Breakfast for Learning
With many corporate donors preferring to fund programs in communities where they have customers, Breakfast for Learning found itself stranded in an information gap, unable to provide fact-based data on which communities its programs were serving. The group turned to EA to help them make a strong case for support by defining each school’s service area and mapping the locations where potential corporate donors’ customers overlapped.
Deeley Harley Davidson
With a mandate to grow the business, especially among women and younger riders, company marketers believed that better consumer intelligence would help the company’s 75 retailers grow sales in their communities. But what messages and approaches would resonate with potential customers and how could the company use its existing customer database to help local retailers to sell more bikes?
Canadian Blood Services
Maintaining the blood supply to meet the current and future demand of Canadian patients is an ongoing challenge to CBS. While the group has reported that more than half of Canadians will require blood for themselves or a family member, less than 4 percent of the population regularly gives blood. CBS needed to reach out to new donor groups especially now that the primary donor age cohort—Baby Boomers—has begun moving from being net donors to net users as they age and undergo medical procedures associated with the ailments of seniors.
Walt Disney World
A trip to Walt Disney World is high on many families’ vacation wish list. But over the years, WDW has identified some key barriers that prevent prospects from booking trips, among them: affordability, age of children, lack of urgency, and feeling overwhelmed by the planning process. To overcome these issues, Disney wanted to test the effectiveness and measurability of targeted email messages in generating orders for WDW vacation planning kits.
SOS Children's Villages
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.
Mississauga Library System
Mississauga’s library system’s administrators wanted to know what improvements their 18 branches could undertake to better serve the community. While they knew plenty about the reading habits of card-carrying library members—46 percent of the community—they wanted to know which residents weren’t being well served by its branch network and how these non-users could be better accommodated.
Cancer Research Society
For many years, CRS relied on using direct mail for fundraising appeals, trading donor lists with other charities when deciding where to mail the pieces. But as response rates steadily declined, CRS decided it needed a more strategic approach to raising money from existing and future donors. The group wanted to better understand its current supporters in order to customize its marketing and messaging to those most likely to respond to the group’s appeals.
CAA (Maritimes)
As CAA (Maritimes) grew and expanded its offerings to include travel services, insurance products and a member rewards program, the club found itself challenged to stretch its brand perception beyond roadside rescue. The group had traditionally relied on direct mail to acquire new members, but about ten years ago the marketing department began to notice lower response rates. Once-golden staff intuition in selecting mailing lists no longer had the same touch. “We realized that we weren’t being as methodical as we could have been when targeting the right people and avoiding the wrong ones,” recalls Gary Howard, Vice President of Marketing and Communications for CAA (Maritimes). “We had to get smarter at it.”
United Church of Canada
Since 1960, membership in the United Church has declined by nearly 40 percent, and recent research showed that many people had little awareness of the church. To reverse these trends, the church turned to EA for data to help in better understanding its congregations to ensure that its programs and messages resonated with current and potential members. “We asked ourselves, ‘How can we help congregations address the questions of who we are and how can we better serve our neighbours?’” recalls Robert Dalgleish, Development Coordinator for Local Ministries.
Swiss Chalet
To evaluate the potential for Swiss Chalet delivery and takeout for any market in the country, the chain needed a quick way to estimate food expenditures away from home, which would help determine how many new restaurants could be added to a market. The company also needed a way to communicate the delivery areas to the Call Centre staff so that customer orders could be efficiently routed and guaranteed delivery times could be met.
