Online & Offline Strategies and Database Recommendations for SAS Canada Community

Copyright © 2008, SAS Institute Inc. All rights reserved.
Enhance Engagement of
SAS Canada Community
Created by GBC Team

Agenda
 Executive Summary
 Current Situation
 Objective, Strategies and Tactics
 Conclusions
 Appendices

Executive Summary
• This report offers some recommendations for encouraging more
SAS users to participate more often in SAS events.
• Analysis is shown in Appendices. This plan focuses more on
some strategies that SAS can begin executing today as well as
a recommendation on the data that should be collected in the
future and how to leverage it once the new database becomes
available.

Executive Summary (continued)
Specifically, we recommend:
• Increasing number of event types with high attendance rate
• Modifying event types with low attendance rate
• Improving relevant data to better understand the relationship between
attendee profiles and event attributes for better targeting and communication
• Reducing user effort required for on line registration
• Encouraging external social communities to migrate to the SAS community
• Making it easier for users to connect with groups/networks with shared
interest
• Testing alternative communication techniques to improve attendance

Current Situation
 SAS Canada believes that greater involvement amongst
users generates higher opportunities to up-sell or cross-
sell their products and services.
 SAS Canada Community provides online and offline
platforms for the users of SAS products to interact with
each other and share their knowledge.
 The database shows that a relatively small number of
users (986 out of 5470 total users) have been taking
advantage of SAS Canada Community’s offerings (1540
attended counts since 2010).
 We built marketing strategies with the goal to increase
the attended counts effectively and efficiently.

Issue/Opportunity Implication
• Insufficient or unavailable data which
limits optimal understanding of SAS
users
• Better customer understanding makes it
easier to engage customers with
matters that are most relevant to them.
• Most popular events (e.g. SAS User
Group) have low attendance rates.
Events with high attendance rates are
less popular
• Need to understand the event attributes
and communication approaches that
impact popularity and attendance rates
• Limited connection between SAS online
community and external
groups/networks such as forums (e.g.
Talk Stats*)
• SAS can strengthen the appeal of its
online community by convincing
external groups to migrate to the SAS
community
*www.talkstats.com
*www.talkstats.com/forumdisplay.php/16-SAS

Objective 1: Attendance
Increase total attendance counts by 10%

Strategy 1
Create additional events by identifying and building on the
formula used for event types that have high attendance rate*
Course, External Event, SAS Talks, SAS Live Event, On-Demand SAS Webcast, Relationship
Marketing/Corporate Hospitality, SAS Webinar, Contact Request (See Appendix for analysis)
Tactics
1. Identify event elements (topic, venue, speaker, location, month of the year,
etc.) that contributed to high attendance rate and create additional events
Example: Analyze how distance to event, commute time, cost of transportation,
month of the year and industry affect participation
2. Identify profile of attendees (industry, province, frequency of attendance,
month of the year) at events with high attendance rate
3. For profiles with low attendance, create relevant events based on event
elements identified in #1
4. For profiles with high attendance, assess opportunity to offer them more
frequently or on a regional basis.
*Attendance rate defined as attendance counts divided by total including attended users and
non-attended users

Strategy 2
Test other communication channels , creative
approaches, and targeting techniques to improve
attendance for popular* events with low %
participation (See Appendix for analysis)
Tactics
1.Target decision makers with more intrusive direct marketing
techniques such as direct mail and phone
2.Target and tailor promotional messages according to user profile
and interests (when new database is available,)
3.Test the impact of creating a micro-site and promoting on social
media (e.g. – SAS Community, etc) and SAS home page
*Popularity defined as absolute number of attendees

Objective 2: Database
Enhance data capture and data
quality to better target and tailor
communication and services

Information/Fields to be Captured
User • Industry
• Pre-defined and required Job Function Category
• City of user location (not company headquarter)
• Pre-defined Area of Interest
• Status for a particular event (see note below)
Event • Online or Offline (2 categories)
• City where an offline event occurs
• Event type
• Month of the year when the event occurs
Note For offline events Attended Registered Declined No Response
For online events Downloaded Registered Declined No Response

Tactics
 Facilitate online registration by creating pre-
populated registration form for events that only
require that user update any personal information
that has changed
 Target promotion of events according to user profile
Example:
- Segment users by industry and target financial service and
telecommunication industries
- Segment users by job function; test and target promotion
according to job functions
- Analyze association between user profile and event profile

