6 Key Steps for Setting Up an Effective Call Room
If there’s one word that makes people more nervous than “fundraising,” it’s “telefundraising.” But it shouldn’t be that way! Just as the act of fundraising is comprised of many actions (such as connecting, engaging, asking, thanking, and reporting on impact), the act of telefundraising is a multi-faceted approach to building your donor community.
Although some places across the country are beginning to cautiously resume live events and in-person meetings, many are still living their day-to-day lives in relative quarantine and isolation. What we have found, especially since April, is that this has meant people are more likely to pick up the phone when you call.
And we’re not the only ones. On April 17, 2020 The New York Times reported that polling firms, often accustomed to hang-ups and rejection, were getting people on the phone who were much more interested than usual in talking.
So, we dove in headfirst and launched telefundraising campaigns with several of our clients. In every case, the callers—most of whom were staff or community members of the organizations—ended up in meaningful, and sometimes long, conversations with donors about how they were feeling, doing, and coping with the COVID-19 pandemic. Whether or not the phone calls resulted in direct donations, the calls made people feel more connected to the organization and the community.
In several cases, these campaigns were also very financially successful. One organization raised over $60,000 in two months with only three callers— 30% of their individual giving goal for the fiscal year.
Even with schools re-starting and restaurants re-opening, we are still not back to business as usual. The future remains uncertain and many nonprofits may have a difficult road ahead. Now is the time to get on the phone!
Let’s go over the 6 key steps you need to take to set up an effective call room:
Choose the right callers
Provide ongoing training
Back up your campaign with research
Make personal connections
Make an ambitious ask
Follow through and follow up
1 | Choose the Right Callers
The primary goal for your telefundraising campaign should be to form meaningful connections with members of your community, whether those community members are ticket-buyers, donors, or prospects. In order for those meaningful connections to form, it is important that your callers be able to speak fluently about your work.
This does not mean that the callers should necessarily be members of your staff—although certainly a well-placed phone call from an Executive or Development Director to select donors can go a long way. Instead, hire people who are passionate about your mission. If you are an orchestra, perhaps your callers are recently graduated music students. If you are an animal shelter, your callers might be pet owners who have adopted from your organization. This way, the callers’ backgrounds will naturally lead to honest and organic conversations with the people they are calling. Telefundraising gets a bad rap for being too transactional, this element solves that problem by making it relationship-focused first and foremost.
As you go through the process of hiring and onboarding your callers, we find that it is most effective to compensate callers appropriately for their time so that they are motivated to hone their skills on the phone and become more effective at building relationships on behalf of your organization.
2 | Provide Ongoing Training
The training that you provide for your new callers as you’re getting your call room up and running is so important. These early lessons and practice calls are going to help them find their voices and their confidence on the phone. However, an initial round of training is not enough. As with any skill, learning to be an effective caller takes time and practice, with feedback from a coach and peers.
If there is a member of your team who is experienced in telefundraising, that person could serve as your call room’s coach. If not, we recommend bringing in an outside expert who can sit in the room (or a Zoom room) with your callers, listen to their conversations, and provide guidance in real time that can help them have more effective conversations.
In addition to providing strategic advice, the call room’s coach can also provide moral support and act as a cheerleader to keep callers motivated even after long stretches of low response or potentially difficult conversations.
Being in a room (or digital space) together allows the callers to have camaraderie and build community with one another, as they share their experiences making calls and become more effective as a group.
3 | Back Up Your Campaign with Research
In order to be effective at forming meaningful connections on the phone and securing meaningful gifts to your organization, you and your callers need to be prepared with the most (and best) information possible. As you pull your list of leads for your callers, make sure you have compiled the following:
Any relevant history of engagement with your organization. For instance, did this person attend a recent event? Are they a subscriber to your season? Have they previously met with a member of the staff? Do they receive your monthly newsletter?
Any relevant giving history. Have they previously made a gift to your organization? What was the amount and date of the most recent donation? Was it designated for a specific purpose
Any relevant life details. Even though the caller may not specifically refer to these details, it may be useful for them to be aware of things like geographic location or family status.
In cases where the data on a lead is incomplete, the caller should acknowledge that. We often see this with our performing arts clients—sometimes they know when a person purchased a ticket to a performance, but not whether they actually attended. In that case, we recommend leaning into the missing information and asking: I know you bought a ticket to our production of A Christmas Carol. Were you able to make it to the performance?
