Helping victims navigate the judiciary process
The Canadian Resource Centre for Victims of Crime (CRCVC) is the leading advocacy organization for individual crime victims and their families. Since it began in 1993, the CRCVC has helped thousands of crime survivors to get the services and resources they need. Much of it’s work is focused on the corrections and parole system, helping victims obtain and understand information on offenders.

Keeping clients informed
The CRCVC offers a variety of resource materials to crime victims in Canada, including a monthly newsletter. The monthly newsletter program, called the National Justice Network Update, is the organization’s primary method of maintaining contact with clients and stakeholders. Content is focused on upcoming and proposed changes to the justice system and the impact on victims’ rights. It also examines issues and changes in several key issues, such as young offenders and conditional release programs.

With a skeleton staff of just two full-time employees and several part-time and student staff, the CRCVC has tight constraints on time and resources. It must deliver help to the over 150 active cases the staff are working on at any given time and manage the resource centre and newsletter program.

Manual newsletter takes time, lacks metrics
The newsletter is an important connection to their clients, but production was taking resources away from helping clients. “Our students or I would research and write the content, and then we laid it out and produced a PDF which was emailed to subscribers manually. The format had a hard limit of four pages, which really constrained our content. We had to send messages in batches to avoid mail server issues. We tracked changes to the list by hand and we didn’t have the time to manage the bounced messages and correct our list. The process took a lot of time and effort” says Heidi Illingworth, the executive director of the CRCVC.

All of this production time resulted in over 20 hours a month of staff effort that took away from time for helping clients. The CRCVC was not getting any metrics on the readership of its newsletter, and therefore didn’t know if the investment was worth it. It received positive feedback from a few clients, but they had no way of measuring the effectiveness of the program.

Making the newsletter manageable
A conversation with Carolyn Gardner, cardcommunications founder, gave the CRCVC insight into how a more automated process could help them. “We had just accepted that what we were doing was what you had to go through to get a newsletter out the door” says Illingworth. “Once we talked to cardcommunications, we knew we had to change.”

Cardcommunications is a leading provider of e-marketing services including e-newsletters, e-surveys and e-promos. It instantly recognized the problems the CRCVC was having and had the solution - a fully managed email marketing program.

Transitioning took just one month. After sending cardcommunications its list and approving a new template, the CRCVC was ready to send out the first new and improved newsletter. For CRCVC,the transition was painless and took very little management time. “We sent them out lists, overcame a couple of small web site issues, and approved a new template and we were done” says Illingworth.

More effective use of time, measurable results
For CRCVC today, the newsletter represents a much smaller investment of time and a clearly documented return on investment. Typically, content research and writing takes five to seven hours, and then CRCVC staff simply sends it to cardcommunications. The newsletter is formatted and two tests are sent so that staff can proofread and correct errors. The newsletter is sent to the subscriber list and bounced messages are automatically updated on the list.

Detailed reporting gives the CRCVC a complete picture of the newsletter program’s effectiveness. With typical open rates upwards of 50 per cent, the CRCVC newsletter exceeds industry standards.

For the CRCVC, the new newsletter provides newfound time and measurable results. “Automating our newsletter with cardcommunications could not have been easier. We have nothing but good things to say. In the time it used to take to manually produce the newsletter we can now help more clients and take on new projects” says Illingworth.