alumni relationship management

thankQ delivers a range of business benefits to its not for profit customers, but increased efficiency is not always top of our customers’ lists when it comes to the desired outcomes from their CRM system. And yet for the University of Edinburgh, thankQ’s barcode functionality has revolutionised the way they approach direct mail campaigns and has delivered some impressive efficiency savings along the way.

Every year the university mails between 40,000 -100,000 alumni as part of its annual appeal. Twice a year the university sends out 115,000 copies of its alumni magazine – that’s around 300,000 pieces of direct mail every year in these two campaigns alone.

Since implementing thankQ, The University of Edinburgh has been using barcoding to build a process to deal effectively with returned mail or gone aways. For all mailings of 5,000 units or more, a barcode is attached to each item which includes a unique number that identifies the recipient, and a campaign code linked to the specific communication.

Historically, each time an individual item of mail was returned, users would have to go into the contact record and manually amend the relevant details. Now, users simply scan the barcodes for returned items and the corresponding records are updated automatically. Thirty pieces of mail can be scanned in a minute, whereas previously it took a few minutes to process a single item of returned mail.* That’s an efficiency saving on staff time of over 99%.

And because the barcodes can be scanned so quickly and easily, contact data can be updated within minutes of the items’ return, ensuring that data is accurate and up-to-date in time for the next mailing, and saving on postage costs for items that would never reach the intended recipient.

The University of Edinburgh can today boast that 70% of its alumni addresses are accurate and usable – an impressive figure in itself – even more so when you discover that the university holds graduate records from as far back as the 1920’s! Using data cleansing and de-duping tools in thankQ, along with the bar coding functionality, the university has an impressive return rate of less than 1% on individual mailings, which means that they can easily maintain these high levels of data integrity.

Where the university holds organisation records for its alumni, this record is created separately and linked to the alumni’s individual record. The barcode returned mail processing rules need to recognise and make use of these relationships, particularly as some alumni prefer to be mailed at home whilst others prefer to receive mail at their place of work. The barcode rules not only record gone aways from individual household addresses, but also for mailings sent to individuals at their employer addresses. In this way, individual records and contact preferences are updated quickly and easily, along with related records for households and employment. This not only leads to increased reliability, but also ensures that the university maintains its relationship with alumni over the long term.

*considering the related updates that often needed to be performed - e.g. if the contact was mailed at their home address but still had a valid work address, then the work address would be made their principal address so that they could still be contacted.