2011 Silver Best business performance or improvement

Client The Salvation Army

What is wonderful about this work? We recognised some donors have rational reasons for giving, some emotional, and some go on a journey. We built a new tool, empowering planners to allocate £3.8 million by channel and by day. Our incremental investment was £1 million, incremental return: £2 million immediate income.

What details of the strategy make this a winning entry? The 2010 challenge was threefold: more volume; maintain year one ROI; and convince the trustees that increased investment would be a good bet. All in a campaign that lasted just 24 days. DR analysis is traditionally channel by channel. But with 250,000,000+ exposures across 13 channels and four response mechanisms, linear analysis isn't enough: door drops influence radio response; TV drives warm mail. Multivariate analysis gave us equations to build a tool for our media planners to tweak investment by channel, by day, varying the order of message exposure by channel as well as total investment. We linked this to Touchpoint insight, understanding who saw what, when. Armed with these, we asked the trustees for an additional £1 million (a 40% increase on 2009). We needed ROI of 1.0 on incremental spend in four months to satisfy them. Our predictive model showed if we integrated DRTV, door drop and online there would be an overall halo effect. We expanded door drops and on TV we aligned creative/media strategy with shorter ad runs to facilitate call handling. We introduced SMS donations, integrated online donation, invested further in cold lists and introduced reminder mailings.

How did creativity bring the strategy to life? We created scenarios for investment by channel, day, and point in campaign period, relative to one another. This gave us a series of predicted returns, one set from call centres and fulfilment houses, and the 'true' results, i.e. what media channel actually drove those results. Linking this with the modelled cover and frequency build from Touchpoint helped us understand donor journeys across our planned activity. These two tools now enabled us to understand the effect each channel had on overall results, while controlling for the effect of all other media. Planning became fully integrated. We could see how minor changes to individual media schedules affected the overall campaign. Our planning became holistic, in line with journeys our donors were taking, with multiple media touch points engaged at multiple points in time.

Team Mike Colling, Nicky Legg, John Eversley, Maria Phillips, Sandra Money, Bodhi Morrison.

Other contributors Angel - Call handling, Response One - List buying.