The Swedish Heart-Lung Foundation:
How we increased donor engagement with optimised segmentation

The Swedish Heart-Lung Foundation have succeeded in driving up engagement and retention on their donors by implementing an optimised segmentation model blending their internal data with relevant external variables. This provide them with a deeper understanding of their segments and, thus, a useful tool to target their content and choose the right channels to publish it in

The 115-year-old NGO have been using their internal donor data to analyse and understand their donors for decades. This has taught them a lot about who their approximately 400.000 donors are, but they still felt as if their segments were not defined clearly enough to really operationalise them. Struggling with the same issue of keeping and attracting new donors as any NGO, they decided to search for ways to optimise their segmentation

Data blending the right data to get a 360° view

“We felt like we could go deeper,” recalls Business Developer Sofie Redzematovic, “analysing our internal transaction and interaction data could make our donors feel a bit like numbers and graphs. That’s when we decided to test if we could optimise our segmentation with by enriching our internal data with external data”

Starting off with a pilot project where the foundation tested hundreds of variables in combination with their own, they were able to identify some variables that made their segments much more clearly separated from each other

“By implementing these variables – we call them the human view - into our algorithm we were able to distinct our segments and describe them more. One of these variables being the conzoom®groups, it provides us with a lot of extra knowledge about our target groups and how our segments are characterised when they are outside our organisation. It turned out to be the missing pieces in our puzzle"
- Sofie Redzematovic, Business Developer, The Swedish Heart-Lung Foundation

Understanding donors to become more relevant

Motivated by the desire to deliver more relevant content to their existing donors and the potential ones, they set off with the project

To get the full effect of the investment, the foundation was very keen on making their segmentation operative implementing it in their communications to both existing donors and their campaigns to acquire new donors – and even in the tracking of their branding activities

“Understanding our segments, we are now able to make differentiated content and to choose our channels to match the target group we want to communicate with. We are also able to find twins to our existing donors in the market and implement this in our direct marketing campaigns, which is also a widely used campaign method for us,” Sofie Redzematovic enclose, “and of course we also use it when tracking our broader activities to learn how the segments interact and respond”

The results are clear - and have even led to the team dubbing the conzoom^® descriptions as the conzoom^®bible:

“A great example is when we wanted to publish a story about new research into cardio-vascular disease a short while ago. We used our segmentation and the conzoom^® descriptions to plan where to publish our story and how to tell it, and we saw substantially higher read and click rates than previous,” Sofie Redzematovic recalls, “and experiences like that naturally motivate us to do more”

Easy to use – easy to love

Introducing a new way of thinking with the new segment descriptions and possibilities to operationalise have taken time. To ease the transition, they have named their segments in a way that make sense to the foundation and enables them to speak of the segments in a unified manner both internally but also externally when booking their advertisements, for instance

“I like to say the complication is in the algorithm creating the segments, whereas the segments themselves are easy to understand and put to use”
- Sofie Redzematovic, Business Developer, The Swedish Heart-Lung Foundation

Still, she acknowledges that the cultural change and organisation adaption have taken up to three times as long as the technical development and adaptations:

“We have been on a journey from our initial pilot project with testing new variables to our current level of using the optimised segmentation in many of our communication activities. So we have come a long way: we have implemented our increased donor understanding in both our marketing and communications, our business development and in the way we have organised ourselves; we even consider building teams to work with each segment to make sure we will get as much value as possible from the customer knowledge our segmentation gives us. I believe we still can strengthen our implementation of the segments and, thus, increase our ROI even more,” Sofie Redzematovic concludes

About the Swedish Lung-Heart Foundation

The Swedish Heart-Lung Foundation is a charitable fundraising organisation. The foundation was established in 1904. The foundation raises funds and distributes money to heart, lung and vascular research, and provides information about heart-lung disease

The Swedish Heart-Lung Foundation obtains no state subsidies and its activities are completely dependent on donations from private individuals and companies