Past Analytics Excellence Awards

JulieH · ‎04-13-2016

Author: Keith Snow (@ksnow), President/Data Scientist

Company: B2E Direct Marketing

Awards Category: Best 'Alteryx For Good' Story

On December 1st, 2015, which was "Giving Tuesday", a global day dedicated to giving back, B2E Direct Marketing announced a newly created grant program for 2016 called 'Big Data for Non-Profits'. B2E Direct Marketing is a business offering Big Data, Visual Business Intelligence and Database Marketing solutions.

Non-profit organizations are a crucial part of our society, providing help to the needy, education for a lifetime, social interactions and funds for good causes.

Describe the problem you needed to solve

While serving on three non-profit boards, Keith Snow, President of B2E, became aware that data is among the most important, under-used and least maintained asset of a non-profit.

"The 'Big Data for Non-Profits' Grant program was born out of a vision that we had at B2E to give back to our community. We wanted to offer non-profits the same visual business intelligence and database marketing services that we offer our other clients." says Snow.

The grant program includes the following services free of charge to the winning organization in the month for which they are selected:

Data Hygiene (clean up donor file)
Data Append (age, income, gender, marital status, lifestyle segmentation, and more)
Detailed donor analysis and overview reports

Each month in 2016, B2E will choose one non-profit from those that apply through www.nonprofit360marketing.com. Award recipient applications are reviewed by a panel selected by B2E and awards are given based upon how the services will be used and to further the organization's goals. The grant program began accepting applications from eligible 501(c)(3) non-profits at the end of December and has already completed work on three organizations so far this year.

"We are excited about using Alteryx to help non-profits expand their mission and to better serve our communities." says Snow.

Describe the working solution

B2E has an initial consultation meeting with each non-profit where the goals and takeaways of the 'Big Data for Non-Profits' program is discussed.

We identify current data sources that the non-profit has available, and request up to 48 months of donor contact and giving information. Minimal information is requested from the non-profit as we know great value can be added using Alteryx Designer.

Name
Address, City, State, Zip
Phone
Date of Donation
Amount of Donation
Campaign
Donation type: i.e. cash, check, soft credit, etc.

B2E has created Alteryx workflows to perform donor file hygiene. Since we have licensed the data package, we take advantage of the CASS, Zip4 Coder and Experian Geodemographic append and TomTom capabilities.

All donor data is address standardized to meet postal standards and duplicates within their database are identified. Once the data is updated to meet our standards, we process the files against the National Change of Address and the National Deceased database.

The next step is taking the donor's contact information and appending demographics at the individual and household level (age, income, gender, marital, age of home, Mosaic segmentation, etc.) using the Alteryx Experian add-on product. Alteryx Designer is invaluable for this process as we manipulate the donor data to be more useful for the non-profit.

Alteryx' ability to export Tableau Extract files are key for this program to be successful. We have created key Tableau dashboards that highlight the following:

a. Consumer demographics

b. Mosaic marketing segmentation

c. Campaign or donation source

d. Donation seasonality / giving analysis

e. Pareto (80/20 Rule): to identify and profile the 20% of the donors who contribute 80% of the revenue

f. Geography (city, zip, county, metro area)

Once the data is in the Tableau Extract, business intelligence analysis is performed with visualization that is easy to understand and immediately actionable by the non-profit. Tableau packaged workbooks are created for each non-profit so they have access to interactive analytics to help them make quick and immediate business decisions for their organization.

Describe the benefits you have achieved

B2E provides a niche service that many non-profits do not have the knowledge, tools or budget to complete on their own.

The benefits to each non-profit includes the following:

The donor data from each non-profit can now be processed in days instead of weeks using Alteryx. This allows B2E the maximum ability to help more organizations. In the past, we only worked with one non-profit per year. Our 2016 goal is to work with twelve.
A clean donor contact file with updated addresses, deceased individuals flag and duplicated merged is returned to the organization. Many non-profits send out direct mail, they immediately see their deliverability rates increase by more than 15% and return mail rates decrease. The cost for printing and postage is optimized as well.
The best way to get your current donors to give more is to truly understand what they look like. Understand the donor's life stage, giving history, demographics, lifestyle characteristics, media preferences and digital behavior is key for success. Targeting a donor in a way that resonates with them has lead to an increase in giving.
All non-profits want access to new donors. A profile identifies what the best donor characteristics look like. Since B2E can also acquire direct mail and email lists, we help the non-profit find "look-alike" individuals who have never donated to their organization.
B2E's goal is to help each non-profit to maximize the current donations coming into their organization so they can keep their expenses and overhead lower as well as offer them a free service they would not have otherwise acquired.

