Accepting the need for Voice to Voice

“Good evening Mrs Smith, my name is Adam and I’m calling you this evening on behalf of ……”

Use the words ‘telephone fundraising’ in front of a charity fundraising manager or director and you are likely to get a variety of reactions:

‘We tried that once and it didn’t work’
‘Our Trustees don’t like it’
‘Our members don’t like it’
‘What about the Telephone Preference Service (TPS)?’
‘We are worried about the Data Protection Act (DPA)’
‘We do it all the time and achieve great results’

With the exception of the last comment, what most of them are saying is that they do not fully understand how to make telephone fundraising work for them.

This may often be a result of internal issues, unclear lines of communication, a fear of intruding in someone’s areas of responsibility, possibly a result of poor leadership.

They may also have problems with their internal systems and infrastructure and in particular their databases. Experience shows that many databases are poorly constructed, have not been cleaned for sometime and cannot be interrogated to get any worthwhile information out of them. It is not uncommon for an organisation to have several databases in different formats and in different departments. There can be no co-ordination between them.

All these potential issues can hold back the organisation from doing what it should.

They have resources they cannot effectively utilise, and may neither realise they exist nor how to use them.

“To accomplish great things, we must dream as well as act”
Anatole France

There is no sound argument against telephone fundraising.

However, even when the fundraising manager is keen on the concept, and can put forward a convincing strategy both in terms of numbers and outcomes, it is not the end of the story.

They generally need to gain Board and / or Trustee approval. And this is where a sound strategy sometimes runs aground.

There may be one or two people at this level with a deep-seated apprehension about the telephone option. They probably do not even have a valid argument to support them.

It is also quite common for the TPS or DPA (as mentioned earlier) to be raised.

As soon as the use of the charity’s data is mentioned the panic button is hit! There is always the fear that someone will take the charity to court over illegal use of data – and all the bad publicity that would entail.

It must be said that most of the prosecutions that make the press tend to be for organisations that failed to register that they hold data. There seem to be few cases where organisations have been taken to task for the way they handle that data. Unless of course you are the MOD or some similar organisation and lose thousands of confidential records on a memory stick or laptop!

The reality of it is that in the vast majority of cases there is nothing preventing the judicious use of their data. In fact charities are often failing to use most efficiently the assets they have at their disposal.

Let us take an example. Charity A has a lapsed donor database of over 40,000 records. This is so-called ‘warm’ data that you would pay dearly for in the open market. As yet they had no plans to revisit them.

This is a serious lost opportunity.

Remember, it costs 10 times as much to recruit a new donor than it does to retain an existing one (Building Donor Loyalty by Adrian Sargeant and Elaine Jay).

Let us try a telephone campaign to those 40,000 records once they have been cleaned.

If we err on the side of caution and achieve only 30% penetration - 12,000 of the 40,000 successfully contacted by telephone. Then a cautious 30% reactivated (3600 agreeing to a monthly SO or DD).

Even with a monthly donation of only £5 this would generate an additional £18,000 per month, resulting in £216,000 over the course of 12 months, and a projection of £648,000 over three years.

An additional £216,000 per annum generated from a resource that the charity is otherwise not utilising. And these figures are based upon very conservative outcomes.

OK, there are costs involved, but these are miniscule when the overall picture is viewed.

At a time when the ‘credit crunch’ is upon us, due diligence must be the byword and it should be considered criminal in these difficult and challenging times to be underutilising resources that can produce such a dramatic impact.

Rather than holding the telephone fundraising sector at arms length charities should really be embracing them. Especially in the current climate when many major charities are reducing their workforce to keep overheads down.

Professional call centres that work predominantly with the charity sector are best placed to provide them with a service to welcome new donors, upgrade or convert existing donors, and to reactivate lapsed donors as we have seen above. Gift Aid is another area where charities may have ‘lost’ money sitting there waiting to be claimed.

The call centre can also be used to co-ordinate the payments to the charity – even better if they use paperless direct debit. They know from the phone call who has pledged and can monitor who fulfils their pledge and who does not.

And that brings me nicely to another aspect, fulfilment. Yet another area that the call centre can often assist with, thus keeping down the burden on the charity’s own staff and freeing them up to do more productive work for the charity.

