(a.k.a. the redemption of telephone fundraising)

Now that Covid-19’s forced us all out of face-face fundraising there’s been a rush to pick up the phone again. It makes sense; the similarities between face-to-face channels and voice-to-voice vastly outweigh the differences. If you can’t talk about why your mission matters on the street, in the mall or on the doorstep, then a phone call is the next best thing.

But telephone fundraising has always been an outcast in our sector. While it generated the same kind of complaints that face-face did (interruption marketing, pushy etc.) we never defended it in the same way. While it always got better response rates than direct mail, and allowed for spontaneous, supporter focused personalisation, DM has always been cheaper so…

And while it’s infinitely more personal and interactive than digital it’s never been as sexy (we all know how to make a call, but the mysterious wonders of digital are known only to shiny agencies who charge through the nose –or our children).

So, if we are cautiously, even reluctantly, picking up the phone again, how can we redeem it? What mistakes can we learn from rather than repeat? Speaking as someone who still bears the scars of starting out in telephone-fundraising I’d suggest three biggies:

1. Who am I talking to?

Imagine starting a phone call with a friend or stranger like this:

“Hello – have you got a moment to talk about me? I’ll be very brief. Can I start by asking how much you know about me? I was born and grew up in London and have two younger brothers. I went to nursery and then school in Old Street, about a 10-minute walk from the Thames, and…hello? Hello, anyone there?”

Farcical right? Now check this joke against the introduction to TM scripts you’ve been using recently. How different are they, really? (The same could be said of many a face-face conversation guide and the brief for damn near every mail/email appeal ever sent.  But, I digress).

How did we arrive in a place where our best practise for speaking with people professionally is the total opposite of how we talk personally? Simple; we tell them everything about us because we know nothing about them.

Yes, we have plenty of descriptive information about the people we’re calling. We know how old they are, where they live, and if they’re supporters we know how much and how often they give. But none of these things tell us the only thing that makes for a meaningful conversation; the part of who they are that could align with mission.

Understanding this has a tragi-comic history in our sector. Some don’t ask the question while others think they have an answer. But sign up and retention rates for both belie any claims to know.  Not asking is to not know but asking with little grounding in how to do so may be worse than not knowing. Fortunately, Agitator readers already know the importance of what to ask for and how.

Now imagine a phone call where you know something of material import about the person you’re calling:

“Hi – Bob, last time we spoke you said you considered yourself a Conservationist who liked to be outdoors and supporting us was a way to help make sure those outdoor spaces are there for you and your family.  That’s why I’m calling today, in part, to fill you in on what we’re up to on conservation in your area and hear from you so we can…”

This script could just as easily have been structured to get this data as part of the call.  The critical take-away in all this is assigning value and business priority to getting it.  If you focus your priorities  you can quickly get to a place where you know precisely why people support you and what they want to hear about.

This simple change means that, from the very start, your conversation is led by the person on the other end of the call, not you. The result? We’ve seen conversion increase by 15%, average gift increase by £10. And that’s just the start (we’ll see where this goes in point three).

  2. Was this call (or face-to-face interaction or e/mail) any good?

How do we define the quality of our fundraisers and supporters? Easy. For fundraisers the more they sign up the better they are. For our supporters it’s even easier, they said yes not no.

But given that, regardless of channel, we’re losing people as fast as we find them because what we’re measuring isn’t helping us manage. How could we redefine quality?

Let’s start with our supporters. Do we really believe everyone who said yes to our request is the same? That their strength of relationship with our organization, their connection to the cause, and the experience they just had with us is identical? No one believes that,  yet our business process finds us acting this way.

Take the last two people you called. Both are the same age, gender, live in the same area and have the same income. Both said yes, to the same fundraiser, using the same script, giving the same amount. How similar are they? With what we’re conventionally measuring and managing they’re identical. So why does one stick around for 2 weeks and the other for  9 months? The data you have contains no answer. The data you didn’t ask for does.

