Effective Frontline Fundraising Part 7

Retreat Topic #2: The Phonathon.

The telephone is a great, often underestimated way to engage people as a subst.i.tute for in-person visits. It is also a great fundraising tool. Telephone fundraisers get a bad rap for interrupting dinner, but when on the phone, you often have someoneas undivided attention, a luxury you do not have with mail.

Again, weall get to how to craft a telephone message in the next chapter, but for now, you should focus on asking questions similar to those in the preceding list for your mail campaign.

A phonathon is any concerted, direct effort in which a number of volunteers or employees of your organization call donors with the express purpose of asking them for money. A phonathon can be a once-a-year or a year-round operation.

How many times a year will you conduct phone solicitations? Will the phonathon be a year round operation or seasonal?

Will you segment your phone list into multiple segments and scripts, based on past giving, giving levels, or affinity giving? Or will there be a simple, general call script?

Who will be making the calls? Staff, volunteers, hired callers?

Who is writing the script?

If you hire telephone fundraisers, what is your budget for paying them?

If you use volunteers, how many will you need per shift?

How many hours are required to make it through all the segments that you are looking to call three to five times each?4 Who is pulling the data? Who is reviewing the data to make sure that it is sound (see the following section on recommendations)?

Will you be calling during the day or during the evening?

Will you be calling work numbers and cell phone numbers or just home phone numbers?

Will you be leaving messages?

Some general recommendations on phonathons: If you have to choose between day time and night time calling due to staffing concerns, itas advisable that you call in the evening. You have a better chance of reaching people and of having their attention for longer periods of time. Itas okay to interrupt dinner. You might irritate folks, yes, but at least youare getting them on the line.5 If appropriate, remember to account for time zone differences.

Call from your work line. Yes, if you call from your cell phone, itas more likely youall get someone to pick up, as they donat recognize your number, but itas a little deceiving.

Donat call a single prospect multiple times in one evening, unless you are really short on numbers to call and/or really close to the end of a campaign/fiscal calendar.

Collaborate with your fundraisers to see if there are individual prospects they want to contact personally; make sure that these prospects are removed from the calling data.

Utilize your phonathon to complement your other contacts with donors. For example, you can use it to secure RSVPs to an event if your numbers are lagging, or to follow up on a written appeal that was recently mailed out.

Some organizations will send out a pre-call postcard or e-mail to donors, letting them know that the phonathon team is going to call them. This often spurs people to make gifts to avoid the phone call.

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4 Calling through a single list three to five times is usually how long it takes for the list to be aexhausted,a which is to say that it is no longer worth calling through it again. You should move on to another segment or list after that point.

5 If you DO interrupt dinner, apologize sincerely ONCE, and only ONCE; then, move on to your script. Youare interrupting dinner because you want to talk to them about some serious stuff!

One final note on telephone fundraising: make sure that whoever is calling, whether volunteer or staff member, has very thick skin. Telephone fundraising can be downright brutal work, perhaps more so than canva.s.sing. At least with canva.s.sing, you have the face-to-face aspect, which usually prevents most people (although by no means all) from getting too out of line. Telephone fundraising can really bring out the worst in donors. Getting hung up on is often an act of mercy compared to the verbal lambasting that can happen. You really do need the folks calling out on behalf of your organization to be able to take heat.

Considering the potential brutality endemic a.s.sociated with telephone fundraising, why bother with the phonathon program, then?

The answer is simple: it gets results. Phonathon programs do bring in good money. Nonprofits wouldnat be investing in the technology and expenses (and staffing challenges) inherent in phonathon programs if the operation wasnat cash positive. While you probably wonat be able to afford an autodialer, server, and programming to automate your phonathon operations at the outset, you should still find that your phonathon program brings in money.

Retreat Topic #3: E-mail.

Of course, to remain relevant in todayas world, you need to be able to communicate with your const.i.tuency electronically. E-mail is cost-effective and fast, and the returns are more immediate than snail mail. You can, with the proper software,6 track what percentage of e-mails were opened; how many bounced back; how many got swept into spam filters; what percentage of opened e-mails were read (as tracked by scrolling to the bottom); and what percent of opened e-mail resulted in a aclick-througha (that is to say, the reader clicked on a link leading them to a web-pagea"hopefully your giving page!).

