Data Services
Blog & News Centre.

Recently, representatives from our DCA Data Services team packed off to the Asia Pacific Loyalty Conference 2024. We were delighted by the opportunity to catch up with our friends and industry colleagues and to get a feel for the current challenges and recent triumphs in the loyalty sector.

DCA is excited to announce a strategic reseller partnership with Validity, a global leader in data quality and email marketing success solutions. Through this partnership, DCA will now offer Validity’s renowned DemandTools solution to its extensive network of customers.

Modern businesses collect a lot of data. In the internet era, every transaction, visit, delivery, page view, click, and share is registered as a new data point. This is extremely useful, because that information can tell you a lot about how your business is performing and what strategies might improve that performance. But collecting a lot of data is no guarantee of data quality. And that’s where data cleansing comes in.

What’s data democratisation? Data democratisation has become a popular industry phrase over the past couple of years. But what does “data democratisation” mean? “Democratisation” is the act of making something accessible to everyone. A company’s data assets, of course, are a resource that shouldn’t always be freely accessed by everyone, because it can be sensitive.

What is data privacy and why is it important? To get to the root of the matter, let’s start at the beginning: what’s privacy? At its most fundamental, “privacy” refers to the idea that we can restrict access to information about ourselves as individuals.

With the recent release of GPT-4o from OpenAI, there’s never been a better time for us to dip our toes into the technologies underpinning our newest and most advanced generative AIs. Artificial Intelligence (AI), as we currently use the term, broadly refers to manmade constructs that can complete tasks that would usually require human reasoning.

At the conclusion of another successful FIA Conference, we have an opportunity to reflect upon the experience. The theme for the conference was “where passion meets purpose.” From the opening plenary session on, this year’s conference emphasised the vital role that data has to play in fundraising—now, and in the future.

At the conclusion of another successful FIA Conference, we have an opportunity to reflect upon the experience. The theme for the conference was “where passion meets purpose.” From the opening plenary session on, this year’s conference emphasised the vital role that data has to play in fundraising—now, and in the future.

The DCA team recently packed ourselves off to Sydney for the Salesforce World Tour. The energy at the event was off the charts and its scale was massive: it was the biggest World Tour yet, taking up five floors of the Sydney ICC and attracting ten thousand attendees.

If there exists a business problem, you can be pretty sure someone has created a technology solution to fix it. We know that sales teams alone use an average of 10 different tools to close deals, and most of those professionals feel overwhelmed. Large organisations in particular often find themselves juggling a confusing melange of…

Australia’s banking and finance sector has seen some turbulence in the last several years. Although it might outwardly appear that shifts in the competition landscape are disparate and unrelated, they do all have one thing in common: organisations looking to get ahead are going to need excellent data strategies. Royal Commission and reporting The 2019…

With inflation at a thirty-year high, past behaviour is no longer a sufficient predictor of borrower serviceability. Our current macroeconomic climate of higher interest and inflation isn’t strictly novel. But it is something we haven’t seen in Australia for many years. The Reserve Bank of Australia indicates that inflation this year has attained a thirty…

Years on from the Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry and its “fee for no service” scandal, banks are still at risk of charging deceased people’s accounts fees for products they’re not using. ASIC was still taking banks to federal court about this issue just last year. It seems…

Australia’s financial system needs strong data governance to buttress against cybersecurity threats It has escaped nobody’s notice that banking—for businesses as well as individuals—is increasingly digital. Commentators have been quick to point out that most transactions have been digital long time. The use of cash was declining in Australia, even before the pandemic arrived and…

The construction industry is a fraught place to operate right now and researching your business relationships has never been so critical. Historically, the industry has been subject to price volatility and supply chain problems, but recent stressors have stretched it to its limits. Global responses to the COVID-19 pandemic caused delays in production, skilled labour…

Why Research is Critical to Your Account-Based Marketing Strategy What is account-based marketing? A traditional lead generation funnel runs from the broadest part of the funnel—brand awareness—to the narrowest—converted customers. This is a strategy that diffuses your company’s resources across a broad array of potential customers, and it might use tactics like direct or electronic…

Are you exposing your supply chain to risk and missed opportunities by not investigating alternatives to ANZSIC? The ANZSIC is by nature and intention the most general tool for business and economic statistics. Businesses that engage in a wide range of activities will nevertheless be described only by their predominant activity. For procurement professionals, a…

