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28 Keys for Successful Fundraising Phonathons
 

 "MAXIMUM Generosity" -  21st Century Biblical Generosity Resources and Training ( www.kluth.org )

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28 Keys for Successful Phonathons

Proven tips to help you raise funds through the phone by phonathon and fundraising expert Christin Graham

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MAXIMUM Generosity
Brian Kluth
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Colo Springs, CO 80919
Cell: 719-930-4000   Email: bk@kluth.org               Web: www.kluth.org

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There are at least three ways for a ministry to raise money using the telephone. The first, never to be forgotten, is a personal call by a ministry leader, asking for a gift. While face-to-face meetings are most effective, the phone, when used by a friend, is a next best step.

Your choices for fundraising with the telephone include personal calls, phonathons,  and use of outside telemarketing firms. Personal calls really fall within the realm of personal solicitation, though it is important always to recognize that face-to-face solicitation is always preferable.

Outside of a personal call, the simplest, and least expensive, is the phonathon. In a phonathon, you gather your volunteers together at one site with many telephones and make calls to many of your donors or potential donors asking for their contributions. These can be new donors, renewing donors, lapsed donors, or donors at a particular dollar level. You can select the target group, but make sure it is a good match with staff or your phone volunteers.

In telemarketing, you hire an outside firm to do the same thing. You provide them with prospects’ names and phone numbers, and their paid staff people telephone your prospects and ask them to give a gift to your annual operations, scholarship fund, or building project.

When the telephone was first used for fundraising purposes, it was highly effective, in no small part because of its surprise value. People were pleased to hear from their friends who called on behalf of an organization. Past participants, former board members, parents of past participants or ministry recipients, are pleased to hear from a ministry they know about and exchange a little bit of news and be asked for a gift at the same time. However, fundraising by telephone has become big business and now almost all of us are annoyed to pick up the phone in the evening and hear another solicitation.

There are ways that you can still use the telephone in a highly effective manner, but you must plan carefully and you must be highly sensitive to your donor’s wishes. Also, there are certain kinds of fundraising that will be more effective by phone than others.

You will probably get your highest response rate in telephone solicitation by pairing callers and donors with close relationships. A staff member, calling someone he hasn’t seen in 5 years, has a very good chance of receiving a pledge or a gift over the phone. People who know each other well and who feel a sense of kindness toward each other will treat each other well on the phone and will take a request for funds seriously.

If you are “cold calling,” which means calling people you do not know and who do not have a tight relationship with your ministry, you will receive a smaller percentage of pledges. However, you may be able to make up for this by volume. If you can call two hundred in a night, even if you only get 50 new donors, you’ll be doing very well. Those 50 people may be people you could never have reached in any other way. However, if you were using volunteer callers, they might be very discouraged by these numbers and lose willingness to volunteer again later.

This is where telemarketing comes in. Businesses have made a very good business out of cold calling. Paid phoners do not mind the turn-downs that they receive. They simply treat it as a job and go on to the next phone call. So if you want to develop a core of new donors through cold calling, perhaps you should use paid, well-trained phoners. If you want to get a high percentage yield on your calls, and your prospects include people closely related to your camp, use staff and volunteers.

Most groups that have little or no experience with telephone fundraising should approach the idea with enthusiasm but caution.  Most importantly, think of the phone methods as just one part of your overall fundraising plan.

Be realistic. Don’t expect a great response in one night. Remember that each new donor is a step in the right direction. It’s one more person with a human contact to your organization, one more person getting practice in writing checks to your work, and one more person who has a feeling for helping you and your cause. Each call makes a new friends, and a good many of them will bring you new dollars. This is a great investment in your future.

Every organization could benefit by including more consideration for prospects in its phonathon planning. Good starter rules for phonathons include those listed below:

    

Before the Phonathon

1.     Get a good location.  A bank, private company, phone company, law office, or another site with many phone lines will work best. Try to arrange free use of phones with charges only for long-distance calls. Find a comfortable, central location with easy parking. Remember, just having a lot of telephones is not enough; your site must have enough different phone lines going out so that many callers can work concurrently. Make sure you can serve food and beverages.

2.     Choose the best evenings. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, 6:30-9:30 p.m., have traditionally proven most productive.  Beware of local and national holidays, all religious holidays, high-interest sports activities, and very popular television specials.

3.     Allow four to six weeks to recruit volunteers. Recruit one-third more helpers than you need, because some will not show up, and plan to have double the number of workers as phones. This way people can take turns with a partner, making the calls and writing the thank-you notes, or the shy people can take the clerical jobs.

4.     Remind volunteers one week in advance, and on the day before the phonothon.

5.     Plan for food and drink. This is a real key to a good evening. The better the food, the more congenial your volunteers will be. Decide whether you feel comfortable asking volunteers to bring food. If not, have a staff member take responsibility, but in no case overlook treats!

6.     Ask a photographer to come. It makes it an event and can be useful later on for PR.

7.     Compile a good prospect list. Decide whom you will focus on: new prospects, faithful donors, lapsed members, $10 donors, and so on. This may provide you with a theme and your callers with a “good excuse” if the prospects ask why they are being called. It also gives you a logical and manageable way to prepare the lists.

