Marie Curie’s Mini Pots of Care is a unique and educational fundraising activity for children aged 3 to 11. Schools register to receive a daffodil growing kit for each pupil. The pupils plant the daffodils in the Autumn, nurture them and see them bloom in the spring. The third stage of the project is to organise fun activities to raise valuable funds for Marie Curie Nurses.

Initial analysis of historical registration and donation data from previous years brought to light several important issues, including that a large number of schools registered to receive bulb kits but failed to raise money for Marie Curie.

We then mapped this data to our Education List and identified patterns and trends across five key indicators, including school location, age range, funding method, demographic and Ofsted performance. From this analysis, we were able to identify the types of schools that had a high propensity to drop out, as well as schools with a high propensity to donate.

With the analysis complete, we worked with Marie Curie to agree several overall campaign objectives:

• To allocate all 350,000 daffodil kits
• To focus on schools most likely to register and reduce drop out rate
• To reduce substantially direct mail expenditure
• To increase average donation levels from participating schools
• To reduce kit distribution costs

We were able to reduce direct mail activity to a single mailing piece, migrating all other promotion activity to email. 26 distinct email campaigns were delivered, each focused on a specific segment with appropriate messaging and calls to action. In fact, The Education Company created, managed and delivered the entire email communication campaign for Mini Pots of Care 2014-2015.

The results speak for themselves. All the bulb kits were allocated to schools resulting in zero waste and maximisation of material investment. More than 1,000 schools donated and average donation levels were 10% higher than the previous year. The migration from print to digital marketing reduced print and distribution costs by more than £15,000. Fulfilment costs associated with the delivery of the daffodil bulbs were reduced by more than £5,000 through intelligent management of despatch data.