“What do you need, and if you don’t have what you need, how can you get there?” Artificial intelligence is driving change across all aspects of our lives, it’s been all the buzz long before the emergence of GPT. Though, the idea of using ‘AI’-driven tools in our jobs as fundraisers still sounds a bit…

Macroeconomic conditions impact your investments—so due diligence is more important than ever In the present moment in Australia, headline inflation is just coming down from a height that’s not been seen since the 1990s. Unsurprisingly, the blunt instrument of monetary policy has been whipped out and employed in hopes of taming it, so the cash…

The Australian Securities Exchange reports that almost 9 million Australian adults hold investments outside their home and superannuation. And yet, Australia’s financial literacy is declining. The HILDA survey measures financial literacy as part of its ‘household wellbeing’ category. In 2020, when the last financial literacy questionnaire was completed, we learnt had been a significant decline…

Supplier research 101: why should we research our suppliers? In 2022, Australian supermarkets were famously (or perhaps infamously) selling iceberg lettuce for over $10 a head because of sweeping problems in the supply chain caused by floods, war and the pandemic. Just like the supermarkets rapidly running out of fresh green veggies, if one element…

Positive vibes only: reduce your reliance on complex tools and leverage your loyalty data to lift your customer experience Over the past few years we’ve seen a move to really prioritise customer experience. In 2021, customer service leaders reported that the expectations of customers were at an all-time high and that, mostly, they didn’t have…

Database Consultants Australia (DCA) are proud to announce our partnership with the Fundraising Institute of Australia.

Database Consultants Australia (DCA) are proud to announce our partnership with the Fundraising Institute of Australia.

Database Consultants Australia (DCA) are proud to announce our partnership with the Fundraising Institute of Australia.

Database Consultants Australia (DCA) are proud to announce our partnership with the Fundraising Institute of Australia.

When we interact with other people and organisations in the world, we reveal information about ourselves. This could be our names, what we look like, where we’re from, or other, more specific information. This is our personally identifiable information. The idea of privacy concerns all aspects of the collection, storage, dissemination and use of that information.

When we interact with other people and organisations in the world, we reveal information about ourselves. This could be our names, what we look like, where we’re from, or other, more specific information. This is our personally identifiable information. The idea of privacy concerns all aspects of the collection, storage, dissemination and use of that information.

Data enrichment, sometimes called data enhancement, means adding relevant information to your data to give it more context – and make it more valuable. This might mean getting complex demographic information to develop more targeted messaging….

Data migration means moving data permanently from one storage system to a different one. There are varied reasons for undertaking a data migration, from the obsolescence of older systems to novel marketing tools offered by a newer one that empowers a marketing strategy.

Data verification is the process of checking data against an additional, authoritative data set to make sure the information is accurate. Often, data verification is used to check the accuracy of data before it informs any decisions or anything is spent acting on it.

Augmented intelligence is an AI perspective that centres humans and focuses on the enhancing and assistive role that technology can play. In short, rather than replacing humans in workplace environments, augmented intelligence is AI that makes us better at what we do.

For small businesses, automation may have a lot to offer, but it can also appear frustratingly complex and inaccessible. Perhaps there seems to be a lot to learn, and many convoluted systems to put in place or services to purchase before anything can really be achieved.

Salesforce.org’s Unite Partner Summit is now over, and in the settling dust we have the opportunity to reflect on the tremendous wealth of information shared there—and how our new knowledge can be merged into the work we do day-to-day.

Customer profiling, also called consumer profiling (or donor profiling in the non-profit space), is the process of collecting and analysing data to create personas.

A recent news article over at the ABC caught our eye. It details how Volunteering WA employed a marketing agency to “kickstart the sector’s makeover” and successfully attract new blood from a younger generation

We store personal data for diverse purposes: health services store patient information, retailers store past purchases and buyer preferences, charitable organisations store information about past donations. In some cases, organisations are required to hold onto this information for tax or other compliance purposes.

A single customer view (also referred to sometimes as a 360 customer view) is the practice of collecting all requisite information across separate sources and aggregating it into one single, comprehensive record for each customer.

