British Dyslexia Association significantly increases number of new memberships

"The BDA ran a six-week DM letter campaign, targeted specifically at marketing memberships, from May through to mid-June 2008 based on the intelligence from Trovus Revelations. The campaign was purely letter-based (no telephone or further letter follow-up), and it generated about as many new memberships in those few weeks, as we did in the full 12 months of 2007." Judi Stewart, CEO - British Dyslexia Association

Background

As a charity, the British Dyslexia Association (BDA) has limited resources - and an obligation to use its charitable funds really well.

The BDA has two main objectives - first, its mission, which is to communicate research and lobby on behalf of people who have dyslexia.

Second, the BDA needs to fund that mission through sales of memberships, training services and their Quality Mark.

Business Challenge

In a difficult economic environment, the BDA needed to maximise revenues with minimum resources by driving value from their website and measuring the effectiveness of their DM campaigns.

The BDA have a long-established website and used basic, free analytics tools to provide a broad picture of visitation which was used to sell advertising space on the site, but not to make informed marketing decisions. Like most charities, they have also pursued Direct Marketing as a strategy using various lists. All this activity is conducted in-house, by a small, dedicated team.

Solution

By using the Trovus solution the BDA were able to identify which organisations were looking at the their website, how frequently they were visiting the site, what pages they were looking at and how long they were spending on those pages.

The BDA used this wealth of information about organisations which had already expressed an interest in them to develop a simple and cost effective process to track, measure and refine their DM campaigns. 

• By regularly exporting the Trovus Dashboard data into Excel they have an up-to-date list of "warm" prospects who have expressed an interest in the BDA.
• Knowledge of the pages looked at by those organisations allows the BDA to tailor their cover letters, according to whether they accessed details of membership, Quality Mark or training services .
• Prioritisation of new organisations that have visited the web site several times means less wasted time as well as a targeted follow-up by either letter of phone call.
• Identify and engage with potential partners or targets for campaigning and lobbying activities, both domestically and internationally, who are already aware of the BDA.
• Measuring campaign responses allows them to monitor the frequency of approaches to different organisations and track whether changes to cover letters yields better results. For example this has shown that they have faster results targeting SME's - valuable information which can be used for future campaigns.
• As the information supplied by the Trovus Dashboard is at the organisational rather than individual level, the BDA benefit from this detailed information whilst still importantly operating in accordance with the Data Protection Act.

Results

The Trovus process has dramatically improved the targeting and ROI of BDA's Direct Marketing campaigns.

The BDA ran a six-week DM letter campaign, targeted specifically at marketing memberships, from May through to mid-June 2008 based on the intelligence from Trovus Dashboard. The campaign was purely letter-based (no telephone or further letter follow-up), and it generated about as many new memberships in those few weeks, as we did in the full 12 months of 2007.

The BDA are now expanding their campaigns to include their training and Quality Mark programmes.

The impact has been: 

• On-line web intelligence provides offline Direct Marketing lists allowing the BDA to run highly targeted DM campaigns, measure the results of the campaign, and then tailor marketing messages for future activity.
• Reduced time, effort and expenditure required to generate revenues from the website.

Back to Case Studies..