With more than 38 million members and operations in all 50 U.S. states, AARP serves people age 50 and over and operates as a non-profit, non-partisan advocate for its members. AARP’s mission is to “empower people to choose how they live as they age” and it works to strengthen communities by promoting healthcare security, financial security, and personal fulfillment amongst its members.
CHALLENGE
Like most organizations, AARP is facing increased competition for attention and wallet-share from an increasingly tech-savvy audience. With traditional advertising channels declining at double-digit rates and over 90% of Americans owning multiple mobile devices, it is crucial for AARP to be laser-focused on the prospective member journey, knowing exactly how, when, why and on which device(s) to communicate their message for maximum efficiency.
With the goal of reaching a growth target of 50 million members by 2020, AARP sought to transition to a digital-focused company with the dual-goals of improving the overall member experience to increase member retention, while also improving marketing efficiency across all channels to increase new member acquisition.
AARP’s analytics team had established a mature traditional analytics and predictive modeling program for their internal datasets. They also had access to third-party (vendor) analytical insights for various touchpoints with existing and prospective members. What AARP sought was a way to pull all of their data together, enabling a deeper level of member attribution and modeling. Pulling these data sets together would require an infrastructure capable of quickly gathering, storing, cleansing and analyzing large quantities of granular data, along with technical expertise to integrate semi-structured third-party data with structured internal data.
SOLUTION
Caserta architected and built a unified cloud-based data lake and analytics platform on AWS, providing a fast path to analytics to inform the actions that will drive greater renewal, member acquisition, and registration metrics. This data lake enables the collection and analysis of the large amounts of data available on member profile, transaction, and behavior information.
Data from all available physical and digital channels (direct mail, email, web, and social media) is collected and stitched together into a cohesive data journey per member, enabling AARP to better profile their members to provide more personalized messaging and better prospect targeting.
A key element of AARP’s analytics platform is a customized identity resolution capability. Contact records from across all of their data sources are merged into a single, content-rich member (or potential member) profile. This includes merging early “unknown user” cookie-based web activity to complete the full member journey from initial contact.
BUSINESS OUTCOME
The newly unified data analytics platform has enabled business stakeholders to gain a high-resolution, 360-degree view into member behavior. It allows for unrestrained data analysis, which enables the business to create more personalized experiences and boost member retention.
The new analytics platform is helping AARP on the way to reach their goal of 50 million members by 2020.
Our unified data lake and cloud-based analytics platform that Caserta built have enabled us to gain unprecedented insight into member behavior thus enabling us to improve the general member experience. This has helped us retain existing members as well as increase new memberships.
Bill Gale
Vice President, Information Strategy and Infrastructure
