Case Study: Data integration for Trout Unlimited helps double online revenue

"Freeflow Digital quickly identified and solved TU’s growing data challenges. Now our online tools utilize donor information that had previously only existed in our offline database. Being able to integrate that information not only created major efficiencies internally, but it directly helped grow our organization’s online revenue."

- Amanda Thacker-Heidtke
Trout Unlimited, Director of Online Operations

	Problems TU was losing time and money - its e-CRM was poorly synchronized with its offline CRM and it couldn't optimal donation and membership forms.
	Solution Engaging Freeflow Digital to clarify and rebuild the synchronization of offline CRM and online e-CRM, while integrating more member management and flexible and integrated donation and membership forms.
	Results Trout Unlimited’s online revenue grows from 0.5 million to 1.2 million per year over the course of four years. At the same time, TU adds 30,000 new prospects to its CRM database.

Trout Unlimited (TU) was an organization with over 140,000 dues paying members, multiple chapters and state councils nation-wide, and a wide variety of local and national staff and volunteers. Information management was a big and growing problem. Specifically, TU didn’t have an optimally functioning system for managing all its donor information and activities. Their online donations, e-advocacy and bulk email communications efforts had developed organically, and thus were not adequately integrated with their direct mail and local volunteer efforts. This led to several problems:

1. Two different systems were used to store donor and supporter information, an offline CRM and an e-CRM. These were not very well integrated
2. Information was lost, time wasted, and records were often out-of-date
3. TU missed opportunities for engaging prospects and retaining existing members.

TU needed to have information accessible and integrated. They needed, for example, for a member to be able to log-on to their website to update their address information, and for that information to then be synchronized across three different membership databases. And for national staff to be able build email marketing lists which had the greatest chance of converting prospects to donors, and donors into online activists.

TU engaged Freeflow Digitial to work with their existing technology vendors and budget constraints to build a custom “Middle Tier” system that synchronized offline and online donor databases nightly.

Working within this new synchronized framework, Freeflow also created a series of custom, Ruby-on-Rails built donation forms, which are distinguished by their flexibility and ease of use. Between October of 2008, when these new online donation forms were introduced, and January of 2009, Trout Unlimited experienced a 33% increase in online donations over the same time period in the previous year.

Many of TU’s donation forms were more complex than previous eCRM systems could provide. The custom solution created a seamless and simple interface for their donors, many of which incorporate a wide variety of giving levels and gift premiums. One such form was the TU “Life installment” donation form, allowing high-dollar donors to make recurring contributions amounting to $1,200 within one year. In part because of Freeflow’s custom work on this form, TU has experienced a %50 increase in these high-dollar online donations, over a two year period.

Donor data from such forms, and from the rest of TU’s online operations, is now much better integrated among TU’s databases. Now, when a member edits his or her profile on TU’s Drupal-powered website, that information becomes available to offline and online CRM databases, and available to all the staff and volunteers who use those systems. Staff in charge of online advocacy can confidently use information available from online fundraising efforts. Member acquisition and renewal campaigns have the data they need to build membership. All this has helped their bottom-line: since being engaged by TU in 2006, Freeflow Digital has helped increase online revenue by %140 over four years.