Today’s post is by Michael Nyman, of Impact Dialing. I don’t know about you, but when I hear the word phone-a-thon…well, I just sort of shrink inside, even though I’ve run successful phone-a-thons myself! Here’s Michael’s story of why Phone-a-thons are worth your time.
People talk to each other – it’s how we’ve interacted with each other for millions of years, and, no matter how popular Facebook gets, spoken word will always be the most personal way to communicate. While nothing beats a face-to-face conversation, in a society where we almost as often interact with people thousands of miles away as we do our neighbors, the phone and all of its online and mobile variations are still the most effective way to for non-profits to get their message out.
Unfortunately, telemarketing has become a dirty word, thanks to the unscrupulous practices of a few bad apples who have given a bad name to what should be our best way to communicate. Before telemarketing became heavily regulated in 2003, the rapidly plummeting cost of making phone calls meant that telemarketers had little reason *not* to make unsolicited calls, just as we see with spam email today. But as regulations have tightened on telemarketing, and as people increasingly switch to heavily-regulated cell phones, phone fundraising is a more attractive proposition than ever.
I started a phone fundraising program at Equality California, a non-profit organization that had, at the time, over 600,000 members. The previous summer, we had acquired 150,000 new donors through a street canvass program, but these donors weren’t making follow-up donations to our email or direct mail appeals. I talked to another non-profit that was running a large street canvass operation, and they told me that they had been having good success with telefundraising for years. They passed along the names of a few firms they used, and I called a couple up and arranged for a trial campaign.
The campaign went really well – close to a quarter of the people we called pledged to donate. However, many of the pledges said requested to be mailed an envelope with which to donate by check, and this is where we really botched the program. We did a terrible job of mailing out the envelopes in a timely manner, and a relatively low percentage of them were returned. We still raised quite a bit of money, but not as much as we had hoped. After a couple months of improving our internal processes, we were bringing in donations hand over fist. It was the most successful low-dollar program we had ever run outside of an election!
We also started a second program, to call people who had never donated before and try to turn them into donors. This campaign performed far beyond our expectations. We hadn’t expected much from it – these members had never given before, so why would they start giving now? But when we got them on the phone, almost 20% decided to donate. The success of this program really speaks to the power of the phone to form a connection with your supporters and engage them in new ways.
One of the big criticisms of phone fundraising is that it creates “donor fatigue” – that people may give the first couple times they’re called, because they feel pressured to do so, but that after a while, they resent the phone calls and stop giving. This criticism is especially leveled at outsourced firms that call on behalf of a non-profit – some people say they’re just trying to make money off of the current campaign, so they don’t take the long-term view of cultivating donors. From my conversations, it seems like there is a very wide quality of telefundraising firms, and that some focus more on quality and long-term relationships, and some focus more on bringing money in the door immediately.
But I never got a chance to find out at Equality California, because not too long after I left the organization, they brought their phone fundraising program in-house and hired their own staff to make the calls. The believed that their own callers would be more invested in their cause and so more likely to personally want to do well, and that they could more closely supervise the operation to make sure the calls were going how they wanted them to. The results were amazing: they doubled the amount of money they made per member contacted. The program came with its own set of headaches, including hiring and managing employees, running their dialing system, fielding calls from members who no longer wanted to be contacted, and so on. But the fundraising results made the extra work worth it.
Here are my Top Three Tips for running a Phone-a-Thon, based on our runaway success at Equality California:
Even if you’ve only got a few hundred people on your list, you should still be calling them. Have a development associate or similar staff member call through the list a couple times a year. Don’t give the job to interns or volunteers (unless you feel very confident in them); it takes a lot of practice to get good at calling for money.
You Should be Listening. Ask a lot of questions. Find out what’s on the person’s mind.
Asking for specific amounts. Last time you donated $100. It’s been 12 months since you’ve given, and we’ve got this important initiative going on right now, and could you give $120? And if they say no, ask for another specific amount after that, say, okay, can you do $100 instead? Give a reason to give that amount. For example: “$100 can pay for lunch for 100 kids in ethiopia to eat at school. It can feed a whole school.”
If you’ve got a larger list and don’t have the capacity to run a program in-house, make sure that you find a firm you’re comfortable working with. Spend a lot of time asking other non-profits for their experience, and don’t be afraid to ask for a small, trial campaign. If you can, go on-site with at the firm’s call center while they’re calling.
If you have the capacity to do so, run an in-house program. You’ll need to find someone with experience, since running a call center is not easy to do. It will be a lot of work, but done right, you can run a very high-quality program and raise much more money than outsourcing.
Michael Kaiser-Nyman is the CEO and founder of Impact Dialing, an easy to use power dialer and hosted predictive dialer. Non-profits use Impact Dialing to help them raise money, contact voters, and communicate with their members.
If you’d like to learn more about how to fundraise with volunteers, I have a webinar coming up on this very thing.