Secours Catholique chooses smartFOCUS to improve communications and relations with its donors
Howard Lake | 16 June 2006 | Newswire
By choosing smartFOCUS’ EMM (Enterprise Marketing Management) suite, the Secours Catholique has taken an active stance on donations, refining donor segmentation and personalising its appeals to build special relationships with its donors.
London, June 14 2006: smartFOCUS, Europe’s leading EMM (Enterprise Marketing Management) software supplier today announced that the Secours Catholique, a charity recognised to be of public usefulness and a member of the Caritas Internationalis Confederation, whose mission is to help people in difficulty, has acquired the smartFOCUS’ software solutions smartANALYZER, smartCAMPAIGNER and smartREPORTER. By so doing, the Secours Catholique aims to adopt a more up-to-date approach to its donor relations, at a time when charitable donations are experiencing low growth in France.
Aiming to create a new dynamic in the way charitable donations are made, the Secours Catholique launched a request to build a global technological marketing solution to encourage an increase in donations, both from potential donors and by improving relations with regular donors.
The Secours Catholique is looking to improve its understanding of existing donors – their motivations and average donations – but also of “sleeping” donors, those who no longer make donations or never have done, in order to find ways to strengthen ties with the former and create or renew them with the latter.
Secours Catholique took the decision, in July 2005, to build its system around smartFOCUS’ technological solutions for target group analysis and for management and reporting of forthcoming campaigns. These high-capacity and flexible analytic solutions quickly convinced the decision-makers who were looking for suitable solutions for users, who although highly competent in their field of resource development, are not necessarily technology experts. “Our aim was to acquire a highly reliable and operational software solution, which would be user-friendly even for those whose job is not IT-oriented,” explained Stéphane Corda, head of Secours Catholique’s Information Systems Department.
Three of smartFOCUS’ key solutions are currently installed at the Secours Catholique: smartANALYZER, smartCAMPAIGNER and smartREPORTER.
smartANALYZER is used to optimise knowledge about each donor and initially, to check the quality of existing data, mainly in order to reduce rates of returned mail for ‘Unknown Address’ type reasons. With a database of over one million donors, it is of the utmost importance that information is up-to-date, as substantial savings can be made in this way. Data is then structured to allow for requalification. And smartANALYZER will enable the Secours Catholique to refine its knowledge of donors by identifying how they can be encouraged to give more, or to start making donations again, and by identifying what stops people from making donations and how these restrictions can be lifted. “smartANALYZER enables its users to create complex target groups in record time without any particular previous knowledge of the software,” explained Curt Bloom, director of smartFOCUS for Southern Europe.
By defining processes and allowing them to be carried out, smartCAMPAIGNER enables the Secours Catholique to establish rules to streamline and automate communications with its donors. The software automatically adapts the message or the communication channel to the population group for which it is intended and allows the rate of return of each campaign to be measured in real time. “It is therefore possible to carry out the most daring segmentations, and to confirm or refute theories immediately, thanks to practical applications and rapid analysis of results,” Curt Bloom said.
The smartREPORTER solution chosen by the Secours Catholique is based on the Microsoft Excel standard and enables the charity to produce tailor-made reports integrated in MS Office. To begin with, smartFOCUS teams installed template reports, based on workshops run by experts in the company. In the future they can be reworked at will, to evolve as growth in donations evolves.
About the Secours Catholique:
The Secours Catholique is a service of the Catholic Church, member of the Caritas Internationalis Confederation and a charity recognised to be of public usefulness. Its mission is to spread Christian charity by advocating solidarity among everyone, in France and throughout the world. It believes that men, women and children living in poverty are the key players in their own development. With them, it fights the causes of poverty and social exclusion and promotes every aspect of human development. It looks to forge active partnerships with organisations which share similar objectives, in order to promote social justice within local, national and international politics. Bearing witness to the Gospel, it encourages each and everyone to go in search of the poor, to listen to them, support them and join with them to build a just and brotherly society together.
In France and its overseas départements and territories, there are 106 branches with 4,100 local teams and an active network of 67,000 volunteers and 957 employees, supported by 600,000 donors.
Internationally, the Secours Catholique has formed a permanent tie with 162 national Caritas branches, resulting in over 550 operations in over 80 countries.
About smartFOCUS
smartFOCUS is a leading supplier of enterprise marketing management software for multi-channel performance driven marketing. Headquartered in Bristol, UK, with offices in the US and Europe, smartFOCUS develops, sells and supports a portfolio of data integration, analysis, modeling and campaign planning and management solutions that integrate to deliver Intelligent Marketing. smartFOCUS clients include AAA, ABN AMRO, AC Nielsen, Avis Europe, Carrefour, France Telecom, Hilton International, News International and many more. www.smartfocus.com
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About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.