The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) is the UK's leading charity specialising in child protection and the prevention of cruelty to children. It has been protecting children from abuse for over 100 years. The NSPCC is the only children's charity in the UK with statutory powers enabling it to act to safeguard children at risk. As with all successful charities they rely on donations from both the public and corporate enterprises. With the advent of cheaper computing and increasingly sophisticated database and analysis software, more and more charities are able to predict who will respond to their campaigns, thus saving them money in direct marketing promotions.
In recent years the NSPCC have been very successful in recruiting new donors into their £2 per month regular gift programme. However, traditional segmentation methods (i.e. recency, frequency and value) have not given them sufficient discrimination within this group due to the majority giving £2 (value) on a monthly basis (frequency and recency). They were looking for another method which would look at other internally held variables on the database in order to segment this ever growing group of donors.
Tracey A Claro, Direct Marketing Development Manager, NSPCC, describes the situation, “In the past we have used an external agency to carry out this type of analysis for us. However we couldn’t justify spending a large sum of donated income on this project. We were aware of CHAID analysis and that this might be the best tool for our requirements. We therefore obtained an evaluation copy of SPSS Base and AnswerTree”.
The NSPCC ended up doing their whole regular donor giving segmentation project using the 1 month SPSS evaluation programme. “We found the software very intuitive which meant we were able to really maximise the 4 weeks during which we had the evaluation copy. The software was so intuitive that the learning curve was remarkably short”, Ms Claro explains further.
The success of adopting an SPSS data analysis solution, even for this short period of time, led the NSPCC to purchase SPSS Base and AnswerTree to complete the initial building blocks of an ongoing data mining environment. They realised that if their databases grew and more sophisticated analysis was required, they could get professional SPSS training or upgrade to SPSS’ other data mining technologies.
The results of this donor segmentation exercise have enabled the NSPCC to discover the key predictors of response to their donor mailings. This enables them to save money by developing the most appropriate mailing program to new donor segments and by mailing the most responsive donors more frequently than donors who have a lower propensity to respond.
As well as the obvious cost savings, Ms Claro also noted, “This will aid us to develop relationships with those donors who want to receive information from the NSPCC and have a more involved role in the work of the Society. The main outcome of this work will therefore enhance our return on investment by improving retention rates within this valuable group of donors”.
By taking sophisticated data analysis in-house, the NSPCC were able to have more control over their data segmentation exercises and implement direct marketing donor campaigns more efficiently. Tracey A Claro concludes, “We obtained a quote for getting this analysis done by an external agency. For a one off analysis this would have cost us twice as much as the SPSS option. Also, mailing donors at an appropriate frequency will reduce our costs by approximately 35% and we also expect to improve our retention rates.”
The complete list of global SPSS success stories can be found here
“......we obtained a
quote for getting
this analysis done
by an external
agency. For a one off
analysis, this would
have cost us twice
as much as the
SPSS option.”
- Tracey A Claro, Direct
Marketing Development
Manager, NSPCC
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