Marie Curie Case Study
Marie Curie Cancer Care provides high quality nursing, totally free of charge, to give terminally ill people the choice of dying at home supported by their families. Last year Marie Curie cared for over 18,000 cancer patients in their own homes, providing more than 900,000 hours of nursing care.
The Problem
Each year approximately 600,000 supporters help Marie Curie, either through direct financial support and/or by giving their time to the charity by way of volunteering. Keeping in contact with these supporters was key to Marie Curie – both for raising funds and also to communicate how their help was making a real difference in the cancer care community. The charity currently runs 8 annual direct mail campaigns, generating donations of around £6.5 million.
Historically, Marie Curie had used direct marketing agencies to clean data prior to the distribution of mailing campaigns. This tended to be on an ad-hoc basis which meant high cleaning costs and non-standardised formats being returned back to the charity. The fact that the entire database had not been thoroughly cleaned for many years was beginning to take its toll.
“Through a more proactive approach to managing the integrity of our supporter data we have initially saved a minimum of £60,000 a year.”
As Paul Jackson Clark, Head of Information and Analysis at Marie Curie explains:
“We were getting unacceptable amounts of returned mail and a number of people phoning or writing to us, asking why we had mailed their relatives who had died. If your letter hits someone’s doorstep when they are grieving, there could not be a worse time”.
Marie Curie recognised the need to address the quality of their data to ensure it could target supporters accurately, maintain its social responsibility to not mail those people who had passed away whilst also meeting the requirements of the Data Protection Act – and that’s when the charity turned to GB Group for help.
“In a highly competitive marketplace, that relies heavily on public goodwill we fully recognise that we have to take great care to ensure our communications are well researched, well targeted and ultimately well delivered. We had great confidence that GB Group could help us deliver this. Here at Marie Curie we need to constantly measure costs and look at ways of reducing overheads while still providing a quality service to our patients and supporters.”
“With no structured data cleaning process in place, wastage in relation to mailing people who had died or moved was resulting in an unacceptable situation for Marie Curie, not to mention the emotional upset that is caused to families by mailing supporters who are deceased – the effects of which are incalculable. Through a more proactive approach to managing the integrity of our supporter data we have initially saved a minimum of £60,000 a year.”
The Solution
With the widest range of datasets available in today’s marketplace at its disposal, GB Group’s DataCare Bureau used a range of sophisticated name and address matching, cleansing and suppression processes on an extracted file of nearly 550,000 of Marie Curie’s supporter records.
Beverley Seddon, Senior Account Manager at GB Group says, “We were able to update details using our powerful National Register® database, which contains current name, address and lifestyle data on 48 million householders and businesses across the UK. Our Bureau were also able to check if supporters had registered on the NCOA file and, if they had, we were also able to provide their forwarding address.”
Key to the cleaning exercise for Marie Curie was running the data through the Bereavement Register and Mortascreen to identify any people on the database that had passed away. In total, almost 13k deceased records were flagged.
“Thanks to GB Group we can now be confident that the supporter database we have created is populated with the very latest and most accurate data.”
GB then suggested Marie Curie begin screening their data every month rather than on an ad-hoc basis. Benefits of this were two-fold – data was always clean and ready for any mailings so no time was wasted conducting any last minute cleaning, and a more staggered approach meant that costs could be spread throughout the year. Paul Jackson Clark said, “Thanks to GB Group we can now be confident that the supporter database we have created is populated with the very latest and most accurate data.”
Click here for the full pdf article (115kb PDF)