Challenge
A family health services organization was looking to increase its universe of responsive donors for upcoming direct mail campaigns. Challenged to identify potential donors outside of their usual sources, Kevin Price, VP of Nonprofits at Infogroup, turned to Alliant on their behalf. Alliant had earned a growing reputation among non-profit marketers and Price sensed that Alliant’s analytic approach might be a source of new perspective. “I have had previous successes with Alliant and wanted this client to test their transaction-based data. I know they’ve increased their nonprofit membership in the DataHub, and I thought that the resulting insight, in combination with their direct-to-consumer purchase data, would lead to success. Turns out I was right.”
Solution
Alliant’s Data Science team built a suite of models based on the client’s donor file and recent campaign results. The models uncovered new classes of predictors in the client’s top donor segments. In addition to strong traditional variables like previous charitable donations, and recent DM purchases, Alliant was able to identify several non-obvious but powerful targeting characteristics. These included: affinities for parenting and spiritual products, presence of income-producing assets, and previous magazine subscriptions. The models were used to score prospects from Alliant’s Direct Audiences database, identifying substantial volumes in the top groups. The client ordered tests for their next campaign.
Results
Test panels supplied by Alliant outperformed response from other audience sources by 30%. Not only did the client find more donors, but they “gained some interesting insight into who their donors are” said Mr. Price. In addition to the observations gained during the modeling process Alliant’s data team also identified sports, movie and cosmetic purchases as impactful attributes. Additionally, Alliant also provided the client with a list of top brands that their audience has an affinity for, to support future prospecting or partnership opportunities. The marketer has since fully rolled out using the Alliant model, activating larger audience quantities in all direct mail campaigns.
