Alex Marchetti, President, CEO of Whitestone Marketing Group.  I want to share with you a case study that we had with a client that we did some work for at the end of last year.  It was Habitat for Humanity and how this all transpired is that Habitat for Humanity who had worked with some printers and some email companies decided that they wanted to apply some direct marketing technologies and tactics to their fundraising campaigns.  So they contacted us and said they were interviewing firms and what they wanted to do is they wanted someone who would be able to go in and manage their databases, do some segmentation of their databases allowing them to see what passion points there might be for some of their potential fundraising donors and they wanted to look and see how they could measure the ROI on some of their direct mail campaigns.  They wanted to have some fresh, new graphics and some messaging.  

So we had several conversations with them and it was a long, arduous process in that they didn’t have a lot of money and what they had to do was make sure that there was a return on the investment that they had.  They had not done much mailing in the past year because it didn’t seem to work, but they had come to the conclusion that it was something they had to do.  So through several conversations they determined that we were the firm that would be selected to do this.  So what happened is we went in and we did an assessment to determine what did their databases look like, what kinds of graphics and campaigns did they run in the past, did they do print, did they do mail, did they do emails, what did their website look like and was it consistent with the other messaging and graphics in the look and feel and we determined from that that when you do an email campaign or you do a direct mail campaign and you drive someone—in their case we were trying to get people to donate—that the expectations of that landing page have to match up with what you had communicated to drive them there and so there were a number of disconnects that occurred within their channel management. 

So we created for them a new look, feel, new graphics.  We wrote some new messaging.  We created some versions.  We had three different versions.  We broke the database up in three different segments that matched up the different versions of the messages.  We created different donation amounts that were based upon historical data and how much people gave in the past giving them an opportunity to add more.  So we finished and we did all the graphics.  We prepared a direct mail piece, which in their case, they did letters.  We did various kinds of letters with tear-offs, BRCs.  We also included in there to move them to online donations we added in online channels that allowed them to go in and do this.  We then created an email campaign.  An email campaign was to reflect the same kinds of graphics, some kinds of look, feel and messaging that we had developed inside of the direct mail pieces.  We designed all the emails with the ability, links, donations, things of that sort.  We did the code for them.  We took the databases and we segmented the databases, created three versions into the email so that they all were consistent in the messaging, consistent in the messaging that went to specific segments. 

We then created a calendar whereby each of these were interacting in a consistent, well thought out, managed time for a two month period.  So we could say if we were going to do this direct mail piece there would be in a follow-up email which would occur at this period of time, which would support the direct mail campaign.

What resulted from all this is we ran it through the last two months of the year.  They had incredible response.  I think the email campaign resulted in about a 19 percent open rate.  They had never done an email campaign prior to this.  They sent us an email at the end of December and told us that it was an extremely strong performance.  They were extremely happy with the results of the campaigns and that they look forward to building upon those campaigns in 2011.  So we’re pretty excited about it and we expect it to continue to grow.