Why do so many segmentation projects fail to deliver the goods?

Howard Lake | 17 November 2009 | Blogs

• Tagged with:
• segmentation

For quite a few months now I’ve been working with the team at Cancer Research UK to help develop their new supporter segmentation. After countless days spent working through transactional analyses, quantitative and qualitative research findings, and segment profiles, a week or so ago we reached the point where the segmentation was all set to launch. So, it was perfect timing for one of my old colleagues there to email me a link to a very interesting blog post by Brad Bortner of Forrester Research – explaining “Why good segmentations fail”!

In it, Bortner says that recent research reveals most segmentation projects never actually fully deliver their planned business results. Not because they haven’t been well developed, but because effective plans are not put in place to ensure that the segmentation is properly adopted and used across all parts of the organisation.

He then provides some very sound advice on how to avoid this happening, which I’m pleased to say tracked pretty closely with our own implementation plans…

Click here to read more on the Strategy Refresh Blog…

• Audience Segmentation: how personalised can your fundraising get? (1 November 2012)
  
• Insight in Fundraising SIG to hold event on segmentation (18 April 2008)
  
• What’s the collective noun for a group of bankers (and why didn’t we think of it sooner)? (24 April 2009)
  

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.