Case Study: PDSA

Company overview
Peoples Dispensary for Sick Animals (PDSA) is one of the UK's largest charities, and is the world's largest private employer of Veterinary Surgeons and Nurses. PDSA has 46 fully equipped animal hospitals in the UK delivering care for sick and injured animals that belong to people in low-income groups who typically cannot afford the costs of private veterinary treatment. To support this activity, PDSA aims to raise over £26m per annum. This funding is totally provided by generous animal lovers who respond to PDSA direct marketing campaigns, visit one of the 167 PDSA Charity shops, or kindly leave the PDSA a legacy.

Requirement
PDSA has a small direct marketing team who manage the wide range of products and campaigns run to increase funding. Despite having an excellent IT support department, direct marketing were unable to get the information they needed to define and drive campaigns in the timescales required. The IT team started a major project to build a new marketing database system, but Direct Marketing needed a way to reach marketing information themselves.

Implementation
FastStats and Cascade were chosen by PDSA Direct Marketing to deliver the analysis, counts and selections needed to plan and deliver effective direct mail campaigns. All 4 million supporter records plus 15 million transaction records and 60 million items of mailing history have been loaded into FastStats to deliver 50 or more campaigns a year. These campaigns range from small tactical mailings of a few thousand people, to major monthly lottery mailings of up to 1 million people. FastStats is a strategic part of the new marketing database development which provides weekly data refreshes including full postal address details, allowing FastStats to drive the campaign production process.

PDSA makes extensive use of effectiveness testing by key-coding all segments of all mailing campaigns. Testing includes both the database selections and the creative element of each campaign and ensures an optimised return. Telemarketing is used to follow up mailings and improve the response rates to very high levels by most marketing campaign standards.

FastStats "Recency Frequency Value" selections are used extensively to count the frequency of transactions within each category. PDSA create some complex selections and Venn diagrams are used to illustrate these to staff who do not need to know the details. FastStats scripts are used weekly to create virtual variables (Lifetime value by product areas, number of items mailed by supporter etc) to make selections easier for staff. FastStats is used regularly by everyone in the marketing department.

Upgrade
After over three years of successful use, PDSA recently undertook the upgrade to the new FastStats WebLink client application and FastStats.NET web service. This newer version of the system retains compatibility with the previous version, allowing interoperability between systems and users. FastStats WebLink is deployed with data on a server, accessed by users through a standard web browser. This means remote users get exactly the same capabilities as their office based colleagues.

The new FastStats WebLink client server system uses FastStats Server through FastStats.NET, which delivers up to five fold performance improvements compared to the previous version. This allows the users to make more interactions with the database in the time available, thus increasing insight and offering better targeting. The use of standard web browsers for connecting to the database means PDSA no longer needs to distribute copies of the data for remote users, doesn't need to manage any software installation, and minimises network traffic.

The new integration of the FastStats Cascade application into FastStats WebLink ensures the complete solution is easier to use and thus more effective. Marketers are now able to make targeting selections and insert them directly into direct marketing promotions. Likewise, the Cascade module results can be integrated directly back into the selection environment for data production or response analysis.

Future
The direct marketing element of PDSA funding is growing yearly, more campaigns are being run and the return on investment is increasing. Direct Marketing is now the second largest fundraiser after legacy donations. To date, FastStats has been used primarily as a tactical marketing tool for specifying and creating counts and selection for direct marketing activity. In the future, PDSA want to be able to look at their data from a more strategic perspective. They want to be able to build a customer relationship management model to create closer relationships with the people that contribute regularly and to be able to understand total lifetime value of donators. High value givers will be identified and offered a closer relationship through newsletters and frequent giver memberships. The cost and return of every campaign will be measured and results will be used to drive future initiatives.

Shaun Williams, FastStats Project Implementation Manager says "the speed and simplicity of FastStats has made a significant contribution to PDSA's campaign planning and campaign production and we have been delighted with the products impact on our marketing team."

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