissions within Aptify.

The system has also shown that it can be used to also build just general purpose forms that people need information on. The system right now is programmed for four types of forms:

Nomination: Used when nominating an individual for award/board etc. Nomination forms are entered into Award Nominations. The nomination once approved by staff then through a process flow kicks off an email to the nominated person with a link to the application.

Application: Used by the person who has been nominated for something. This person receives an email from the above process flow with link to application as well if necessary a custom link to a reference form to give to their references to fill out.

Reference: Used by people who are references and ties directly back to the award nomination record.

General Form: Used outside of the awards process for general forms. Reporting is done in both Aptify and in a custom SSRS report that pulls all of these together in both matrix and just one answer per page formats.

WorldatWork Java Aptify Library and Persistence Framework

World at Work

During our Aptify migration project, due to the sheer amount of functionality on our existing website and the number of our existing applications and integrations it was not an option to rewrite everything from scratch into Microsoft’s .NET platform and move to an e-Business-based website.

Instead WorldatWork chose to create our own Java-based Aptify code library for use in integrating Aptify into existing web applications and integrations. This code library, along with the use of a custom-written Java persistence layer, work together to transmit data manipulation requests to the Aptify database through the use of a generic e-Business web service developed by Aptify consulting. WorldatWork integrated all of their websites and entire application portfolio with Aptify using their Java Aptify library and custom persistence layer.

Some specific development highlights include:

• Development of an entirely new Java-based Aptify integrated ecommerce system that has taken in more than $12 million in online orders in 14 months of operation. 

• Development of a new streamlined Call for Presentations web application that manages all speaking proposal submissions for WorldatWork conferences and integrates seamlessly into Aptify.

• Conversion of an Educational Transcript and Certification web portal to tie directly in with Aptify.

• Development of a powerful, easy-to-use conference session scheduling web app for conference attendees.

Click here to view a recording of this year's innovation awards.