Alison Goldsworthy, head of supporter strategy and engagement, Which? Shaun Roberts, supporters and promotions manager, Which? Visit the CharityComms website to view slides from past events, see what events we have coming up and to check out what else we do: www.charitycomms.org.uk

1. Driving engagement and growth
through segmentation
October 2015

2. • Which? is a group social enterprise
• We’re independent, apolitical and work for all
consumers.
• Funded solely from commercial ventures, no government
money or fundraising
• We want to make individuals as powerful as the
organisations they have to deal
with in their daily lives
• Supporter Strategy and
Engagement Team set up in 2013
• Tasked with building an active
supporter base of 1 million by 2018
Which?

3. What we set out
to achieve with
our segmentation
Actions that we
took and learned
along the way
The difference it
has made to
engagement and
growth
What we’re going to cover

4. The goals of our segmentation work
• Objective
• More actions from more supporters
delivering more change for consumers
• Strategy
• To understand our supporters better
and build a strong relationship with
them using the right message, right
tone and offering the right actions
• A flexible approach
• To improve the quality and
accessibility of our own data
• To perform regression analysis on past
supporter data to see what can be
learned
• Engage Populus for behavioural
segmentation research and analysis

5. Our data and CRM
• Immediately
identified as a major
barrier to success
• Limited data on
supporters
• In two different systems
• Time consuming to find
even basic things
• Couldn’t easily track
activity or engagement
levels
• Required lots of manual
shifting of data –
inherent risk

6. Integrated CRM - an essential foundation
• Requirements
• Able to cope with a database
that will grow to well over a
million people
• Integrated - key data in one
place where it can be easily
accessed and used
• Strong testing and reporting tools
• Able to deliver automated welcome journeys and other
content
• Flexible and easy to use enabling us to create different
content quickly
• A system that will be invested in and developed
• Legally compliant

7. The best things in life are free…
- the almost free elements of our project

8. • So many questions that we
wanted to know the answer to…
• Which supporters are super active and
which are inactive?
• Which supporters take social actions and
which only sign petitions?
• Why supporters have joined us?
• What supporters think about our
campaigns?
• What kind of people (values and beliefs)
are our supporters?
• What do our supporters want for us going
forward?
Our 2014 supporter survey...

9. The survey
• 20 questions covering behaviour,
attitudes and demographics
• Used Survey Monkey as platform
to enable easy analysis
• Split people into five potential
segments to see if they worked
as a group
• Members, paid acquisition, recently acquired, longer standing, inactive
• Pushed survey three times to supporters in September
2014 – 24,000 responses
• Strong take up (20% click to open rate for survey and 72% completion
rate)

10. What we learnt and what we did
• Useful data on what people thought of our current
campaigns and what they wanted us to prioritise going
forward
• Data on their values, attitudes and behaviours
• Information about their involvement with other
charities and organisations - just how busy our
supporters are with other organisations
• Demographic data and information about supporter
habits (eg newspapers read and social network habits)
• Significant differences between members, organic
supporters, inactive and paid acquisition supporters
ACTION
Introduce
segmentation v1
ACTION
Punchier
messaging
ACTION
More campaign
activity
ACTION
Keep asking
supporters

11. • Once we started to look in more
detail at our inactives, we found that:
• 78.5% of long term inactives had only taken their
first action
• Over 90% of paid acquisition inactives had
only taken their first action
• Primary objective of Welcome Journey was to
persuade new supporters to take a second action
with Which? and quickly
• Launched in November 2014
• 5 stage journey over 20 days - included petitions, polls,
survey and a Which? campaigns round up
Putting ideas into practice - Welcomes

12. Welcome journey results 5 months on
• As hoped, at the end of the Welcome Journey, the number of
people taking a second action was much higher than those in
the control group
• But this effect has continued beyond the welcome journey. In
Q1 of 2015, 8% more have been active
• 27% increase over Control
38
30
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40
WJ
Control
% taking action in Q1 only

13. • Prior to 2014, Which? relied on a
monthly email newsletter
• Abandoned in late 2013. Replaced by more
regular single issue emails with a strong
increase in open rates and activity levels
• Our survey showed a strong
appetite for our campaigns
• We set out to increase
engagement by sending more
emails - closer to one per week
on topical, relevant issues
• A lot of attention to getting content right,
testing and monitoring of results
• More use of polls and surveys to involve
people in our campaigns
• Significantly more people taking actions
because of this
Increasing volume of communications
How often are you home? If an
organisation called on you 12 times
in a year, how many times would
they catch you in?

14. • By the middle of 2015, we could see a marked
improvement in supporter activity
• Average supporter actions up from 2-3 actions a year to 3.6 actions per year
• Click to open rates increased from 23% to 33%
• Open rates down by 4% - but inevitable for list size
• Members not always our most active segment
• Being outperformed by some of our new sources
• Number of long terms inactives down
• Without specific reactivation action, we have reduced the number of long
term inactives over 9 months by 17%
• Welcome journey getting more people active
• But could be improved
• Lots more knowledge about supporters from our
surveys and, by this stage, our Populus work
Good early steps, but how to improve?

15. Welcome
journey 2.0
High take up actions
(polls) earlier in the
journey
Simplify survey to
increase completion
rates
Poll actions doubling
click rates compared to
petitions
Segmentation
2.0
Introduced action
levels (hot/warm/cold)
Introduced new Super
Supporters segment
Other subgroups grown
– social sharers, rural
supporters, etc
Reactivation
trials
Split into non openers
(8 stage) and openers
(4 stage)
5 stages across 2 weeks
using a range of
subjects/asks
Non openers 15.2%
success
Openers 18.5% success
More actions that drove engagement

16. Because it’s worth it
- paid elements of our project

17. • Gave us a very detailed
look at past behaviour of
supporters telling us:
• That the average supporter
was taking 2-3 actions per
year, but most engaged could
be taking 12 or more actions
• Which recruitment sources
the most engaged supporters
came from
• Which campaigns had been
best in the past at
reactivating supporters
Regression analysis
...but found little link or
patterns between
supporters of different
campaigns

18. Project’s impact on Which?
• Our objective was more actions from
more supporters delivering more change
for consumers
• We think we’re getting there and here’s
what we think the best outcomes have
been for Which? :
• Integrated tools/database that allow us to track
behaviour, test effectively and learn more
• Deeper understanding about what makes all
supporters and segments of them tick
• Identification of key supporter groups that we
can target actions at – social sharers, super
supporters, inactive (reactivation) and new
supporters (welcome journeys)
• And learning which content and actions our
supporters do not enjoy!
• Supporters at the heart of campaigns – from
influencing messaging and content through to
appearing on the media as case studies
• Better knowledge about what kind of supporters
we should be looking to recruit going forward

19. Don’t stop us now...
Any questions?
Ali Goldsworthy - alison.goldsworthy@which.co.uk @aligoldsworthy
Shaun Roberts - shaun.roberts@which.co.uk @shaunr_lb

20. Visit the CharityComms website to
view slides from past events, see what
events we have coming up and to
check out what else we do:
www.charitycomms.org.uk

21. Engagement
conference
Conference
22 October 2015
London
#CCengagement
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