IT WORLD CANADA Informer BI Award Submission - 2018

Arlo Murphy amurphy@itwc.ca

IT World Canada uses Informer 5 to manage delivery of 30,000 registrations in over 150 content marketing, webinar and live event campaigns per year, for the largest clients in the IT space.

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Using Informer 5 for Reports, Decision Support and Business Process

Management at IT World Canada

IT World Canada is an online publisher. We have been the leading source of IT news in Canada since the

1980s. As a publisher, one important part of our business is to monetize our data by marketing to our

subscriber base (IT professionals) on behalf of our clients (IT companies). For instance, if an organization

offers an IT security solution, they come to us because they know our subscribers have a high interest in

IT security and many of them are likely to be in the market for IT security. On our client’s behalf, we

offer a webinar or live event on IT security, or offer access to premium sponsored content like

whitepapers, case studies or research reports on IT security. The folks who register for the offering

become leads for the sponsoring client. Every year IT World Canada delivers 30,000 registrations in

more than 150 campaigns to some of the largest clients in the IT space.

At IT World Canada we use Informer 5 for a wide variety of reporting. This submission is based on just

one use case: managing these marketing campaigns for external clients. Informer helps us to manage all

these campaigns and to deliver all contracted registrations on time. We use Informer to do three things

• Report Generation. We use Informer to generate both the lists of people to target, based on

demographic information, past history and other data that is stored across several databases,

and we also use it to generate lists of qualified registrations to be provided to our clients.

• Decision Support. We use an Informer dashboard to do near-real-time status on all campaigns,

allowing us to determine which campaigns are healthy and which require intervention. This

allows us to fix problems with campaigns before they fail.

• Business Process Management. We use that dashboard as a task manager to see what needs to

be done and as a hub to manage access to all other tools.

Reports and lists In terms of report generation, we use Informer to pull lists of targets for each campaign, and to provide

reports to our clients. Because each campaign is unique and each client has different requirements, we

generate different target lists for each campaign. We use Informer reports to determine who are the

best candidates for which campaign based on our subscriber data. This means not only who meets our

clients’ criteria (every campaign has unique demographic requirements), but also who is most likely to

be interested (every subscriber has their own unique interests and history). In order to meet this need

we pull list according to complex criteria, and have even developed a lead-scoring report in Informer.

We also rely heavily on Informer’s flexibility in terms of outputting data in exactly the right format – this

is crucial for us because every client we have demands that the registrations we provide come in exactly

the format that their system uses – not necessarily in the format that we prefer.

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Data and decision support The most critical set of reports for campaign management are on a dashboard called our Campaign

Monitor. The Campaign Monitor not only provides up to date information on the status of all

campaigns, both live and soon-to-be-launched, but also lets us make changes to the campaigns as

required.

Figure 1 and 2 show the status of campaigns that are in the field collecting registrations. Figure 1

provides data about the health of these campaigns – how many registrations we require, how long we

have to get them, and whether or not we’re on track – while Figure 2 shows near real-time statistics

about new registrations as they come in (we have strict quality control queue procedures to ensure that

we only pass on the best leads to our clients). Looking at the two reports together gives us insight into

the health of a campaign that might look unhealthy only because it has many registrations in the process

of being qualified.

The Completion column in Figure 1 tells us how close we are to completing the campaign by percentage.

The colour indicates the health (red/yellow/green), according to complex logic built in Informer that

takes into account (1) the number of registrations measured against (2) number of days in the campaign,

as well as (3) how close the campaign is to its deadline. This calculation also takes into account (4) the

type of campaign – we measure the health of a content marketing campaign differently from a live

event campaign. The other columns indicate the registration target for the campaign plus a count of

how many more registrations we need, the end date for delivery and the number of days remaining.

Figure 1: Campaign Status. This dashlet tells us how healthy each campaign is.

In terms of data, this dashlet gives us a great overview of all the campaigns that are running. In terms of

decision support, it tells us which campaign need immediate attention (the red ones) and which we can

probably safely ignore (the green ones).

Our campaigns are for external clients, so we put the registrations through a rigorous quality control

process before we pass them along. The dashlet in figure 1 tells us about the “qualified” registrations,

who have passed QC, so it provides us with the definitive count for each campaign. But what about

about the registrations that are currently in the QC queue?

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If the Campaign Status dashlet counts the

number of qualified registrations per campaign,

the Quality Control dashlet counts all the

registrations that have not yet passed our

process. They are probably good – but we don’t

know yet. This count is near real-time, so we

always have a “good idea” if we have new

registrations or not.

