Ohio Department of Natural Resources Trawls for Big CRM Prize

SAS® provides platform for long-term business intelligence goals

When the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) first tried its hand at CRM, it licensed SAS, segmented a database of 700,000 anglers and developed a marketing campaign that helped improve the sales of state fishing licenses for the first time in 14 years. It was, by all accounts, a successful endeavor that garnered more than $500,000 in increased revenue. But to Ken Fritz, the agency’s deputy CIO, the lessons learned were even more important than the immediate financial gains: "This project revealed customer insights that no one had suspected. We gained insights about our customers that highlighted a shared community of boaters, hikers, campers and outdoor enthusiasts."

Fritz and his colleagues saw unequivocally that ODNR customers crossed segments, that the agency’s individual products were linked and that customer needs were geographically connected. But most importantly, Fritz saw, first hand, how well targeted marketing could work. Armed with this realization and plenty of enthusiasm, he began promoting the benefits of CRM and business intelligence within the entire agency.

Developing a complete intelligence architecture may sound like a lofty goal for a financially strapped, state-run organization. But with SAS, the Ohio Department of Natural Resources has deployed an integrated CRM program that is garnering interest from government agencies throughout the country.

Gathering, managing and analyzing – all with SAS
At ODNR, the SAS Intelligence Value Chain provides the technological framework for CRM and all other business intelligence endeavors. "SAS is the backbone of our intelligence architecture," says Fritz. "Taking data, manipulating it, cleaning and storing it in an effective way and then performing advanced analyses – it’s all done in SAS."

Specifically, ODNR has used SAS to build its Recreational User Data Warehouse, which pulls together GIS (geographic information system) data, lifestyle and demographic data, point-of-sale information from hunting and fishing license sales, watercraft license sales, and other recreational services. By manipulating this information, Wildlife Division managers can tell which individuals tend to buy fishing licenses year after year, which are more likely to purchase one in conjunction with a camping and fishing package deal, and which might respond to programs that teach intermediate outdoor skills.

Understanding the needs of all Ohioans
More importantly, the agency’s various divisions can develop customer-driven strategies in cooperation with one another. Without that cooperation, says Fritz, each division could end up developing silo-style CRM campaigns with competing goals. Instead, the three divisions – Wildlife, Watercraft and Parks – recognize that they share many of the same customers and that working together can benefit the entire agency and its customers.

"This enterprise initiative has allowed us to develop a true organizational structure for business intelligence," says Fritz. "The interdependencies that we’ve identified among the divisions have contributed to everyone’s willingness to buy in to the project."

The result is a better organization that truly understands each of its potential customers – all 11.3 million residents of Ohio. "My real goal is to make us a better organization – to understand our customers better and provide the services that our customers want," says Fritz." SAS helps us leverage our resources more efficiently and ensures that we provide one consistent face to the customer."

According to Fritz, this message was easier for everyone within the agency to comprehend once they received access to the intelligence architecture via the agency’s intranet. "The enterprise reporting tool helped everyone see the benefits of SAS. It put business intelligence on everyone’s desktop and immediately created an interest in the systems we had set up."

Changing paradigms with SAS
With SAS technologies in place and divisional buy-in for business intelligence, the agency is now poised to re-evaluate millions of dollars in existing programs and to develop exciting, new programs that meet the needs of today’s customers. After all, times have changed since the 1940s, when many of the department’s existing programs were developed. "With SAS we’ll be able to deconstruct the things we do, analyze why we do them and make sure we’re doing everything for the right reasons," says Fritz.

The Ohio Department of Natural Resources now sees each division – Parks, Wildlife and Watercraft – as a portal through which the agency can attract customers to additional outdoor pursuits. That’s a big step from the agency’s initial goals: merely to predict which fishing licenses would lapse and to keep them from lapsing. What started out as a plan to implement a simple targeting and segmentation program has turned into a complete intelligence architecture that the agency will use for advanced CRM, internal decision support and performance management.

In addition to the successful CRM endeavors, Fritz is using the SAS platform to develop an HR reporting tool that will allow executives to analyze hiring practices throughout the agency. He is also working on an IT management solution that will measure the quality of IT services provided to each internal customer.

And Fritz’s plans for SAS in the future are even more impressive. Now that he has helped to achieve interagency corporation within the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, he hopes to undertake a series of collaborative projects among different state agencies. "We’re really trying to leverage what we’ve accomplished to get more people involved with data warehousing and business intelligence, so we can begin to share our expertise with other agencies, and so they can share what they have accomplished as well," he says. It’s a plan that he looks forward to implementing, with help from SAS.

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