Finally, if you have full names and residential addresses for your leads, it will go a long way to conduct a wealth screening so that you have an understanding of the person’s capacity to make a gift before even picking up the phone.
4 | Make Personal Connections
Remember, the primary goal for the telefundraising campaign is to form meaningful, personal connections. The actual raising of dollars is one result of those connections being made.
One way for the caller to form a connection with the person they are calling is to ask about their last experience with the organization. For instance: I see you adopted a puppy from our shelter last spring, how is she doing? Or I see you participated in our last walk/run. How did it go for you?
Challenging times like the ones we’re living in sometimes require a greater understanding of how your organization and mission fit into the bigger picture of what’s going on in the world. Even with research on a potential donor, a caller is probably not going to know in advance how one of their leads has been affected by the COVID-19 crisis, the national reckoning with racial injustice, or the current political climate.
When we were running telefundraising campaigns this spring, we advised all our callers to start every conversation by checking in with the person they were calling and asking how they were doing. This created space for the person being called to open up and share a little about where they were in their own lives. In the cases where callers learned that someone had lost a job or was otherwise not in a position to make a gift, they didn’t ask for one. In those cases, the calls were still vitally important because they let community members know that they were cared for.
5 | Make an Ambitious Ask
Don’t be shy!
With your prospect research in hand, you and your callers should already have a sense of who on your list might be able to make a small gift (let’s say $50) and who might be able to make a larger one, perhaps upwards of $1,000. Generally speaking, you should let that background information be your guide. That said, your callers should always be making ambitious asks—that is, make an ask that is slightly larger than what you think the person you’re calling might give.
There are two very scientific reasons why you should be doing this.
First, if the caller has done a good job of forming a meaningful connection, the person is not going to be offended by a higher ask. What’s more, research has proven that anchoring a donation request to a specific amount consistently yields higher individual gifts, on average, than making a request without an amount attached. The higher the anchor, the higher the gift (within reason, of course). For example: Could you make a gift of $200 today? Will result in larger gifts than Could you make a gift of any amount? Or Could you make a gift of $100?
Second, acknowledging that they’re making a big ask allows the caller to talk about goals that they are trying to hit. For instance: We’re trying to raise $30,000 this month and we’re only $5,000 away, could you give $500 to help get us there? The tactic of referring to a goal that is nearly achieved triggers the endowed progress effect and is an effective motivator when you are trying to get someone to take an action that will carry you across the finish line.
6 | Follow Through and Follow Up
It remains true that your callers are more likely to secure a gift if they can get their prospect to commit to making a pledge on the call in the moment. Once upon a time, the recommendation was not to leave a voice mail, but rather to call back (and call back and call back) until the caller could get someone on the phone. More and more, however, we are seeing success with multi-channel follow up.
This is when a caller leaves and voicemail, and follows up with a personal email or text message when possible, and then the donor independently makes a gift on the organization’s website or puts a check in the mail. It is often effective when there is a pre-existing relationship with the person being called, either because they are a prior donor or a participant in the organization’s events.
This is why follow through is so important! When someone on your call list doesn’t pick up the phone, that doesn’t mean they don’t want to hear from you.
Likewise, when someone doesn’t make a commitment to a gift in the moment, that doesn’t mean that they are closing the door on a relationship with your organization. What it means is that they don’t have all of the information they need yet to make the decision that is right for them. Trust us, people will let you know when they don’t want to hear from you anymore.
Once effective tactic to use if someone needs more time to think about making a pledge is for the caller to verbally commit to a time to call the person back, like this: That’s no problem, Susan, how about I try you next Tuesday at 7pm? It goes without saying then that if your caller says they are going to call Susan next Tuesday at 7pm, they need to actually do it. Showing up when you say you are going to show up is just as important to building a meaningful relationship with your prospective donor as having a thoughtful conversation is.
Finally, once your callers have followed through, there needs to be follow up!
If a pledge or gift was made, a member of your staff should reach out to thank the donor. In addition to expressing gratitude, this action moves the organizational relationship with the donor out of your call room and into your administrative offices. As your relationship with this donor evolves and grows, always remember that your goal from the beginning of this process was to form a meaningful connection. Whether you’ve gained a $50 donor for life, or someone who will eventually name a building, you’ve successfully used your call room to engage, and deepen your relationship with, your community.