The impact to each non-profit is huge, but the impact to B2E is just as great as we are allowed to use a great tool to be a leader in Iowa as a company that truly gives back to our community all year long. As of April, 2016, we have provided services for:

Big Brothers Big Sisters of Iowa
Children's Cancer Connection
Youth Emergency Services and Shelter of Iowa
Governors District Alliance
Easter Seals Iowa

MattD · ‎08-12-2016

Author: Kristin Scholer (@kscholer), Insight Manager
Company: Ansira
Awards Category: Most Time Saved

Ansira, an industry-leading marketing agency in integrated real-time customer engagement, activates big data through advanced analytics, advertising technology, programmatic media and personalized customer experiences. Ansira leverages superior marketing intelligence to build deeper, more effective relationships with consumers and the retail channel partners that engage them on the local level. Marketing intelligence is infused across all disciplines and executed through digital, direct, social, mobile, media and creative execution, marketing automation, co-op and trade promotion.

Describe the problem you needed to solve

As a data-driven advertising agency, Ansira is constantly profiling customer behavior for a variety of clients in industries such as quick service restaurants, automotive brands and large retailers. Ansira’s Analytics team heavily utilizes media and consumer research that comes from the MRI Survey of the American Consumer to create Customer Behavior Reports. This large survey provides a vast database of demographics, psychographics, media opinions and shopper behavior that give insights into the actions and behaviors of the U.S. consumer. These insights help Ansira better understand consumers for new business perspectives as well as develop strategies for existing clients.

The challenge the Analytics team faced was that these rich insights were not easy to format, interpret or analyze. The data is accessed through an online portal and exported into an Excel format that does not make the data easy to manipulate. Depending on the project requirements, it could take an analyst 4-8 hours to format the data, identify survey responses that are statistically significant, build out a report to display all the information and write up a full summary. This is not cost effective and it became clear that a better way to transform this data was needed if Ansira wanted to utilize it on a regular basis.

Describe the working solution

After using Alteryx to format unfriendly Excel output for many projects, it was clear to the Analytics team that Alteryx could also be a solution for speeding up the Customer Behavior Report process. In about two days, one team member was able to create an Alteryx workflow that did all of the Excel formatting in just three seconds (this was generally taking over an hour to do manually).

Then Alteryx was taken one step further as formula tools were integrated to identify which behaviors were statistically significant for an analysis (this was taking 1-2 hours to work through manually). Next, the process was simplified one more time by incorporating the reporting tools to create a full report of all the data needed in the form of a PDF. The report even included color coding to easily identify statistically significant behaviors. Not only did this create a beautiful report in seconds but made key behaviors easy to identify, thus taking the analysis and summary process from 2-3 hours down to 15-30 minutes.

Describe the benefits you have achieved

The process that was created in Alteryx has allowed the Ansira Analytics team to offer Customer Behavior Reports to New Business and Strategy departments that can be turned around in a day instead of a week. If a full analysis is not needed, the Analytics team can turn around just the PDF data report in as little as 15 minutes (see picture below). This allows Ansira to gain additional direction on who is the consumer they are targeting, which can be instrumental in creating a new campaign.

To make this process even easier, the Analytics team has created a request form (see picture below) that anyone at Ansira can use to identify the behaviors they are interested in seeing for their client. Once the request form is received by the Analytics team, they can do a quick data pull from the MRI online portal, update the Alteryx workflow and have a full report created in under an hour.

Ansira recently had a consumer packaged goods client where the Strategy team needed to learn more about the difference in behavior patterns between Millennials and Non-Millennials who purchased 16 specific products. The Analytics team was able to pull data from MRI on these 16 products, run it through the Customer Behavior Report workflow and create 16 individual reports for each product comparing Millennials and Non-Millennials purchase behaviors in less than 4 hours. Without Alteryx, this would have taken a single analyst almost a full week to complete and likely would have never even been a possibility due to budget and capacity constraints.

Creating these Consumer Behavior Reports have become a regular occurrence with two to three requests coming into the Analytics department each week. With the help of Alteryx, these reports have become a large asset to Ansira as they provide very impactful information without a lot of effort.

Past Analytics Excellence Awards

Excellence Awards 2016: Keith Snow - Best 'Alteryx For Good' Story

Excellence Awards 2016: Kristin Scholer - Most Time Saved