Comic Relief has committed to improving the quality of its fundraiser data by creating a single view of its supporters, in amove designed to bring in more participants and more donations for Red Nose Day and Sport Relief events.
The charity has signed a five-year partnership with Trillium Software, a Harte Hanks Company, which will streamline multiple sources to one accurate, enriched source of data.
The first stage of the partnership was a 15-day collaborative ‘Rapid Data Engagement’ on a sample of records from Comic Relief’s dataset, followed by a data improvement exercise.
This used Trillium Software’s data quality solutions to analyse relationships within the data and rectify errors such as gender conflicts, duplicate records or misfielded information, while also creating a benchmark of data quality against which improvements can be made in the future.
The exercise involved the Trillium team sharing their experiences with the Comic Relief data team, advising on best-practices and helping to contextualize the value of the potential savings through detecting and rectifying duplicate records; standardising telephone number formatsand improving nearly 40,000 address records.
Comic Relief believes that by achieving this single customer view it will achieve a substantial increase in funding. Additionally, the automation of the previously manual data quality processing was calculated to provide a saving of 65 full-time equivalent days – savings that translate directly into the ability to make larger grants to the supported causes.
Comic Relief head of data Yemi Okunade said: “This collaboration with Trillium has created a robust business case for us to invest in data quality, not least because we know that we can accurately thank fundraisers for their extremely valuable contribution to Comic Relief and help them raise as much money as possible.
“It has also helped employees at Comic Relief understand the business benefits of a best of breed data quality solution and make more informed decisions. Working with the Trillium team we were able to understand and improve the quality of our data within 90 days, which is hugely impressive. Equally, hosting this data quality solution in the cloud creates efficiencies and the flexibility to adapt rapidly for future campaigns.”
The next stage in this partnership is for Trillium and Comic Relief to build a single customer view for fundraisers of Red Nose Day US before focusing on the same activity for Comic Relief’s UK fundraisers.
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