Race for Donors

In raising money for a team of 3,000 scientists working to improve treatments for cancer patients, marketers at Cancer Research UK have what one might say is a nobler calling than their peers in other industries.

But with the London-based charity's annual scientific outlay of $406.4 million drawn almost entirely from contributions by the general public, it's under just as much pressure to perform as any commercial firm. As competition for funds intensifies, making the most of donor data and maximizing marketing contacts is essential.

Cancer Research UK was formed in February 2002, following the merger of Imperial Cancer Research Fund and The Cancer Research Campaign. The new organization decided to retain the same data systems used by Imperial to manage the many aspects of its marketing efforts: one from Care Business Solutions to handle central direct marketing and fundraising, and another from Raiser's Edge to deal with local marketing initiatives.

“These are two very different systems,” says database business development manager Ben Slasberg. “Raiser's Edge tends to be more for face-to-face work and holds details of local canvassers, donors and committee members and chairmen. We hold in-depth information on local events and monitor them. We're currently looking at whether it makes sense to migrate to one system or continue using both databases.”

As in any merger, it was imperative to quickly bring together all donor data to provide an accurate view of the charity's supporters. Though the Care system has built-in dedupe tools used both on incoming data and for regular maintenance, a representative portion of the database was sent to data services firm GB Group eight months after the merger for as thorough a cleansing as possible. As well as deduping, data was matched against a battery of reference files to identify lapsed donors and deceased records, and to update contact details.

Along with information feeds from the call center and fulfillment houses, the Race for Life database — held separately by data-driven marketing firm Identex and used to operationally support a well-known series of charity races — is also loaded into the main donor database twice yearly in August and January. “This gives us the opportunity to cross sell to Race for Life participants,” says Slasberg. “If they give both to Cancer Research and to Race for Life then we tailor communications accordingly.”

Between them, the systems now have more than 300 users throughout the organization in areas as diverse as customer service, direct marketing and local fundraising management. This internal service is backed by 16 people working in data quality, analysis, list selection and technical support.

“Where it's safe, we empower people to do their own work with the database,” says Slasberg. “In fundraising, for example, they can export a list themselves for community work.”

Following the major cleansing work late last year, the database now holds the names of 4.5 million lapsed and active donors, with most active supporters contributing via direct debit from their bank accounts or through cash donations. Managing these different types of supporters and encouraging them to give more is what drives the charity's marketing strategy.

“We use each channel according to which group it works best for and have life-cycle programs for each group,” says direct marketing manager Nick Georgiadis. “DRTV is best for a younger audience, for example, while e-mail is not so good for recruitment but good for retention. We use a variety of lists, both mail order and lifestyle, depending on which [demographics] we are mailing.”

All givers are mailed several times a year in a bid to upgrade the amount they donate, while newsletters and details of upcoming events are sent out to more regular givers and local activists, respectively.

“We do a diverse series of mailings,” says Slasberg. “As well as trying to recruit new donors and increase the amount given, we send out newsletters, promote local events and offer rewards like lab tours to high-value donors.

As selections tend to be quite involved, these are done centrally by the database department in response to a query by the direct marketing team, which works with analysts to help target the right groups. A typical campaign might take three weeks to select, test and run, and a parallel offline version of the central database is created for campaign development.

Most models are built and modified in-house and appended to the Care database, though external suppliers such as information management firm Acxiom and the Results consultancy do provide data and analytic support.

“We use them for more complex projects and to gain their cross-industry expertise,” says analysis and reporting manager Bob Francis. “We do use geodemographics for legacy work. But otherwise, geodems are not enormously predictive of response from our existing supports because cancer in the family is the primary driver. This is pretty flat across the United Kingdom. We've profiled using Prizm codes before but aren't [doing so] at the moment.”

To allocate marketing resources most effectively, the charity splits major, legacy and committed givers (those donating by direct debit or standing order) and cash contributors into four separate groups. Within them, a value segmentation is used. For example, cash donors are split into three bands by predicted lifetime value. The LTV score for cash givers is first calculated 12 months after initial acquisition and used to calculate the likely amount of a donation.

“To be accurate, we need to make a certain number of asks first before scoring them,” says Francis. “Committed givers tend to be the highest value along with legacy donors [who leave a contribution in their will], though we have certain cash givers who are very valuable. If we try to upgrade them, then we'll attempt to make sure it's to an equivalent or higher level of giving.”

Committed donors also have their own segmentation that's used to decide the type of communication that's most suited to them. In all giver classifications there are groups dubbed high value. For example, a high-value cash giver would get offers that are more about sponsorship than those going to ordinary cash contributors. There's also a major-giver segment that contains individuals at the very top of the value spectrum. As such, it's handled by a separate department that develops one-to-one relationships rather than sending communications through the more impersonal direct channels.

Legacy donors have been one of the priorities for the charity over the last year and much effort is put into targeting them. After using Acxiom to append age information to the database, the marketing firm Zalpha built a model that was used to score all supporters based on their propensity to leave a legacy and its likely size. By combining this new score with the standard response model score used on the database, the analysts selected those most likely to respond to a legacy offer.

The charity also worked with Results last year on the Free Will initiative. Prospects and supporters were offered a will for free in the hope they also would take the opportunity to bequeath money for research. Again, geodemographics were combined with other profile data to help target mailings and door drops. By rigorous use of the segmentation — which is tweaked continuously — every active donor on the database was contacted at some point during the year.

Besides using newspaper and magazine ads and inserts, donors are recruited through high-volume door drops for which historical response data is used to target the most likely sectors. “Often it's the people affected by cancer who are the best givers, but again, this is flat across the United Kingdom,” says Francis. “We look at the sectors that have responded well or badly over the last three or four drops; we're looking for consistency. We'll chop out the worst sectors and drop the best ones more.”

Cold mailings recently have restarted after a period when door drops were used exclusively. Mailing and telemarketing data is gathered through a number of sources, including the Reciprocate charity list swap service.

Cancer Research UK also does a lot of outbound calling to existing donors. For security reasons, there are no third-party links to the Care system, so a segment of the database with all relevant donor information is supplied to call centers. Similarly, fulfillment houses build a flat file of respondent information which is merged with the central database.

“We will be taking a fresh look at live links but there are many more urgent priorities,” says Slasberg. “Agents are not without information. We would supply anything that would be of use to them: when they last gave and the amount, when they last responded. Those in different segments will get different asks.”

Both Cancer Research UK's own Web site and the separate one for Race for Life are extremely effective in recruiting and managing donors. Visitors can sign up to give by direct debit or even commit to a legacy donation. All Web data is piped into the Care database, so that customer e-mails are stored centrally and pulled off for each campaign.

“We've done a lot of testing over the years but e-mail still isn't huge for us,” says Francis. “At the moment, we're testing e-mail to donors to see if they're happy to be contacted in this way or whether they would prefer offline contact. We're also trying other offers, such as upgrading committed givers via e-mail — it's a very cheap way to do it. We're actively collecting e-mails, but we still don't have a huge overall penetration in the database.”

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James Lawson is editor of Nottingham, England-based Database Marketing magazine (www.dmarket.co.uk).