Fannie Mae: Disaster Relief

The Client

Fannie Mae, the Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA), is a government-sponsored enterprise and a publicly traded company. Founded by Congress during the Great Depression as part of the New Deal, Fannie Mae aims to provide a reliable source of affordable mortgage financing across the country. Fannie Mae continues to support low- and moderate-income mortgage borrowers and renters by enabling greater access to home and rental housing financing in all markets at all times.

The Situation

Along with the devastation caused by the pandemic, wildfires have wreaked havoc across the world in recent years. Fannie Mae sought ways to provide critical wildfire relief information to homeowners and renters living in some of the most impacted states. 

The Challenge

Providing and scaling personalized experiences is already important for keeping customers engaged, but sometimes there’s even more at stake. The organization knew it wanted to get wildfire relief information to affected renters and homeowners, but wasn’t certain how to effectively route this important information to the users who needed it most.

The Solution

During the 2021 wildfire season, set in the middle of an existing pandemic crisis, Fannie Mae began an initial personalization experiment to target impacted customers as quickly as possible; its emergency relief programs were only valuable if those in need could access them. Because of this, Fannie Mae had to quickly rethink its historically traditional approach to connecting with customers, pivoting to a program geotargeting those most impacted by this disaster. This prompted the sudden need for a series of new, extremely personalized content and a completely new way of thinking about connecting with those who need their services immediately.

Working with FFW, the teams decided that the best approach to this pilot project was to display personalized content and calls to action about wildfire relief to seven highly impacted states. The site used geotargeting to identify visitors in specific states most affected by wildfires, showing them wildfire disaster relief info while keeping the default info for all other site visitors. This personalization laid the foundation to more easily spin up new personalized experiences in response to future disasters as they occur. 

Acquia Personalization was a key driver of this initiative, powering the effective personalization strategy that fulfilled the mission of getting the right information to the right people. It was leveraged to implement custom event tracking, configure goals for primary and secondary metrics, and create segments to measure different subset audiences.

The Results

Comparing the behaviors of users that saw the content variations with those who saw the default content showed that personalized content hit the mark:

• Visitors who clicked on the personalized content had a 20% lower bouncerate and showed higher engagement with the loan lookup form and renter's resource finder
• 38% of visitors in targeted states clicked on the personalized content
• Homeowners who saw the personalized content had a higher level of loan lookup activity
• Renters who saw the personalized content had a higher number of resource form submissions
• The targeted personalization group had 2x the appointment requests to the Disaster Help Center

While the project started as an experiment with the objective to provide relief information to homeowners and renters living in states devastated by wildfires raging in 2021, it was such a success that these personalization campaigns became an ongoing response to natural disaster events. During Hurricane Ida, Fannie Mae leveraged the personalization campaign and its components to feature local disaster assistance pages to site visitors from impacted locations.