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6 Lyris, Inc. (www.lyris.com) has a software suite that offers such services.

You need to be cautious though, as mistakes can still happen. Data can get messed up and you can end up erroneously e-mailing a segment of your donor pool that you did not intend to, sometimes with very messy consequences and no small amount of clean up (both in terms of donor relations and in terms of time spent mopping up the damage). Before sending the e-mail to your donors, send a test round of e-mails to staff members. Get their feedback: make sure that there are no typos or grammatical errors and that all the links work (especially the link that takes you to your giving page).

For example, sending a thank you e-mail to non-donors, which has happened where I work, is never a good thing. Especially when it gets sent on the last day of our fiscal year and we are scrambling as it is to hit our targets. That added another layer of work onto an already stressful week, and it could have been avoided with a little more vigilance and coordination between divisions.

Donat trust your data. Even though data and reports should come out clean, you need a set of human eyes to do a thorough scan of each list to make sure that you are not crossing your wires. This is true of snail mail, the telephone, and e-mail. For whatever reason, though, it seems that the errors in external communications happen more often with e-mail than other forms of communication.

With e-mail, there is always the challenge of trying to stay on peoplesa radars. Striking a balance between establishing a connection and over-communicating can prove difficult, since, in todayas world, inboxes are bombarded incessantly on a daily basis. So, how much e-mail is too much? Do you alter the frequency of your communications when you get one irate response asking not to receive e-mails from you? Probably not; but at what point do you acknowledge that you are becoming a nuisance?

Itas a difficult question to answer, and Iam not certain there is a golden rule on this one. For each person who responds saying that we are sending too many solicitation e-mails, there is another thanking us for the constant reminders. It is often the case that on the last day of the fiscal year, after constant reminders to give, with that final e-mail saying that there are less than 24 hours to make a gift, you will get tons of responses saying that theyall make their gifts, and then say how glad they are that you sent the final reminder.

Again, itas tough to come up with a magic number in terms of how often to send an electronic solicitation. People do respond differently to e-mail.

On the whole, I tend to err on the side of a.s.suming that people are more patient than we give them credit for. I hear people complain that they receive aso manya e-mails from this non-profit or the other, but rarely do I hear them saying that theyave responded to the sender asking to be removed from their mailing list. With e-mail, our attention spans are short. Itas usually easier to click delete than to write an e-mail asking to be removed, or to go through the steps a.s.sociated with unsubscribing.

Having your message deleted is acceptable; having someone request to be removed from your mailing list because of the high frequency of receiving e-mails is a bit more problematic.

Hereas what you should be considering when devising your e-mail strategy. Youall see that there is some overlap in the types of questions.

Will you be dividing this appeal into multiple segments?

Who is pulling the data?

Who is reviewing the data?

Who is in charge of loading the data?

What program will you be using to send the e-mail: Outlook, another program/software?

Will you be sending in html or plain text?

Who is writing the appeals?

Who is editing/reviewing the appeals?

Who is signing the appeals? From which account will each of these e-mails be sent?

What is the turnaround time from the approved final drafts to the e-mails being sent?

What will your subject line be for each appeal?

And, of course, how frequently will you be e-mailing your donor base?

It makes a lot of sense to do as much planning around e-mail as you possibly can at the beginning of the year. When things get crazy mid-year and in the third and fourth quarters, and youare just beginning to come up with e-mail strategies for later that month, the solicitation will be a little lackl.u.s.ter, a little rushed; the data pull will be hasty; the data review will be cursory; the likelihood that mistakes will arise increases.

It is natural for the frequency of your e-mail solicitations to increase as you approach deadlines, whether fiscal year ending, campaign deadlines, etc.

Retreat Topic #4: Events.

