Case Study: The Fred Hollows Foundation

Published 17 October 2014

CHALLENGE

The Fred Hollows Foundation (FHF) is an international development organisation working towards eliminating avoidable blindness and improving Indigenous Australian health. As a non-governmental organisation, FHF relies on donations to fund its mission. CoreData was asked to develop research to identify major donors within the Foundation’s database, with capacity for escalating their commitment. This research would not only identify and segment existing contacts in the FHF database but also provide a framework for identifying and targeting prospective high value donors moving forward.

APPROACH

CoreData set out to undertake research that would not only identify major donors but also seek to inform the development of the standard donor pitch to be more appealing and relevant to the discerning high net worth (HNW) contributors. Furthermore, the research would identify key triggers to escalate donations and develop predictive analytics to tag the FHF database around propensity to give and segment into key communication segments. An online survey was developed leveraging CoreData’s understanding of key attitudinal and behavioural constructs such as social conscience and social action to develop and define clear potential engagement segments and assist in building conversations with these segments. To complement these efforts, CoreData engaged its Digital Breadcrumbs team in a database list-washing exercise. Apart from washing against CoreData’s own HNW panel, the team is highly adept at tracking down and confirming the wealth status of contacts through various website scraping techniques e.g. using LinkedIn job roles as a proxy for wealth status.

RESULTS

Based on the insights garnered through this process, CoreData assisted FHF in developing more appealing and relevant communications and donation pitches to the discerning HNW contributors and prospects – cultivating a more sophisticated pitch with well-articulated evidence based outcomes. Our segmentation model solution incorporated personality type, donation motivation/ preference, wealth and engagement dimensions to facilitate targeted marketing and customised messaging. The Digital Breadcrumbs team was able to identify more than 300 previously unknown HNW donors within the FHF database. In addition to identifying the wealth status of donors, the project provided in-depth information on occupational history, earnings, community involvement and interests and other key socio demographic data which greatly facilitated relationship development and marketing activities to this cohort.

Dino Vlachos