Objective 3: Virtual Platform
Increase usage of SAS Canada online Community
Strategy: Minimize registration and search effort
Tactics:
 Automatically enroll SAS users once they register for a product on the server
 Retrieve personal usage preferences by sharing personal email
 Create micro-site containing all events for users to search by event type, location,
date, industry and solution; users may register immediately
Strategy: Promote community discussions of greatest interest
Tactics:
 Profile links to popular discussion on SAS home page
 Develop weekly emails highlighting the latest blogs, articles and news
Strategy: Encourage owners of most popular discussion communities outside SAS
Community to join the SAS community
Tactics:
 Building relationships with online forums by reaching out and starting to participate in
their discussions
 Offer to maintain discussion forum “brand name” and to promote on SAS site

 Lots of opportunity to increase attendance and user involvement by
• Leveraging the “formula of high % attendance events to create
other events
• Finding more effective ways of promoting events with low %
participation but a relatively high number of attendees
 Improved data capture and data quality will enhance SAS’ ability to
target and tailor communication as well as support continuous
improvement efforts to strengthen the appeal of SAS events
 Exploration of other forms of promoting events can help identify
better ways of breaking through cluttered email in-baskets of users.
Vehicles like direct mail, if used creatively, can influence key
decision makes to support event attendance by staff.

SWOT Analysis Opportunities
High quality of crucial SAS events increase
users’ interests and improve attendance rate
Comprehensive and accurate data deepens
understanding of users and improves
customization
Systematic process creates better user
experience
Relationships with other groups and networks
provide users with easy and quicker access to
information
Better technology improves the process of
communication
Network and knowledge sharing platforms
accommodate increasing needs for business
analytics
Threats
Clear presentation of upcoming events on SAP
website, making it easy for users to search
Large SAP User Group with 130,000 members
Easy and quicker registration process of SPSS
and Cognos
External LinkedIn groups and SAS networks not
communicating with SAS Canada Community
Strength
Strong representation of financial industry in the
community
Comprehensive online community network
Active participation in Social Media Communities,
such as LinkedIn groups.
Strong loyalty and close relationship.
Weakness
Low attendance rate of some crusual SAS events
such as SAS User Group
Low number of members in online network owned
by SAS Canada Community
Lack of organization and management of different
groups and networks related to SAS Canada

Data Received
Current Status: attended, registered, invited, no response, no show, cancelled, declined wait
listed, no status

Data Cleansing
The processes of cleansing and modeling included:
− Removal of duplicates
− Correcting Start Date and End Dates that were in the wrong
position, sometimes the start date was after the end date
− Correcting of date cells that were not in the appropriate date
format
− Filtering 26 most important events
− Merge of tables in one master table to optimize the analysis
process

Table Reconstruction
• Exclude high-level decision makers (job functions of C-level, directors,
VP) and non-users
• Include only users of relevant and unknown job functions
(administrative, consultant, educator, manager, medical, sales, student
and technical)
•Current_Status (9 categories, assuming mutually exclusive) in
Event_Contacts table is further categorized into
Attended, Not Attended, Other, where:
Attended attended
Not Attended registered, invited, no response, no show, cancelled, declined
Other wait listed, no status (majority)

Event Types with High % No Status – Removed for Attendance Rate Analyses
% No Status = No Status / Total

Assessing Popularity and % Attendance
Table goes here
Total = Attended + Not Attended
Attendance Rate = Attended / Total
Other: Waitlisted, No Status (majority)
Attended + Not Attended + Other = Number of Contacts

Largest Industries: Financial Service & Telecommunication

Largest Financial Industry Segment: Commercial Banks

Largest Telecommunication Segments: Network Equipment and Telco Service

Different Geographical Distribution for Financial and Telecom Industries
Telecommunication : British Columbia
Financial Service: Nova Scotia
Telecommunication Financial Service

Energy Industry: Alberta and New Brunswick

Manufacturing Industry: Quebec

Public Sector Industry: Quebec & Ontario

Retail Industry: Ontario, Saskatchewan, Quebec

Services Industry: Ontario, Quebec, Alberta

Large Amount of Unknown Job Function Data
Job Function Count of CONTACT_ID Percentage
Administrative 18 0.21%
Consultant 127 1.45%
Educator/Professor 5 0.06%
Manager 1140 13.01%
Medical/Healthcare 24 0.27%
Sales 9 0.10%
Student 5 0.06%
Technical 1030 11.75%
Unknown 6407 73.10%
Total 8765 100.00%

Predicting Attended Counts by Number of Contacts
With nearly 4500
contacts, less than 600
attend

12.8% Attendance Rate for All (22) Target Event Types

Predicting Attended Counts of Event Types with High Attendance Rate
Among more than 300
users, more than
60 attended

Achieve 20 % Attendance Rate Using Selected (8) Event Types with High Attendance Rate

Online & Offline Strategies and Database Recommendations for SAS Canada Community

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