Fundraising Case Study: SOS Children’s Villages

CLIENT:

SOS Children’s Villages (SOS) is an international organization that cares for orphaned and abandoned children.

CHALLENGE:

Although SOS has been active for 60 years worldwide—40 years in Canada—the group had an “awareness problem,” according to Daniel Loftus, Integrated Sponsorship Program Manager for SOS Children’s Villages, in Ottawa. “Many people had never heard of us and those that did were not aware of all the initiatives we sponsor.” To raise its visibility, SOS set out to broaden its donor base by improving its outreach efforts.

SOLUTION:

To help SOS understand who was donating money to sponsor children, EA appended PRIZM C2 segments to the postal codes of the group’s donor base and determined that SOS’s highest concentration of donors came from two distinct groups: middle-aged, married couples and young urban singles (from PRIZM C2 clusters Young Digerati, Electric Avenues and Grads & Pads) who tended to have more discretionary cash for charities because they did not have the costs associated with raising young children. After examining the group’s top-ranked Social Values—open-minded towards others and very concerned about health—SOS rewrote its fundraising appeals to highlight the charity’s global reach and its efforts to build sound homes to protect the health and safety of children. And based on the increase of donations from young, urban men—following the hiring of TV home improvement celebrity Mike Holmes as an SOS spokesman—SOS marketers also altered their media buy to include their top donors’ favourite cable channels, including HGTV and CTV Newsnet.

RESULTS:

EA’s marketing analytics helped SOS better understand and connect with its donor base. After launching a direct-TV ad campaign featuring Mike Holmes, donations increased 40 percent. And the group scored a year-over-year retention rate of 90 percent among its new child sponsor donors. In addition, SOS marketers appreciated PRIZM C2’s privacy-friendly approach that relies on a simple postal code instead of an intrusive survey to produce detailed information and insight about donors. “Traditionally, every question you ask while processing a donation results in a fall-off in the amount of the contribution,” says Daniel Loftus. “With PRIZM C2, we’ve been able to maintain our level of giving because we don’t have to pull the energy of the donor away from the donation to answering questions. All we need is a donor’s postal code to learn their PRIZM C2 segment and find out who they are and what they’re interested in.”