Figure 2: Near real-time view of Quality Control Queue. The columns are counts of registrations that are in the process of being qualified for each campaign that is currently running.

Why do we need intelligence on the QC queue? In this example, most of the campaigns in the Campaign

Status dashlet in Figure 1 are in good health but two of them are in the red. In terms of decision

support: we do not have infinite resources, so we may need to prioritize what we are going to fix. Even

though they’re both red in the Campaign Status dashlet, we can tell from a look at the QC queue dashlet

in Figure 2 that one of them is actually in much better shape than it looks, because there are

registrations going through the quality control process or about to go through the quality control

process.

Figure 3: This campaign is in trouble and requires 21 more registrations in the next four days.

This highlighted campaign would look like a high priority to worry about if we just look at the Campaign

Status dashlet, because it is in red, it is 21 registrations short and the deadline is only four days away.

But if we look at the Quality Control dashlet, we can see that we have already attained 22 registrations,

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so if they all pass QC we are not only not really in trouble – we have actually *over* delivered the

campaign and we do not need to do anything more. And if we’re really worried, we can drill down on

the column and take a quick look to see if the registrations are likely to pass muster. But assuming

they’re good, this campaign is actually in better health than the yellow campaign! Therefore, in terms of

decision support, we shouldn’t waste time on that one at all and should turn our undivided attention on

the other red campaign instead – but without near real-time insight into the QC queue we wouldn’t

know that and we might have wasted precious time on a campaign that didn’t really need help. In short,

the dashboard gives the information we need in order to determine how best to allocate our resources

in order to make sure that all our campaigns are successful, without waiting for our QC processes to

finish.

Business process management Our registration campaigns involve several different departments that all have to work together and our

team uses a wide variety of different tools in order deliver them, including:

• A CRM to manage the sales process of selling the campaign.

• A business process management tool to manage the process of gathering client requirements,

deadlines and other information; writing copy; creating graphics; designing online and social

ads; creating promotional email and target list; as well as other tasks.

• A file manager to manage all supporting documents for each campaign.

• A subscriber database that contains data about our subscribers, that we use to target the best

candidates for each campaign.

• A marketing automation tool to manage the delivery of ads, newsletters and emails, as well as

to collect the registrations.

• A “qualified registrations” database to manage the list of registrations that meet our clients’

requirements and can be delivered to the clients.

We use the Campaign Manager dashboard to support our campaign business process in two ways. First,

as a task manager, and second, as the hub to access all of our other tools.

Figure 4: The Pre-Launch Status dashlet is a task manager for campaigns that have not yet been launched.

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We use a customized business process management tool to manage the process of preparing and

launching campaigns. However, we use our Informer to report on that tool, so the Campaign Monitor

has a dashlet that tells us what stage our campaigns are at and what departments are currently working

on which campaigns. This means that project managers can tell at a glance where every campaign is at,

and our staff can take a look and see if they have a task: if I am in charge of Reg Pages, I know I from

figure 4 that I have one campaign (the bottom one) that needs my attention.

Figure 5: Business process management tools

In addition, the Campaign Monitor dashboard is also a hub to access all the tools we use to manage

campaigns, from referring to the original contract that’s in the CRM, to managing the process of

launching the campaign in our BPM tool, to accessing supporting documentation, to updating campaign

and lead requirements if anything about a live campaign changes – which happens a lot. You may have

wondered what the icons on the left side of the dashlets are. They are buttons to open our tools directly

to the correct campaign. This makes the dashboard a one-stop shop not only to see the data on any

campaign, but also to directly make whatever changes that data might tell us we need to do.

If a client changes a deadline or asks for more registrations, we can change this from the dashboard

(well, from one click on the leftmost tool), and the dashboard will update based on the new data. If we

need to confirm some information from the CRM or any supporting document, this is also just a click

away. Because Informer lets us hook combine data from multiple data sources, we can also use it as the

heart of our operation, providing links to all our tools. All we need is a single identifier for each

campaign (we use the order number that is generated when we sell any order) and rules for generating

links in these tools, which we can store in Informer as calculations.

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Figure 6: Business process management tools with descriptions of activities.

Conclusion Monitoring campaigns isn’t IT World Canada’s only use case for Informer – we’re saving other use cases

for next year’s BI Awards. But delivering 30,000 registrations in over 150 campaigns per year, for a wide

variety of exacting clients, each with targeting a different segment of our audience with a different type

of offering, has become a large part of our business, and we rely on Informer’s powerful reporting and

dashboard functionality to keep us on top of all of our campaigns so that we can deliver every

registration to every client on time.