How Public Outreach, a leading philanthropic fundraising agency, successfully manages data complexity - with contactSPACE.


“...we love how everything just works with contactSPACE. The system allows us to eliminate the complexity of managing our data."



Chris Jackson, Head of Phone Fundraising @ Public Outreach Australia

The Challenge

Managing complex data sets from multiple data sources

Moving to the cloud

Prior to deploying contactSPACE, Public Outreach were using a proprietary telefundraising system built in-house.

The team knew that although they were achieving positive results, they could achieve an even better return on investment with a more powerful solution.

...the previous solution was quite a juvenile system… it had no call recording functionality.
We needed something that would enable us to make better, more efficient contact, that would also act as an all-in-one solution for our telefundraising team.

Managing data complexity

As one of the largest fundraising agencies for philanthropic organisations in Australia, Public Outreach manages significant complexity in its contact centre environment.

The team is responsible for providing great results for a range of different clients, each of which involves a number of different data sources.

...we have quite a lot of different data coming in, all from different sources, all going into different kinds of campaigns. We needed a good way of managing that.

Maximising contact efficiency

Public Outreach also needed to ensure that leads were being dialled as efficiently and effectively as possible.

...we make 1500-1600 hours worth of calls each week across a multitude of different campaigns... it was quite a big ask - we needed a solution to manage how our leads were going to be organised and fed through to the callers.

The team wanted to be able to offer their customers even better value by contacting fresh leads as they arrived, while also effectively managing the allocation of these records among callers.

Another big thing was receiving records by API. That was something we couldn't do before. And we really wanted to make it happen.


The Solution

Finding an extra level of agility with an all-in-one solution

Full flexibility

With contactSPACE, Public Outreach is able to remain extremely nimble in designing contact strategies, despite the complexity of the campaigns the team manages.

[contactSPACE] makes it really easy to switch things around, which is something that happens a lot, because we have so many different campaigns. Agents might switch halfway through the day - we can easily turn skills on and off and not have to go about re-enrolling people.

The team now have the power to dial fresh records as soon as they come in with contactSPACE APIs, or prioritise records with other fields based on the type of campaign.

Plus, Public Outreach now have greater flexibility to adapt their contact strategies on the fly, based on how each initiative is performing.

The solution gives us tons of options that are really great to have. contactSPACE are fantastic at keeping up with the latest trends in contact strategy - the system really reflects that.

Remarkable reporting

But the key for Public Outreach in making these optimisations is the visibility that contactSPACE provides into ongoing campaign performance.

...the big benefit of contactSPACE is being able to see every different campaign running at the same time and tracking where they're at.

More broadly, these insights are used by the telefundraising team to help clients achieve better results, by troubleshooting potential areas of improvement across every initiative.

I really like the detail of the reports, and being able to go in and segment by initiatives or by user groups. I love the conversion report - that's massive for me.

The Results

Helping clients achieve even more incredible results

Achieving strategic objectives

Prior to deploying contactSPACE, Public Outreach were aiming to increase their contacts per hour as a key strategic objective.

...it was a key mission of the business to increase our contacts per hour, because that's something that we really needed to do to improve our performance... contactSPACE definitely helped out with this challenge.

Since deploying contactSPACE, the team has been able to achieve their goal. Public Outreach has seen contacts per hour increase by an average of 20-25% across their different initiatives.

The team has seen a significant return on investment in making the change. Despite having access to a ready-built in-house solution, switching to contactSPACE has led to better business outcomes for the organisation.

Taking control

Public Outreach use the flexibility provided by contactSPACE to improve results in a number of key areas.

No matter the objective, the team can instantly measure and optimise performance, allowing them to improve results on a consistent basis.

It’s a lot easier for me now to check and see what the contact rate is tracking like across each initiative. From there I can get to the bottom of any issues that occur almost instantaneously. Having that level of control is really great.

Discover how other companies succeed with contactSPACE

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We're Ready

If you have a challenge for the contactSPACE team we'd love to hear from you— so let's continue the conversation.

Call us on 1300 360 553 or email info@contactspace.com