Shooting Stars: 12 Brands to Watch in 2014
Brand: WGBH
Idea to Steal: Connect the dots to identify your donor base.
Boston’s WGBH is one of the country’s best known PBS affiliates, and the single largest producer of PBS web, radio and TV content, including Masterpiece, Frontline, Arthur and Antiques Roadshow.
To support these initiatives, financial support from viewers is needed, which means identifying these individuals across all media is crucial. Siloed data was a huge challenge, notes Cate Twohill, director of technical product development, WGBH Educational Foundation.
“We used Salesforce, which gave us access to the data but the downside was that it was created for B2B use and not B2C, so it didn’t fill all our needs,” she says. “There was no query tool, and we wanted to do more omnichannel marketing.”
Last April, WGBH began working with RedPoint Global to get a better view of its pledge data. The station wanted to link data from one channel to another—if a longtime donor calls in during a pledge drive, WGBH wanted the call center to be able to identify that they were already part of the family.
In the next phase, WGBH will begin leveraging social tools to listen to what members are saying on Twitter and Facebook. “Matching members to their data in online interactions—that’s the Holy Grail,” says Twohill. “We want to create an online member portal where we can identify them and know how to address them, whether it be at what level member they are, or whether they are a prospect.”
Direct mail from older donors still accounts for half of donor dollars for WGBH, although younger donors are shifting more to online channels.—BNV