What if one donor has a strong connection to your brand, a personal connection to your cause and had a great experience on the call, where the other donor’s experience is the total opposite? Would that re-define their respective qualities as  prospective long-term supporters? Should that insight define their subsequent journey? Could the fact that it doesn’t go some distance to explaining why one left straight away and the other left later?

A sad aside to all this is your best telephone-fundraisers are having meaningful, often deeply personal conversations with prospects and supporters every day. But it’s random, intuitive, and not systematised. None of this information is being captured or used in subsequent communications.

In cases where charities are seeking this insight, and combining it with many other variables, they’re building models that predict with a high degree of accuracy, at point of sign up, who will stay or leave, why and what the organization can do about it.

If you now know what a quality supporter looks like, by default you can and should know which fundraisers are bringing in quality. It should be obvious that quality and quantity are neither synonymous nor mutually exclusive. So, what happens when we use this insight to redefine how we look at training and rewarding our fundraisers?

What happens if you have two telephone (or face-face) fundraisers bringing in a high volume of supporters, one with say 10% higher volume than the other? Who gets the rewards? Who do we send out to recruit more? Who do we model our training on? D’uh, we all know this one!

But what if we scratch the surface and find this “quality” fundraiser consistently recruits people with no affinity to either your brand or cause and a larger than normal percentage didn’t enjoy their conversation with this individual, while the other was the opposite? The answer of what to do next is as simple as it is obvious. This requires zero additional resource, simply redeploying it to where it has most impact.

Seeking and acting on these crucial insights is the only way to improve the quality of people you recruit and the quality of their experience (see point three).

3. They said yes, now what?

If your remit is simply to bring people through the door then, even if you care personally, your hands are tied professionally. If retaining supporters falls into someone else’s ‘to-do’ list it’s impossible ‘to-do’ it without working closely with acquisition.

There are two things you can do to both immediately and sustainably improve retention rate.

Remember our two ‘identical’ supporters having a different connection to you and a different experience on the phone with you? They both put the phone down having said yes.  What’s the very next interaction they get from you?

If this happened today (and it did, numerous times) the next interaction is likely to be  a confirmation email. Fine. Does this email do anything other than confirm and say thank you? Does it address the personal experience one supporter has and share useful information? Does it seek out and try to fix any negative experience on the call, perceived or real (of course perceived is real)? It should, it can, but right now in almost every case it doesn’t. So straight away we needlessly but necessarily lose a whole swath of people.

The second action is to fix the journey. We spent time on the phone talking with supporters, and we learned something about them. Does the subsequent journey mirror our conversation? Only if everyone had exactly the same conversation and signed up for exactly the same reason. While that scenario is highly improbable it’s the only one we’ve all planned for (and spent a ton of time and money on).

Suppose that instead of  presuming to be ‘engaging’, ‘donor-centric’ or even ‘loving’ we empirically knew, where our supporters wanted to go because we got on the phone and asked them? Not in a random, well-intentioned but still off the mark “why do you support us/how would you feel/what do you like” way.  Not in endlessly crunching data about what people did and trying to infer why they did it. And not in any hideous combination of the two.

Rather the far better more productive approach is to start with a call that outlined which questions to ask, and how to respond to the answers. One that was the starting point of a journey tailored to donors’ sense of identity, knowing what drives value for their identity segment.

Again, this isn’t hypothetical. Charities that follow this path are increasing conversion, value and retention. Charities that aren’t aren’t.

Most charities are picking up the phone these days not because they want to but because they have to. Nevertheless, we are now presented with  a real opportunity to begin a meaningful dialogue with the people without whom many of our organizations could not function.

Fixing historic problems with the telephone, or any channel, isn’t a process issue, it’s a mindset one. The moment we truly assign value to addressing the supporter experience process and delivering on it is the moment returns and retention will soar.

Charlie

P.S.  If you have any questions please feel free to drop me a line at chulme@thedonorvoice.com