Synopsis
Jeremy Walsh joins Dr. Misner on the podcast this week to discuss new features in BNI Connect that make inviting visitors to your BNI meeting even easier.
There are now four distinct ways to invite visitors using BNI Connect and the BNI Connect Mobile App.
The Existing Ways
By email from the BNI Connect website. BNI Connect creates an email invitation that includes the registration links, the RSVP, and all the information your visitor needs to attend.
By email from the BNI Connect mobile app. This works just like the email from the website.
The problem is, everyone is already overwhelmed by emails, and you don't want a possible visitor to ignore your invitation. Make sure you personalize your email invitations.
The New Ways
By SMS from your BNI Connect mobile app. Click the "Visitors" button and choose the SMS option to open your phone's text messaging app and select contacts. BNI Connect will add a registration link to your text messgage.
By other messaging apps from the BNI Connect mobile app. Choose the "Share" option under "Visitors" to launch a messenger app like WhatsApp or WeChat. As with the SMS message, BNI Connect will automatically create an invitation with a registration link.
Be sure to personalize your text invitations, too. However you do it, be thoughtful about who you invite and how. Don't select everyone on your contact list at once. Choose people that you really think would be a good fit for the chapter. If you met them recently, remind them where you met.
Complete Transcript of Episode 671
PriscillaHello, everybody, and welcome back to The Official BNI Podcast. I'm Priscilla Rice and I'm coming to you from Live Oak Recording Studio in Berkeley, California. And I'm joined on the phone today by the Founder and the Chief Visionary Officer of BNI, Dr. Ivan Misner. Hello, Ivan, how are you today?
Ivan Yeah, thanks Priscilla, I appreciate it. I'm doing great and I'm actually at my Galveston condo for a couple of weeks to get out of the heat, the crazy heat in Austin.
Priscilla Great. Well, tell us about what we have going for today.
Ivan So today I have somebody who's been on the show, on the podcast, many times, Jeremy Walsh. I consider Jeremy a good friend. He is Mr. BNI Connect. He has done amazing things with BNI Connect. He's the Director of Support for BNI Connect and BNI University. He's been a BNI member since 2002. And a Director since 2004. He's been with BNI Connect since it went live in February of 2011. Oh gosh Jeremy, I remember those days.
Jeremy Almost a decade.
Ivan He manages the Support Team for BNI Connect with team members all over the world, his team is all over the world. And the Support Team is closing in on answering their 200,000th ticket for BNI Connect, which the team still has an average response time of under one hour. Jeremy, welcome to, welcome back to the BNI Podcast.
Jeremy Dr. Misner, Ivan, it's always a pleasure being here; love sharing, especially new information, with you and all of your listeners out there, and love this format and being here with you. So thank you.
Ivan Well, thank you. And do you remember those early days?
Jeremy It is a whole different ball game now. I mean, I still applaud you on the vision of BNI Connect and, you know, the fact that we, over the past several years, have pulled together, what do we have? How many members now? 200 and...
Ivan About 270,000 members worldwide.
Jeremy All in one system. Could you even imagine that 10 years ago?
Ivan Yeah, I appreciate that. It was, you know, I did have a big vision for this. But I also had a lot of directors who were willing to let go of their own silo, their own database system. And BNI Connect is, I think, a classic example of what can happen with collaboration. And although it was a struggle back in 2011, I cannot imagine running this organization today without it. And you my friend, are a big, big part of that, and you have something to share today about inviting and I can't wait to hear. So the floor is yours.
Jeremy Oh, awesome. Yeah, I mean, we can invite visitors. I mean, it's a whole different story nowadays than it was, you know, when I first became a member. I mean, when I first became a member in 2002, I think we were still sending faxes back then for certain things, if I'm not mistaken. And yeah, really all we had was a phone call.
Ivan Yeah, that's true.
Jeremy But now, I mean, there's no arguing that visitors are the absolute lifeblood of the chapter. And we absolutely need new people to be coming through and it's even easier now to invite people that you know, people that are close to you, people that might even already be in your address book directly, to come to your chapter meeting.
