COVER STORY CHARITY MARKETING
“Our marketing was based around individual products when what we really needed to do was let the data speak to us and tell us which customers to target.” Glenn Cook, Group Solutions, The REaD Group
invest what were very significant sums in a data analysis and insight function, ending up with nine staff in the team.”
The challenge at the time for Cook was to evolve the entire fundraising side of the business away from a siloed, product-based strategy towards a data-driven approach.
“Our marketing activity at the time was all
based around individual products when what we really needed to do was let the data speak to us and tell us which customers should be targeted for which products.”
Since then, Macmillan has gone on to break the magical £10m barrier for the first time last year and shows no signs of slowing up any times soon.
But Cook adds a caveat that “it doesn’t matter how good your analytical team is, or even your data, if the organisation isn’t willing to evolve and adapt”.
LOOKING TO THE FUTURE These days, much of Baggett’s work at Wood For Trees is predictive and based around planning as his clients become increasingly familiar and comfortable with the finer points of predictive analytics and multichannel marketing. “Many of our clients are now looking more
and more at planning and forecasting tools, looking at growth not just for next year or the year after but for the next 20 years,” he says. “That involves lots of modelling work involving lifetime value and attrition rates and so on, but we now produce what are effectively slider bar tools that let our clients see what happens when they put
New charity industry awards Introducing the IoF Insight SIG Awards...
After several years of successfully developing insight and analysis skills in the charity sector, the Stragic Insight Group of the Institute of Fundraising (IoF) is launching an awards scheme specially to recognise best practice and raise the profile of these increasingly important disciplines in driving fundraising performance.
Entries are now being invited for projects and initiatives in that charity sector that demonstrate the highly effective use of data, analysis and insight for the following categories: 1. Driving Strategy 2. Supporter Acquisition 3. Supporter development and retention 4. Innovation 5. Team of the Year 6. Supplier of the Year
14 April2012
Full information on how to enter and downloadable entry forms can be found at
www.insightsig.org/awards
Entry is free and individual submissions must be submitted by 30th April 2012 for judging in May. A prestigious awards ceremony will be held in June 2012. Further details will be published on the SIG website as they become available. Feedback from IoF members indicates that good case study material is much needed to help raise standards in the sector and inspire individuals to leverage data to improve fundraising results. For further information, email
awards@insightsig.org or call Janet Snedden on 07740 285 101.
www.dmarket.co.uk
money into this channel or pull it out of that one.”
The move to high end forecasting has been a major one, and not without its problems, says Baggett, but one that will ultimately prove worthwhile.
“But MSPs like us are not magic bullets,” he
warns. “We don’t look ‘outside the box’ for our clients, that’s not what we’re there for, that’s what they can use agencies for. We can only work with what we’ve got at our disposal, but our clients seem happy with what we do!” And Wood For Trees must be doing something right, having been named Outstanding Marketing Services Provider at last year’s inaugural Database Marketing Awards against some very stiff competition. The one area that causes Baggett mild
concern for the future is the lack of experienced analysts in the charity sector to make the important decisions. A lack of skilled, experience manpower is not unique to charities, of course, but it’s an issue that will need to be addressed if the charity sector is to continue to evolve for the next decade. Far from being the poor relation of
commercial database marketing operations, it appears that, propelled along by the pressures of the recession, charity marketers are keeping ahead of the game. n
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