Telephoning Works

February 4, 2013      Admin

After last week’s focus on sexy social media, it is with some trepidation that I turn this week to — dare I say it?! — mundane telephone fundraising. So yesterday.

At first I wasn’t going to do this. We received an email from Rebecca Patterson at Pell & Bales, who offered a three-part series on telephone fundraising her agency had prepared for its blog.

Being a provincial American, I thought … Nah, who is Pell & Bales anyway, never heard of them?

But we hardly ever hear from advocates of telemarketing, so off I went to their website to check them out.

Whoa! Pell and Bales, founded in 1990, has raised over £1 billion for charity via the phone for its mostly UK clients, passing that milestone over a year ago. Very impressive. That convinced me they were worth listening to.

However, the release announcing that milestone included this even more remarkable notice — the company’s most successful individual fundraiser raised just under £3.5 million from 88,000 telephone calls over 17 years of employment. That’s an average of about £40 per call. What an accomplishment! That’s $5.5 million and $63 respectively for our US readers.

Imagine being a devoted, successful caller for 17 years! According to our latest survey, only 15% of Agitator readers — professional fundraisers — have been in their current job more than 10 years. This veteran phoner puts most of us to shame.

But I digress.

Here is a compilation of the 3-part telephone fundraising series offered by Rebecca.

The three parts are:

1. Why the phone is a great fundraising tool. Here’s one reason …

2. How to use the phone across different fundraising programs.

3. Designing and delivering a campaign.

This is pretty basic stuff. And I wish they talked more about the ROI of different campaigns, given that many fundraisers would have doubts, not about the efficacy of telephone contact, but its cost-effectiveness.

That aside, if your nonprofit has not considered telemarketing, the Pell & Bales series is well worth a read.

Rebecca Patterson and Pell & Bales … you get an Agitator raise!

Tom

2 responses to “Telephoning Works”

  1. Tom Ahern says:
    February 4, 2013 at 10:22 am

    Concur and confirm. I just spent a day with a university. Their direct mail? Really bad. Yet their annual fund income is high, with great renewal rates. Why? Because they use direct mail AND telephone together … and the telephone campaign has students calling alums. I’ve also had the privilege of spending time with Pareto, Australia’s largest direct mail fundraising house. Pareto’s “secret” weapon? Again, the phone. The default strategy at Pareto is an integrated mail-and-phone campaign because it always brings in a TON more money than direct mail alone.

  2. Bethan says:
    February 4, 2013 at 11:44 am

    Hi Tom – thanks again for sharing our blog series. You mentioned a desire for more on ROI’s – we have lots to share on this, I’ll get onto it!

    Tom A – couldn’t agree more re channel integration: mail+phone has always been very powerful and SMS+phone for example is working extrememly well in the UK right now.

    So that’s my next 2 blog subjects sorted! – I’ll post them here > http://pellandbales.wordpress.com/ for those that are interested

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