8.     Provide your callers with neat, thorough information. They need concrete information on the camp, the budget, and the amount given by each donor last year. Occasionally, they will need the donor’s full giving history (if you are asking for larger gifts, or increases). They also need each prospect’s name, address, phone number, and relationship to the organization.

9.     Develop a pledge card that can record the necessary information and be sent the next day to the people who pledged. Make sure you keep carbons or photocopies for your files. Don’t print any confidential information about the caller or the conversation on the copy that goes to your donor.

10. Put together packets of printed materials, including blank letterhead or other thank-you notes and summary sheets so the calling teams can document each phone call and thank each pledging donor as they work through their lists.

11. Send a letter and return envelope to all prospective donors a few weeks prior to the phonathon and offer them the opportunity to give immediately to avoid being called. State the time and date of the planned phonathon, and promise that you’ll remove their name from the evening’s calling if they send a contribution immediately. This works wonderfully!

12. Arrange in advance for a “clean-up crew” that will stay late and tidy up the site. Workers do not want to arrive at work in the morning to find dirty cups, miscellaneous papers and doodles, and food crumbs on their desks!

13. Check in with your site a day or two in advance and make certain they have remembered. Make sure you know how to get into the building if it is usually locked, where your volunteers should park, where you should set up food or plug in coffee pots, and most importantly, how to use the phones! Find out if you should keep written logs of all calls made, or all long-distance calls. Be appreciative and cooperative.

14. Purchase stamps in advance so you can mail all the pledges and thank-you cards when you leave the phonathon. Your prospects will be thanked, and receive their pledge reminder, while the call is still fresh in their minds.

During the Phonathon

15. Each caller should have a packet with pens, note pad, matching gift or other informative pamphlets, facts about the organization, answers to anticipated questions and thank-you notes. Be prepared with extras.

16. Train your Volunteers! Don’t make any assumptions about the knowledge, comfort level, or conversational ability of your callers. Your brief introduction should include:

q       The mission of the organization

q       The total funds needed, and the goal for the phonathon

q       Explanation of packet of materials and prospect information

q       Confidentiality

q       How to use the phones

q       Recommend script and length of calls

q       How to create written records and thank-you notes

q       Teamwork

q       A demonstration or brief role play

q       Encouragement

17. Ask your volunteers for pledges! Anyone who has not yet given to the fund should make a pledge or gift before starting to make calls. Commitment shows in the voice!

18. Assign rovers to gather information and continually update a big visible progress report. The same people can refresh supplies of information, thank-you notes and stamps. This is a good job for staff or experienced volunteers, because the rovers will also answer many extra questions and do a lot of hand-holding.

19. Set goals. Set one overall phonathon goal, and a goal for each phoning session. Also, set goals for calls in each gift category, such as new donors, lapsed donors, and so on. Callers should feel free to talk about the organization. Build their enthusiasm and knowledge in the training session and you’ll garner as much in good public relations as in donations.

20. An energetic phonathon should last two and one-half to three hours, unless you’ve provided for new troops of callers to arrive and take over mid-way. It’s too much to ask anyone to talk non-stop for more than three hours.

21. Ask your volunteers to fill out questionnaires before they leave, with suggestions to improve your next phonathon. And if you have another scheduled for the very next night, try to implement changes immediately.

After The Phonathon

22. On your way home, mail all completed thank-you notes to contributors.

23. Write down everything your learned. All your mistakes, your great ideas, your successes, the things the volunteers liked, the good and bad aspects of the site, how the volunteers liked the refreshments, the general energy and spirit of the event, and anything else that seems relevant.

24. Compute your statistics. You and your volunteers will be more gratified if you know:

q       Number and dollar amount of specified pledges

q       Number of unspecified pledges

q       Total number of prospects reached

q       Number of people not home

q       Number of people who could not or would not give

q       Average amount of pledge

25. Send a summary of results, along with a personal thank-you note, to each volunteer who worked on any phase of your phonathon. Remember to thank them for any pledges they personally made the night of the phonathon too.

26. Before you do the phonathon next year, review your notes and revamp your planning to include suggestions and lessons learned.

Keep A Positive Attitude 

27.   Remember that statistics have shown that 5% of your prospects are truly unable to give, and as many as 50% won’t be home. Experience also shows that pledges of unspecified amounts may add up to as much as 50% of the total raised!

28.   Keep your options open for other forms of fundraising in addition to the phonathon. Different people respond to different approaches. The more methods you use, the more donors you will attract. 

Source: Keep the Money Coming by Christin Graham.  Copyright 1992.  Pineapple Press.  Used by Permission.   Adapted for a book by Brian Kluth, "Out of the Woods: Funding Christian Camps and Conference Centers".

For additional generosity resources, visit: www.kluth.org

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 "MAXIMUM Generosity" -  21st Century Biblical Generosity Resources and Training ( www.kluth.org )

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