The Art of Telephone Fundraising

Let’s change tack here slightly and consider the call centres themselves and the motivation behind their staff.

Telephone Fundraising or ‘voice to voice’ is not a new concept. Despite what has been said before, most charities will have flirted with the idea of running a campaign aimed at recruiting new donors, upgrading those they already have, or simply keeping their existing donors, through the use of the telephone.

However ‘voice to voice’ is now an integral part of the ‘donor cycle’ rather than being seen simply as an effective tool to manage the relationships charities have with their donors.

The face-to-face approach has been regarded as successful for many charities over the years. But they do seem to be of the opinion that face-to-face creates a point of contact that the donor will remember and identify with when they sign up.

So does voice to voice!

One thing that stands out in the ‘voice to voice’ side of things has to be the commitment of the fundraisers themselves – the call centre agents. Charity representatives are often taken aback at how enthusiastic and knowledgeable these telephone fundraisers are when they meet them. Like many fundraisers who have chosen to work in other parts of the sector these individuals have also chosen to work in the third sector.

The only difference being that they have chosen to do so with a headset on.

To regard them simply as call centre workers does them a disservice. For it takes a special breed of individual to absorb as much information as they can about the charity they currently represent, and yet be so adaptable.

In fact ‘represent’ is a key word, because whilst they are calling for a particular charity they do in fact represent that charity.

They are the voice of that charity!

Other methods of fundraising will have campaigns that last weeks at a time with fundraisers campaigning for one charity throughout.

‘Voice to voice’ may require a fundraiser to switch campaigns and represent a number of charities at the drop of a hat. “Ah my charity will not get the attention is deserves”, I hear you scream.

Let’s think about this for a minute. Telephone fundraisers are not a superior breed, however, they do have to be at the top of their game, all of the time. They have to think on their feet, adapt their personality for each call and also keep in mind that they are representing whatever charity it may be at that point in time.

Developments within charities take place every second of every day. Every time a significant development materialises the telephone agent is instantly updated, something that cannot effectively be done with field forces for example. And that’s just the start…

A few Facts and figures

It is worth remembering that telephone fundraising is a very small part of the overall call centre industry sector.

Recent research points to some 15 million people worldwide being involved in customer interaction, call / contact / CRM centre activity. This is split up in to a number of sub-sectors. One of these is charity fundraising but there are also others worthy of a mention here:

• Home Agent/Remote Agents - believed to be one of the fastest growing areas of the contact centre industry today, with by some counts 500,000 home agents in the US alone.

Also regarded as a very ‘green’ option as the drive to work every day is eliminated, reducing the carbon footprint both of the individual and the employing organisation.

Home agents are becoming more and more an integral part of the scene but there has to be infrastructure in place in the organisation to be able to manage this process, together with an underpinning ethos of trust.

• Banking, Insurance, & Financial Services - we have probably all experienced these services at one time or another and have our own experiences to share! Originally UK based, subsequently sourced offshore, and more recently coming back to UK. It will be interesting to see how the ‘credit crunch’ will affect this sector.

• Telecommunications - the telecommunications industry understandably is a heavy user of the telephone.

• Credit and Collections - the credit and collection industry has become significant over recent years and with the ‘credit crunch’ will doubtless continue to flourish

• Sales Support - contact centre personnel build databases, qualify prospects, book appointments and conduct assorted other sales support functions. This then develops further in to Customer Care and Support.

In these difficult times charities cannot afford to miss out on any fundraising concept. They must revisit strategies of the past as their relevance may well have come back in to fashion.

Charities are faced now with a plethora of options:

Face-to-face
Email
Internet
Facebook
Myspace
Twitter
YouTube
Direct mail
SMS

And of course voice to voice telephone fundraising.

The fundraising manager must consider every option available and have a sound reason for dismissing any one of them

Dismiss any at your peril!

They all have their part to play in an integrated fundraising strategy.

Let me finish with one of my favourite quotes from Seth Godin which I feel is very relevant here:
"Persistence isn't using the same tactics over and over. That's just annoying.

Persistence is having the same goal over and over."

(Taken from an article published in the Late Autumn 2008 edition of Charities Management magazine)