E-CRM: The Web Way

United Way of Greater Toronto uses e-CRM to tap into community spiritand wallets

AN E-MAIL ARRIVES ACROSS 200 EMPLOYEE DESKTOPS at management consulting firm A.T. Kearney in Toronto to boast about its charitable work in the local community. The correspondence asks for a donation to the local United Way, and to create a healthy sense of competition, plays up the company's “charity thermometer,” comparing the amount other divisions donated.

Over the next four months, similar e-mails — all personalized and signed by company presidents — will be delivered to 8,600 workers at 16 Toronto-based firms. The campaigns ring up $1.5 million in donations for the United Way of Greater Toronto from 3,200 employees, a 37% conversion rate.

“We believe there is a virtuous outcome when you group people together,” says Philip King, vice president of e-business for the United Way of Greater Toronto. “You tap into their collective capacity for doing good work in the community.”

The focus on group giving via e-mail — a first for the nonprofit — is the primary component in a number of recent e-CRM initiatives the charity has undertaken. To kick-start its plan, the United Way of Greater Toronto (www.unitedwaytoronto.com) sought strategic guidance from Deloitte Consulting, Toronto. It then tapped Delano Technology Corp., Markham, Ontario, for the software application to build the “United Way at Work” program.

“The Internet is fundamentally changing our economy in general — and nonprofits' role in the economy,” King says. “We needed to be competitive and maintain our leadership position.”

The goals? To enhance revenue, broaden the potential donor base, reduce costs and gain efficiencies, he says.

The first phase, the Workplace Giving tool, was developed last summer to promote group gift-giving via e-mail and Web sites within local companies. A successful test conducted on United Way's 100 Toronto employees evolved into four months of pilot tests during the prime giving season among 16 local firms, including banks, dot-coms, real estate firms and mutual fund companies. The pilots ran from September to December 2000, each lasting a maximum of four weeks.

A number of criteria including gift ranges are monitored and pulled from the organization's back-end database — totaling 250,000 active donors out of 1 million names — and housed in the e-business database, built to communicate with the tool. The database populates Web pages with a variety of personalized dynamic information and is updated weekly.

Links in the e-mails take employees to personalized Web sites where they are thanked and can access a wide variety of information, including their company's and United Way's charitable efforts and the “challenge thermometers.” A link to virtual tours pans 360 degrees around the inner workings of four local agencies, such as the kitchen and dorm rooms of a homeless shelter or the art room and workshop of a boys and girls club. Gift-givers can search by interest categories and direct donations to specific causes.

Once ready to give, a click opens donation pages, personalized for either returning and first-time gift-givers. For example, returning donors view last year's donation and are prompted to up the ante with suggested larger gifts. Last year 50% of those presented with the opportunity to give more did so, King says.

First-time donors learn about the average gift. Both review impact statements, such as how $4.50 from a paycheck ($120 per year) helps a homeless youth to get off the streets with job and life skills training at Youth Without Shelter. Payment methods include a payroll deduction, cash, check or credit card.

If a donation is made, a thank-you Web page pops up signed by the company president and United Way of Greater Toronto's president Anne Golden.

Prospective donors are re-canvassed from time to time, although tests indicate that a reminder every three days improves response without sending the recipient's eyeballs rolling.

The results? The average gift for new donors online was $300 compared to $200 offline. Returning donors increased online gifts by 28% compared to 23% offline.

One of the goals, of course, is to eliminate paper, postage and labor costs required to manage direct mail campaigns, King says. Even so, 15%, of e-mail recipients are not ready to give online and request paper. That cumbersome process requires dropping a pledge card to the employee through interoffice mail, which is then filtered back to the on-site coordinator, who bundles up the pledges and sends them to the United Way of Greater Toronto for processing.

Anticipating the need again this year, King explains, an input screen for paper donations has been developed at local sites where on-site coordinators key paper gifts directly into the system. A second phase of the project will use the system to expand the prime donor season to off-season communications.

A recent Web site redesign helped the site drop its load time, and allowed it to add features such as six youth-specific sites to keep young, surf-happy potential donors entertained, King says.

This year, efforts focus on bringing the “group giving” environment to the public Web site, where $50,000 in gifts were collected from individuals last year. An e-mail, fashioned after the Workplace Giving campaigns, will mail in September to some 200 donors who gave via the public Web site.

“For the first time, these donors will be treated as a group rather than individuals,” Kings say. “It gives them the sense that people like giving together more than alone.”

E-mail addresses — once collected in an ad hoc way through the Web site and on the paper pledge cards — are now being aggressively sought after with incentives, such as e-tax receipts and messaging at the Web site.

The organization also plans to experiment with its group giving format with sports fans and other large groupings of people. It is currently in preliminary discussions with the Toronto Blue Jays baseball team, eBay Canada and some independent self-employed groups.

To launch its e-CRM initiative, the organization spent $311,000, a far cry from the estimated $3 million, thanks to donations from local businesses as well as IBM, Delano Technology, Deloitte, PSINet, U.S. Interactive and A.T. Kearney (King's employer).

The United Way plans to increase the number of local companies it partners with to deploy Workplace Giving from 16 to 50. King hopes to grow the effort organically with solid successes and then spread the initiative virally as it rolls out in other locations in North America. This year, United Way Canadian chapters in Vancouver, Winnepeg, Edmonton and Calgary as well two of the 1,400 U.S. chapters — Boston and Philadelphia — will begin to deploy United Way at Work.