Ivan So tell our members, specifically how they can do that.
Jeremy There's actually four ways now, so four distinct ways that you can do that in BNI Connect and the BNI Connect mobile app. Now, one way we've had for a number of years, you just log into BNI Connect, you go to the operations menu, you can send an email invitation right from the website, it looks really cool. It's all set up for the meeting, has all of the registration links, and the RSVP, and all the information you need to know about it. And it's a great format to be able to send it from email. And we've also had that for a couple of years now in the mobile app.
And that's good, but I hate to say it, but you know, emails almost becoming old school nowadays. I mean, we just, we get so many emails that, you know, sometimes we may not look at some of these emails that are coming through, and say, Oh, it's just spam, it's junk, and you end up deleting it without even reading it. So a lot of the world has moved on to other methods of communication over email. I mean, Ivan in your travels, I know, all over the world, other people around the world use different methods, right?
Ivan Yeah, WeChat, WhatsApp, many different ways of connecting.
Jeremy Well, now we can invite from that as well. So it's really, it's a matter of just like clicking two buttons. So if you open up your BNI Connect mobile app, and down in the bottom corner, you'll see a "Visitors" button and you've just got to click that Visitors button. And this whole interface has been completely redesigned to make it so much easier to use, some nice icons and everything. And there's two new buttons there.
One says SMS. So, what that means is that you can just send a text message to anybody in your contact list. So rather than having to navigate the system and put all the information in about the email, you literally go in, it opens up your text messaging program, whatever you use, whether your Apple or Android or whatever. You click down, select the people and it just sends them each an individual text and says, "Hey, why don't you come to my meeting?" and has a hyperlink in there that they can then click and register for that meeting. So that's one new way. But there's another new way as well. If you click the Share buttons, now there's the SMS, and there's also a Share button. And now you can use just about any messaging program that you might have on your system. Obviously, the most popular ones out there, just like you said, WeChat, we've got things like, you know, WhatsApp, but even other messenger programs, what it'll do is they'll take that same SMS style message, wrap it up into that program, and allow you to send it out. So that way you can, whatever platform it is that you're communicating on nowadays, makes it really easy to get that invitation out there.
Ivan Wow. And this is reasonably new.
Jeremy Oh, as of just about a month or so ago, in late July, 2020.
Ivan Yeah. Wow. Well, listen, this is great. Now, one thing I want to add on in terms of reaching out to people is that it's always the personal touch that is critical. And so one of the downsides of having it be so easy is spamming people. Would you not agree?
Jeremy One hundred percent.
Ivan Yeah. So use this tool, effectively, because it's a fantastic tool, but you've got to use it effectively, which means don't carpet blanket everybody in your list, you know, pick and choose, make personal invites. It's still about that personal touch. And, you know, we don't just want, you know, people invited, we want people to feel welcome. And the best way to feel welcomed is to not feel like they're just being spammed along with a lot of other people. Now, having said that, I love this ability. I think it's fantastic. Have you had some success stories yet, Jeremy, and people doing this?
Jeremy Yeah. So the other great thing about this, just to touch upon real quick, you can personalize these messages, by the way. So it's gonna start you off with a little template, just a little blurb, hey, do you want to come to my meeting with the link, but, you know, part of this, right to your point, is to make that a personal message. So you know, put something about them that you know about them, or Hey, I really think that you'd benefit from meeting John in my chapter. Here's a link to register, something to make it so that it isn't just some canned out-of-the-box template.
Ivan I couldn't agree more and say why. I think that's a great way to do it. You know, you'd benefit meeting John in the chapter who does this, which you know, might be somebody that would be able to refer business to you, or that you could create a referral relationship with. You know, the more you can make that connection as to why they want to come, and make them feel personally invited, the more powerful this tool will be for people. It won't be just another way to spam people, it'll be another way to effectively communicate with people.
Jeremy Success stories have already started coming in. I mean, we're hearing people from around the world, especially in other countries, because as I was saying before,...
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