A Realistic Look at Annual Funds

But, through the later chapters of the direct-mail story, telemarketing was rising to meet and anticipate the challenge of that decline. Telemarketing moved in to compensate for “snail” mail. It too, at first, increased the dollars and the donors almost geometrically. The rate of growth was astonishing as alumni volunteers staffing the two-nighter at the local phone company’s facility was replaced by students, then by paid students working several weeks, then all semester, etc. The process was so lucrative and so effective it simply kept growing. Soon telemarketing companies introduced new professional calling centers, and database-driven automated dialing equipment squeezed out the inefficiencies of touch-tone (which had replaced the rotary dial of the earliest days of telemarketing) and drove the contacts to thousands per hour.