SPSS - Customers

PDSA

Situation

Founded in 1917, PDSA is the UK’s leading veterinary charity and provides more than 6,880 free treatments to sick and injured pets every day. The charity also works to promote responsible pet ownership.

Like most charities, PDSA must support its work through public donations alone as it does not currently receive any statutory funding. In particular, income through legacies– money left in wills–is vital to PDSA. In fact, legacy income currently supports two out of every three treatments provided to sick and injured pets by PDSA.

Ensuring that PDSA continues its work is therefore largely dependent on the charity’s ability to carry out legacy fundraising campaigns as effectively as possible.

Challenge

According to think-tank NfpSynergy, legacies can be among the most cost-effective methods of fundraising, generating a high return on investment. However, getting results requires a long-term view and appropriate marketing tools to target the right supporters.

PDSA carries out four legacy recruitment mailings per year. The purpose of these mailings is to find out which supporters are interested in leaving a legacy to PDSA and reinforce the importance of gifts in wills to individuals who may not be aware of PDSA’s reliance on this source of income.

A pledge to include a gift in a will is considered a successful response to the campaign as 76 per cent of people who make a pledge will go on to leave a legacy, according to PDSA.

Regular legacy mailings also help to raise awareness of this type of support, but only if the message is reaching people who are likely to be receptive to the idea of leaving a donation in their will.

While PDSA was already successfully raising income through its legacy campaigns, the organisation felt that even more could be done to target the right supporters and generate better response rates to its mailings.

Solution

PDSA wanted to use its knowledge about successful legacy campaigns and turn it into new intelligence for subsequent campaigns through predictive analytics.

As the charity already used PASW Statistics Base to conduct in-depth analysis of its supporter database, their new focus was to improve direct marketing legacy campaigns, which is why the charity chose SPSS Inc.’s data mining workbench.

PDSA also wanted to include demographic data to enhance modeling – combining transactional and demographic data. The charity selected PASW Statistics Base as the predictive models could be prepared quickly and were easy to run.

Shaun Williams, Marketing Services Manager for PDSA, said: “PDSA has always used PASW Statistics Base; when we first evaluated the market for an analytics tool, we chose PASW Statistics Base because the people who were using it were marketers and it was more user-friendly than SAS®.”

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Results

With PASW Statistics Base, PDSA is now able to profile participants from previous legacy campaigns who responded positively and use these profiles to create models to find ‘look-alikes’ in new data – predicting which people are most likely to respond positively.

PASW Statistics Base also helped the organization understand that there was data on past participants who had not been considered prospects for legacy mailings, but are in fact ideal targets.

The response rate for a typical charity legacy mailing is low, therefore when PDSA’s first mailing using predictive analytics achieved a 0.57 per cent response rate, compared to 0.48 per cent without the model, it represented a significant improvement.

Similarly, when supporters were targeted with a mailing informing them of the benefits of inheritance tax relief when leaving a legacy to charity, the data to which a PASW Statistics Base predictive model was applied achieved a response rate of 5.7 per cent compared to a response rate of 4.5 per cent without the model.

Williams commented: “Our legacy fundraising was going well before we introduced predictive analytics, but it is such an important source of income for PDSA that we need to do all we can to keep on improving response rates.”

As a result of using PASW Statistics Base, analysis is now much faster to complete, response rates have improved, and PDSA’s legacy Product Manager has been able to cut down the amount of time it takes to put a campaign together.

Williams added: “Securing just one pledge to leave a legacy could result in a clear return-on-investment from PASW Statistics Base.”

PDSA’s next step is to enable other major areas of fundraising to benefit from predictive analytics. For example, four significant mailings are carried out each year, aimed at securing large, one-off donations. In addition, there is also a need to convert more supporters to the PDSA ‘best friend’ scheme, securing much needed stable funding through regular committed giving.

Finally, the charity sees a very real opportunity to use PASW Statistics Base to introduce tactics more commonly applied in the commercial sector–such as cross-selling, up-selling and churn prevention–to more effectively market the various ways of supporting the charity and prevent valuable supporters from lapsing.

Williams concluded: “The legacy fundraising team is very receptive to the insight the Marketing Services department can now deliver.”