The Chesapeake Bay Foundation

The Chesapeake Bay Foundation Will Use Blackbaud Direct Marketing To Streamline Operations and Better Segment Supporters



Celebrating its 40th anniversary, The Chesapeake Bay Foundation (CBF) is dedicated to protecting the Chesapeake Bay environment against pollution and other harmful activities, restoring its health, and educating the community through its 17 learning centers.

The Challenge:
The Foundation has 190,000 members and relies on its large direct marketing program to maintain support, encourage advocacy, and educate its constituency about events and issues affecting the Bay. With acquisition mailings, member renewals, appeals, holiday mailings, campaigns, and telemarketing projects concurrently taking place, the program was extremely difficult to manage.

In fact, each project would require staff to research many different variables that were not easily accessible. For example, the segmentation process was extremely cumbersome. A list would be exported and sent to a vendor; it would then be split for recency, frequency, and monetary amount; then it would be sent back to the Foundation. Afterwards, the list had to go through an approval process. It often took three weeks from the time the file was pulled to the time staff had actionable data. By that time, projects would be behind schedule, and information would be out of date, raising data integrity issues.

The Solution:
CBF needed a direct marketing solution that would help them operate more efficiently, move into a strategic planning mode, and achieve their long term goals of increasing their membership to 200,000 and meeting or exceeding their direct marketing fundraising goals.

The Foundation selected Blackbaud Direct Marketing to streamline processes, centralize and easily segment data, and more efficiently manage its numerous programs. Additionally, during the implementation period, the Foundation worked with Blackbaud consultants to come up with a better streamlined process 

The Results:
By being closer to the data, staff members have more control to make changes in real time and track specific attributes that will allow them to attain a holistic view of supporters and further target marketing efforts. There will be less dependency on vendors, enabling staff to manage programs in house — saving time and resources.

All of the information is now in one place, helping staff to easily and quickly make informed decisions. Time spent on gathering data is now being refocused toward strategic planning.