# Collaborate offers improved acquisition and retention through combined supporter data

- Link: https://fundraising.co.uk/2015/07/14/collaborate-offers-improved-acquisition-and-retention-through-combined-supporter-data/
- Published: 2015-07-14T14:34:27+01:00
- Author: Howard Lake

**Direct response media agency Medialab has partnered with consumer data and insight
specialist Epsilon Abacus to bring ‘Collaborate’ to UK charities. **

The tool lets charities enhance their understanding of their own supporters’ likelihood
and propensity to give, and find relevant individuals who are likely to want to 
support their charity for the first time.

Collaborate presents a large volume of data on people in the UK, with their transactional
data across 508 brands and charity donation history, to help charities focus on 
the most responsive donors. It helps charities go beyond their understanding of 
donors from their own database by overlaying the data with that from other sources,
including other charities’ databases.

## Advertisement

By modelling action purchase and donation history Collaborate helps to predict future
behaviour, whether for donor retention or acquisition campaigns. The data can be
used for direct mail, email and digital campaigns.

## Four datasets

Collaborate combines the four main datasets used by charities – lifestyle, home 
shopping, publisher and donor. It consists of regularly updated data on 26 million
individuals and 18 million households, 540 million transactions and £20 billion 
spend. The data is gathered and processed, say Medialab and Abacus, in accordance
to UK data protection legislation, and is run against data cleansing solutions such
as Mortascreen.

The result is a market-wide picture of millions of individual donors, which can 
be used to reduce charities’ expenditure by communicating only with the best prospects
and most likely donors.

## Contribute to share

To take part in Collaborate charities have to contribute their donor database to
the system. However, this does not mean giving away data. A charity’s supporters’
unique names aren’t used, and supporters will only be shared if other sources have
already contributed them to the database.

Charity supporters’ names will never be selected for mailing if they are unique 
to that charity or they have opted out of sharing data with third parties. Typically,
90-95% of a charity’s supporters’ households will match with the data, meaning that
the majority of its supporters will already be receiving marketing communications
from other brands.

[Medialab](http://www.medialabgroup.co.uk) describe Collaborate as “a fresh approach”
and a contrast to concepts such as listing swapping from single charities.

Indeed, the model has been in use in the USA since 2009 and over 350 US nonprofits
use it.

Membership is free and there is no contract commitment. This means that charities
can withdraw their data at any point.

[Collaborate](http://www.charitycollaborate.com) was launched last week at the Institute
of Fundraising’s National Fundraising Convention.

Lara Bonney, UK Country Director, [Epsilon Abacus](http://www.epsilon.com), said:

> “Having seen how Epsilon Abacus donor targeting solutions transformed the effectiveness
> of direct marketing channels for US charities over the last 6 years, we are excited
> to join forces with Medialab to bring the solutions to Charities trading the UK.
> “We are confident that the combination of an unrivalled source of UK consumer 
> data, experience of delivering high performance solutions to UK cataloguers for
> over 17 years plus Medialab’s in-depth knowledge on the uniqueness of the UK charity
> market will make Collaborate a valuable new way of engaging with donors for long
> term success.”

## How Collaborate works

 * **[Rethink Mental Illness promotes gardening in acquisition campaign](https://fundraising.co.uk/2016/04/06/rethink-mental-illness-promotes-gardening-in-acquisition-campaign/)**(
   6 April 2016)
 * **[Big Church Day Out gives Tearfund enough new donors to fund 1 million meals](https://fundraising.co.uk/2016/06/09/big-church-day-gives-tearfund-enough-new-donors-fund-1m-meals/)**(
   9 June 2016)
 * **[Charities must embrace technology to win younger supporters, says CAF research](https://fundraising.co.uk/2016/07/25/charities-must-embrace-technology-win-younger-supporters-says-caf-research/)**(
   25 July 2016)