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Getting Smart With Database Enhancements

By Marla E. Nobles
Shriners Hospitals for Children started as an organization to address polio, and has since evolved into a specialized center for burns and spinal chord injuries, among other ailments. Following the events of 9/11, during which its endowment decreased dramatically, the charitable hospital again found itself in need of an evolution - into a fundraising organization.

"We didn't really ever do fundraising," said Tracy Clouser, CFRE, marketing manager at Shriners. "Now we totally rely on fundraising and on donations." Clouser said several other hurdles lay ahead, including addressing the public's perception of Shriners as more than just "little guys in funny hats," as well as finding donors beyond the obvious Masonic audience, which Clouser said was already getting "hit up" for donations from a slew of Masonic groups.

Headquartered in Tampa, Fla., Shriners is an international network of 22 hospitals with a long history of specialized care, research and education, but no real history of individual giving. "Data was a huge issue in the beginning," said Clouser. Due to internal constraints, and the lack of any prior fundraising, "we started conservatively."

During 2005, Shriners mailed 3.7 million pieces, a conservative number for a large, international organization, and only mailed four times that year. Some 23 percent of the mail was acquisition, 29 percent to lapsed donors, and 48 percent was from house files. "We had issues with recency and hygiene of the data, because we hadn't mailed in a few years," said Clouser. The mailings yielded 306,867 donations and 25,000 new donors. The following year, Shriners mailed 5 million pieces and brought in 38,000 new donors.

How was this achieved? According to Clouser, the results were gained through the use of "smart" data enhancements. This type of service can provide differentiated messaging or selection of audience when an organization doesn't have any transactional or behavioral data to work with. It can also augment transactional data with third-party overlay data to more deeply mine distinct audiences (e.g. family philanthropy, major donor/planned giving targeting, gender), and add new channels employing email or phone append.

Clouser said finding the right partner proved key. "In terms of a direct mail vendor, we were able to get help with analysis and testing, really digging into all the details of our file. We didn't have enough resources to do that internally," said Clouser. A direct mail vendor also provided insight on industry direction and trends, as well as on what was and was not working for other clients.

She provided the following examples of how"smart" data enhancements proved beneficial for Shriners, and offered tips to help in the process:

Email Append. Shriners previously had little to no email addresses to work with, so it performed an email append, merging the charity's database of donor information (lacking any email addresses) with a third party's database of email addresses in an attempt to garner addresses. Clouser said Shriners did the append to figure out two things: would the group's direct mail names respond to email, and would sending current direct mail donors email increase direct mail revenue?

Shriners started with its best direct mail donors, 0-12 month, and refrained from appending all the names at the same time. "After you find that the append worked, you can always go back and append additional names," said Clouser. She cautioned that due to low response rates attributed to email, it's unlikely an organization will be able to reactivate lapsed names (13+ month) through this channel.

Once the append is complete, said Clouser, load the names immediately, and "be sure your append vendor guarantees the addresses won't bounce for at least 10 days." Also, send a welcome email to give donor one more opportunity to opt out, and stagger the first email across multiple days, sending no more than 10,000 emails per day. "This will minimize your SPAM complaints and risk of being blacklisted."

Clouser recommends continuing to stagger emails until your opt-out rate begins to decline. Then test what your next email communication to these names should be (appeal, newsletter, etc.).

The append results were impressive, said Clouser. As of April, of the 625,899 input records that were matched, 101,829 email addresses were appended. Nearly 99,200 were usable, with just 2,631 opting out.

Planned Giving Targeting. "We're doing this for the first time, so we're trying to increase leads, generate leads for the planned giving team, using our current donor base," said Clouser.

When targeting for planned giving, said Clouser,"we didn't look at net worth or income as much as you would think." Instead, Shriners looked at giving history. "Look for longevity and frequency rather than monetary amounts."

Age is critical, she added, for two main reasons:
planned giving information won't be of interest to most younger donors, and different topics are of interest to different age groups. For example, wills and bequests typically are of interest to donors aged 55+, trusts and other more complex tools are of interest to the 65+ set, and the 70 and up segment are interested in IRAs and pensions. Also, planned giving mailings can be expensive and, unlike with direct mail, returns are not immediate.

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Marla E. Nobles is a staff writer for The NonProfit Times. Her email is marla@nptimes.com.

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This article is from NPT TechnoBuzz, a publication of The NonProfit Times.

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