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Data professional of the month: Jan Brasching from Christian Aid
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 is a company born out of post-war Europe, helping to deliver relief and support to its victims. It exists today to help those in need, regardless of religion, ethnicity or nationality. Christian Aid's income from donations, gifts and legacies was £66.2m (77% of total income) in 2007/08.
Christian Aid collects large quantities of data via its call centre 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 a major challenge.
Collecting accurate data from the outset
To resolve these issues, Christian Aid implemented QAS Pro in both its CRM system and on its corporate website. This provided Christian Aid with fast, accurate address capture, and improved service levels, customer satisfaction ratings and brand perception. This success has been highlighted in Christian Aid's recent audit:
"It has helped us bring our
Removing duplicates
Christian Aid also decided to implement QAS Match to reduce the amount of duplicates in its database at the point of capture.
"QAS Match has led to an estimated cost saving of £48k in the first year due to a reduction in waste mailings."
Keeping data clean and relevant
In addition, Christian Aid enhanced its data using QAS Batch with Mosaic Geodemographic codes.
This enabled the organisation to fill in any gaps within the data, such as date of birth, and correct Royal Mail postcode recodes that had occurred since original records were captured. By appending the Mosaic codes to customer information, it has enabled Christian Aid to segment its donor base more accurately, allowing them to use profiles of existing key supporters to actively find new donors.
Cost savings on campaigns
Last but not least, Christian Aid use QAS mailsort to get the best cost savings from its campaigns. Christian Aid have found that, by doing mail sorting in-house, it has saved significant agency fees and rationalised mail costs accordingly.
"QAS Mailsort, in the last year alone, has saved us £15k in fees that we would have otherwise spent on letting agencies do the mail sorting."
Christian Aid are a fantastic example of an organisation who have adopted a long term data strategy. A real success story that demonstrates that, by implementing a contact data management strategy, any organisation can achieve a significant up-lift in data quality.