DCA recently partnered with Salesforce.org to bring you the Salesforce.org Data Migration Best Practices Webinar. In it, Hanzel Nillo, Head of Customer Engagement and Partnerships for Data Services, got together with the Salesforce Customer Success Team to talk through every step of a data migration project.

Customer experience’ has been an industry watchword for years – and with good reason. Customers want, and now expect, a strong customer experience every time they engage with a brand.

Our data-driven fundraising experts have identified these 5 key types of donors who you need to consider during your seasonal appeal

DCA’s non-profit experts share 10 things you can do to improve your Christmas appeal

Database Consultants Australia are proud to announce that our Data Services team are a Nonprofit International Consulting Partner for Salesforce.org.

This year, when many non-profit organisations are reeling from the tangled social and financial effects of the pandemic and being forced to do more with less, the key to Christmas appeal success will be reducing waste and improving return on investment

Superannuation regulations have changed a lot over the past ten years. Those changes are sweeping and ongoing, so the industry has experienced pressures it never had to account for before.

Australia is currently undertaking the Review of the Privacy Act 1988 in order to update our privacy legislation for the complexity of the modern data and privacy landscape.

The Review of the Privacy Act 1988 is the Australian Government’s response to the recommendations made following the ACCC’s Digital Platforms Inquiry. The Inquiry’s final report was published in July 2019 and told us what we, by and large, already suspected

In a world where businesses need to compete for every consumer dollar in uncertain times, driving customer loyalty is critical. The lifeblood in your business is the marketing data that flows from many sources and has the power to drive revenue, increase loyalty and drive customer satisfaction.

Commentators predicted going in that 2020 would be a year of emerging crises globally, but few of us here in Australia suspected that we would lack even the luxury of taking each new crisis one at a time

I suspect we all felt that first rush of COVID-19 related emails in our inboxes.
Every company we had ever interacted with (and some we probably did not even remember), all raced to assure us that they were responding to the pandemic appropriately.

Customer service is a challenging job on any day, but the challenges have only increased during the COVID-19 pandemic.

DCA has achieved PCI-DSS certification for the 8th consecutive year. Our accreditation includes Service Provider at the highest level (Level 1) as well as Merchant accreditation.

Automation is a powerful and flexible tool for marketers. Most companies currently use some form of marketing automation in their digital marketing campaigns. But its not a “set and forget” system.

Fast, effective decision making relies heavily on your ability to understand and analyse your data. With nearly three decades’ experience, DCA can expertly assist your organisation to develop a business intelligence solution designed to maximise your growth.

So much marketing effort goes into generating inbound leads for sales to follow up. Hours of content planning, events, digital marketing, events (did we mention events?), and invariably the business cards, names and leads are sent to sales to follow up.

It’s been some time now since I returned from Salesforce’s 17th Dreamforce conference. That time has given me the opportunity to reflect on my experiences there, and how they fit into the broader context of the work I do day-to-day in my role as Isuzu Australia’s Customer Care Manager.

As you’re no doubt aware, any solid event strategy needs your organisation to think about your goals and how you’ll define success before getting started with an event.

We’ve all been there: hands deep in marinade and we remember that we have to make a dinner reservation for tomorrow night or else there will be trouble with a capital T. These days, Australian consumers are increasingly comfortable saying “OK Google”, or “Hey Alexa” or “Siri” in order to find the restaurant, make the call and avoid Trouble.

When we envision the future of human technology interaction, it promises automation, artificial intelligence that can independently process, reason and create in the same capacity as the human brain.

Account Based Marketing (ABM) is a concept in Marketing that has been around for a long time, but like many trends in the market interest is heating up, especially in large IT organisations.

Every CMO faces the important and critical task of choosing the right marketing tools in an environment that includes digital marketing, big data, and the need for personalised and interactive conversations with customers.

It’s an age-old discussion that businesses around Australia grapple with daily: when revenue figures are up, is it the marketing team who generates the leads or the sales team who converted the leads who should claim the return on investment?

Modern businesses collect a lot of data. In the internet era, every transaction, visit, delivery, page view, click, and share is registered as a new data point. This is extremely useful, because that information can tell you a lot about how your business is performing and what strategies might improve that performance. But collecting a lot of data is no guarantee of data quality. And that’s where data cleansing comes in.