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Brief
Christian Aid is an international development charity born out of a desire by British and Irish church leaders in post-war Europe to alleviate the plight of European refugees who had lost everything. It exists today to fight poverty worldwide, regardless of religion, ethnicity or nationality. Christian Aid works in around 50 countries at any one time.
Christian Aid collects large quantities of data via its CRM system and website, and encountered significant problems with address formatting, resulting in inaccurate reporting and campaign lists. In addition, it had over 30,000 duplicates within its database, which caused confusion. Keeping data accurate over time and managing inadequacies in the content of the data was also a major challenge.
Strategy
When Christian Aid evaluated its data, it found that only 10% of all records contained demographic profile, 16% of the data didn’t identify gender, only 7% of contacts had date of birth information, and 5% didn’t contain any information in the first name field.
Christian Aid also faced problems when using their data. The charity sent out a quarterly newsletter to 300,000 supporters throughout the year, in addition to a number of new donor campaigns. As with any marketing department, it had the challenge of dealing with returned mail and controlling the postage cost involved in campaigns. At 40p per pack, four times a year, it didn’t take long to work out the cost of mailing 30,000 duplicates on the system and where the budget could be better controlled.
Christian Aid saw it needed to deploy a software solution to help improve the quality of contact data held in this database, so it approached Experian QAS.
Execution
By implementing a range of Experian QAS products into its Ascent CRM system, Christian Aid has significantly improved its data quality processes, saving time and money.
Christian Aid implemented QAS Pro in both its CRM system and on its corporate website. This provided Christian Aid with fast, accurate address capture, improving service levels, customer satisfaction ratings and brand perception.
In the second phase of implementation, Christian Aid added QAS Match to its suite of data quality tools in order to reduce the amount of duplicates in its database at the point of capture. Prior to the implementation of QAS Match, Christian Aid performed a time and cost analysis of doing the deduplication work manually. In its assessment, Christian Aid concluded that it would take a dedicated person four months of non-stop work to dedupe 50 records per hour. Upon deployment of QAS Match, Christian Aid noticed uplift in data quality in the analysis work they did, and a significant reduction in wasted mailings. The staff time saved in not doing the work manually has also reduced complaints and improved perception from donors.
In addition, Christian Aid also enhanced its data using QAS Batch with Mosaic Geodemographic codes. This enabled the organisation to fill in any gaps within their data, such as date of birth, and correct Royal Mail postcode recodes that had occurred since original records were captured. Appending the Mosaic codes to customer information, has enabled Christian Aid to segment its donor base more accurately, allowing the charity to use profiles of existing key supporters to actively find new donors.
Finally, Christian Aid integrated QAS Mailsort to get the best cost savings from its campaigns. Christian Aid has found that by doing mail sorting in-house, it has saved significant agency fees and rationalised mail costs accordingly.
Results
Due to the successful implementation of QAS Pro on its UK data, Christian Aid took advantage of Experian QAS’ global data coverage and deployed Republic of Ireland data and USA data in its Supporter-facing team and website. This success has been highlighted in Christian Aid's recent audit: “QAS Pro has helped us bring our PAF address quality up to a commendable level of 94%." With QAS Pro, Christian Aid has also eliminated the address formatting issue.
Jan Brasching, Database Manager at Christian Aid also commented, "QAS Mailsort, in the last year alone, has saved us £15,000 in fees that we would have otherwise spent on letting agencies do the mail sorting."
In terms of future plans for the relationship between Christian Aid and Experian QAS, at present initiatives are underway to automate the suppression of contact data and improve the efficiency of their data sorting and checking, as well as the quality.
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