Action for Children is aiming to paint a more detailed picture of its supporter base – and improve its targeted marketing activity – by implementing a new data insight programme.
The charity works with more than 50,000 vulnerable and neglected children and young people through 600 projects across local communities. It has amassed data on customers, donors, fundraisers and potential foster parents.
As part of this effort, Action for Children has engaged open cloud provider Rackspace to provide an on and off-premise system, allowing it to retain a portion of dedicated hardware on site to host sensitive data.
Darren Robertson, a data scientist at the charity, said: “Blanket advertising no longer works well enough. We are now using web analytics to see what, for example, is the propensity of people living within a 30-mile radius of a children’s centre to give an ongoing donation, as opposed to a one-off gift. We want regular givers, since that is more economic.
“And we need to be able to personalise the web experience for each user, so that we don’t ask students and multinational CEOs for the same kind of donation, for example.”
Robertson says the charity’s Christmas 2012 campaign saw good results from the web analytics effort and Action for Children has made significant savings by moving to an on-demand service.
The charity also works with digital agency Agenda21.
