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Why are we different?
The Data Action Group is independent. All of its activities are driven by its client members and as a result it is able to offer 3 levels of benefit.

Personal - we have a remit that is highly personal – we help your personal development. The Data Action Group offers a unique, safe and open forum where you can meet and share experience with your peers. All events ensure plenty of opportunity to network with people who do a similar role and face similar issues and opportunities.

Company - we help you raise business performance. We do this by a process of measurement and benchmarking. All surveys and reports are chosen by the members, designed by members and completed by them. All of the Data Action Group’s output is for the members and are designed to be practical tools that help increase performance.

Industry – The Data Action Group is a co-ordinated client voice in what is often a supplier influenced data market. The Data Action Group looks at key issues from a practitioner point of view and as such is able to point the way on key issues such as Opt-out, contact density and data quality.

What does The Data Action Group do?

The tank! Data Action Group was launched in November 2004. In response to growing demand for a data practitioners forum and an Opt-in action group. tank! already had a solid reputation for innovating and running the tank! Marketing benchmarkers forum and was the natural choice to set-up and run the Data Action Group.

Since launch The Data Action Group has delivered;

• A prospect pool survey has been completed with 29 member companies participating resulting in National Prospect Pool Database Benchmark – a UK first. It provides for the first time a means for those involved in prospect pool marketing to assess the effectiveness of their program in an industry setting.
  
• The largest cross company survey into opt-out trends and best practise has been completed
  
• Specialist working groups have been launched to progress best practise in use of contact triggers, segmentation and contact optimisation
  
• The Customer Contact Testlab – a UK first. This is the largest and most robust study ever (30+ companies participating) looking at companies contact protocol. The findings from the contact test lab have been combined with the UK’s largest ever study into consumer perceptions and behaviour towards direct marketing (conducted by YouGov and with 10,000 respondents)
  
• We have launched The National Data Quality Benchmark – a UK first. This will provide for the first time a means for both the measurement and improvement of the key data quality issues
  
• We are about to launch the CRM practitioners survey and toolkit
  

Project Approach
The key issues selected for 2006 are those identified by TDAG members as the most important and with the highest value. There are 4 projects planned for 2006 and each have a common interest to all TDAG members.

• Data Quality
• CRM
• Opt-out Update
• Marketing Communications Best Practise

Each one offers numerous benefits including benchmarking your company and improving performance, learning from others, providing tools for you to improve your own performance and impact. In addition they will create a unique industry level insight to help us work closer with suppliers and regulatory bodies

Role of partners in tank! projects
tank! recognises that together these are an ambitious set of projects and has decided to adopt the standard approach above to each project and to bring in resource and expertise to help drive the projects forward. A suitable partner has been (is being) recruited for each project We recognise that client members treasure the openness that a client only forum offers and as such we have been very careful about selecting partners to support projects. Each partner has shown an appreciation of the value of the Data Action Group and signed up to a protocol appropriate for a client forum.

• All project content, output and meetings will be lead/facilitated by tank!
• A volunteer will be appointed from a client company to champion the project and provide guidance to the project direction
• An external partner will be appointed to support tank! and clients drive the project. Please note that the partner will demonstrate real subject expertise
• A full project brief will be sent to all potential clients with an invite to participate
• A small, representative client/partner/tank! team will be pulled together to design surveys/questionnaires
• The subsequent survey/questionnaire will be sent to all interested companies to complete
• Completed questionnaires/surveys will collated and summarised
• A full results briefing will be held
• Finally bespoke and general reports will be made available.

We are pleased to introduce Transactis as the first project partner. Transactis are now working very successfully with the Data Action Group to create the National Data Quality Survey. 12 of our members worked with Transactis to create the survey. We also had the benefit of 2 client champions - Phil Cocoran of NS&I and James Crouchman of Lloyds TSB.
TRANSACTIS

We are also pleased to announce that Marketing Databasics have been appointed to help the group create the CRM Survey and toolkit. David Wreathall of Lloyds TSB is currently planning the project with Marketing Databasics on behalf of the Data Action Group and more announcements will be made soon.
MARKETING DATABASICS

We have also agreed that the Customer Partnership (who supported the Contact Density work last year) will work with us this year to bring the Opt-out survey up-to-date. Watch out for updates in future Newsletters.
CUSTOMER PARTNERSHIP

We are delighted by the support from our partners who are helping us move our projects forward. But remember this is your community and we are here to help you succeed in your role; please feel free to call us for advice and assistance on any aspect of your data-driven marketing. If we do not know the answer then we will definitely know someone who does!

Once again – welcome to the Data Action Group.