Letas not forget about events, which are a great way to engage donors. It is a good setting to keep folks connected without making them feel singled out for contributions. It is also beneficial to your organization because you can get your message across to a large number of people in a short amount of time with their (mostly) undivided attention if you have a content-rich message to share with them. This should include updates on your organization, your latest issues, etc. It is also a strategic way to engage individual prospects who might not currently be worth your time to visit individually, but who you would nonetheless like to meet/keep engaged. Also, on the subject of those prospects not currently worth your time: events can serve as a good low-pressure cultivation opportunity for them, a way to have them stay connected to the work of your organization.

Here is a list of important questions you need to answer when planning your events: How long is the event?

What is the budget? Is there a donor (or donors) who might be willing to underwrite the costs of putting on the event?

Who is the point person for organizing the event?

Who is designing the invitations?

Will invitations be mailed or e-mailed?

Who is collecting the RSVPs?

Are you charging or not? If so, is that going to be considered a gift to your organization?

Is there a pitch at the event, or is it merely a meet-and-mingle type of affair?

Is this event content-rich (i.e., with a speaker, lecturer, etc.)?

Is this event an aall-come,a or a smaller, exclusive event?

Who will be in charge of setting up/breaking down?

If appropriate, who is catering?

You will want a mix of all-come and targeted events, and a mix of social events and ones with pitches at the end.

You have to find a balance in terms of how often to have events. Your donors will tend to like them and will often push you to have more of them. You have to acknowledge your own limited bandwidth, though, and realize that event planning is very time-consuming. If you have a designated events person, please listen to them in terms of what they can deliver and how often. You want events to flow perfectly, and if the events manager has too much to do such that quality decreases, it is time to slow down the pace at which you put on events.

You also have to realize that events are an investment where the return is not always immediate and is usually indirect. Events do provide good opportunities for follow up and individual attention. Here are some pieces of advice: Make the RSVP list accessible to all of your advancement staff (not necessarily such that they can edit responses, but such that they can see who was invited and who has responded).

If you are a fundraiser and you see prospects who have not RSVPad, contact them and encourage their attendance. If they have RSVPad and indicated that they can attend, let them know in advance that youall be delighted to see them.

Events also provide ample opportunity for engagement with your donors post-facto. E-mail them or call to say it was good to see them there (if you attended), and that youad welcome their feedback on the event. Donat just pay lip service. Take note of what they have to say, both good and bad. Reaching out to them is always gooda"they feel empowered when they are solicited for their opinionsa"not just their money.

You can also use events to initiate a targeted e-mail, phone, or mail solicitation. You can use language like, aWe hope you enjoyed the event!a

Retreat Topic #5: Face-to-Face Visits.

Weave arrived at face-to-face visits at last: the most costly, least efficient, but best, most compelling method of solicitation. I will cover trip planning and how to maximize your time meeting with donors in Chapter 9, as well as how to conduct the visit. The focus here is to talk about planning your year in travel/visits.

The number of visits that you have with your donors each year will vary greatly, depending on the size of your donor pool, your geographic reach, and, most importantly, the budget that you have to spend on travel. It will also depend on the size of your staff. If you are fortunate enough to have fundraisers who are designated road warriors, this is a wonderful thing to be exploited. If not, you will have to find a balance between being away from your desk and getting in front of donors and prospects. You will need to a.n.a.lyze how much time you can afford to spend away from the office.

Bear in mind that face-to-face visits are labor intensive. First, you have to secure the visit, either via phone or e-mail. Then, you have to work the donoras schedule to have the face-to-face visit; and then, you have the even more important task of providing meaningful follow up to the donor with whom you visited, which often can (and does) take more time than the planning and actual visit itself.

Here are the questions you should be asking: How many working days out of the month, quarter and year, can you designate as travel days for your traveling fundraisers?

Who is on your A-list, your B-list, and your filler list?

Will any of these visits require other key players to be involved (prior to the visit, on the visit, after the visit)?

When do you need all hands on deck in the office, thereby precluding staff to be on the road?

We will talk at much greater length on travel and face-to-face visits soon enough. This little section is kept short because it is solely to help you think about how travel will fit into your overall fiscal calendar.

Letas turn our attention now to crafting your message, which is where the process of direct solicitation begins.

Crafting Your Message.

Standing Out Among the Crowd.