Sense Scotland Data Enrichment & MOSAIC

The Client

Sense Scotland provides support services for children and adults with complex support needs due to sensory impairment, learning disability or physical disability.

The Challenge

As part of an on-going process of profiling and analysing their donor database, Sense Scotland were looking at ways of improving conversion rates on donor contributions. The initial aim was to research the type of donors who had previously been asked to convert to Direct Debit.

People were simply selected for conversion to direct debit on the basis that they had responded best to previous campaigns. The challenge was for CCR to increase this conversion rate.

Solution

CCR chose to analyse the donor by enriching the database with three key indicators:

- Experian’s Mosaic consumer classification

- Council tax bands

- Household Income

Each of these was then used to create indices of the activities the charity wanted to measure.

This allowed Sense Scotland to assess its previous activity, and the performance of each group in several different ways.

For example, Mosaic^TM Scotland Type A01 (“Captains of Industry”) made up 6.67% of all those asked to convert to direct debit. This being the wealthiest type, and accounting for just 1.92% of the population, the original method of selection was deemed an effective venture. Further analysis showed that those converted from Mosaic^TM Scotland type A01 had given 22% more than the average donor in regular gifts. However; CCR’s analysis also showed that it is much harder to convert an A01 donor – only 14% convert – so the actual return per solicitation (conversion call) was only 95% of the average, giving an index of 0.95.

Even accounting for some degree of statistical error, it was clear to the charity that Mosaic^TM type is a significant indicator of conversion to direct debit. Indices for Council Tax and household income bands were then also created and these were also found to be important discriminators. By combining all three variables CCR were are able to further refine the process of analysis and prediction.

Following this analysis, Sense Scotland made the decision to have its database of active donors profiled.

Results

Prior to the work Sense Scotland had a 1 in 5 success rate and an average annual gift amount of around £55.00 in conversion campaigns.

The next Home Money Box campaign achieved a doubling of the number of conversion calls to direct debit with no loss of performance. This was achieved by:

- Including people who had responded poorly or not at all; but whose combined indices were high.

- Excluding others who had responded well to the original campaign but whose indices were low.

In this campaign the charity maintained its target 20% success rate – HMB responders and non-responders combined – whilst improving the average size of gift.

Conclusion

Profiling its data using Experian’s Mosaic^TM Scotland classification has allowed Sense Scotland to lever significant additional value from its current recruitment and development methods by opening up new income streams. In the past year – 2006-2007 – the number of regular givers has increased by almost 50% with a corresponding increase in income. Without Mosaic^TM profiling, this level of improvement would simply not have been possible.

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