Improve Your Telefundraising Efforts By Avoiding The Five Mistakes

By Ken Dawson

It can be challenging to navigate the rocky waters of telefundraising. With so many vendors to choose from, an ever-increasing tidal wave of legislation and budgets that shrink in the blink of an eye, it’s easy for a nonprofit to feel lost at sea.

Fortunately, we’ve learned a lot about telefundraising in the last 25 years, and your organization can benefit greatly from the lessons others have had to learn the hard way. These are just a few of the common mistakes nonprofits make when it comes to telefundraising — and how you can avoid them.

Picking the wrong teleservices partner.
All too often a nonprofit organ-ization’s lack of experience with telefundraising leads it down a wayward path when choosing a vendor. Due to time and budget constraints, many organizations end up with a cheap, low-quality call-center company.

To avoid this common pitfall, consider the fact that the company you choose will be representing your organization over the phone to your most valuable assets — your donors. In fact, the donors will assume that the agent is one of your employees. Therefore, it is of utmost importance that you choose a reputable, high-quality company with proven strategies and documented ROI.

Here are a few points that can help you identify a high-quality teleservices partner:

• Experience. Be sure that the company you’re working with has a history of success. Ask for whitepapers and case studies that prove its results.

• Professionalism. This goes hand in hand with experience. The company you choose should have mature agents who have extensive training on your program and an affinity for your organization.

• Compliance. In to-day’s hyper-regulated teleservices environment, it’s essential that your call-center partner have the necessary systems in place to stay up-to-date with state and federal do-not-call lists, oral and written
disclosures, caller ID requirements, and a multitude of other regulations.

• Technology. Look for a company that offers technological advantages such as real-time reporting and script-on-screen. These features allow you to see results as they happen and make script changes quickly.

Don’t get hung up on price when choosing a partner. The donor doesn’t care how much you paid for the call; he or she just wants a pleasant experience. The actual cost per call should come second to the
quality, because high quality always will translate into a higher ROI.

Having unrealistic expectations.
When a nonprofit has unrealistic goals for its telefundraising campaign, it sets itself up for failure. Many times, the organization knows its objectives can’t be achieved, but it succumbs to internal and external pressures out of a sense of desperation. For example, you can’t expect to solve a net income crisis with an acquisition campaign or a donor file that is several years lapsed. A high-quality call-center company can help you understand the potential of a donor file and establish attainable goals for your program.

Setting realistic goals will allow you to “under promise” and “over deliver,” and exceeding expectations in this way leads to higher confidence in your abilities. This in no way should cause you to settle for poor results. Strive to have a documented pro forma that you and your teleservices provider both can sign off on.

Being set in your ways.
The fundraising environment is more competitive now than ever before. Those organizations that continue to rehash the same, tired techniques will be left in the dust. This holds true for all of your marketing efforts, including telefundraising. Don’t be afraid to try the new tactics your teleservices partner suggests — including script changes, new types of programs and different appeals.

After all, the telephone is the perfect tool for testing marketing tactics. It is truly dynamic. Unlike direct mail, which only allows you to receive feedback from your donors when they respond with a gift, telephone results encompass all the responses and allow you to understand the motivations behind them. Every call ends with a yes or no disposition.

No other channel allows you to hear why donors aren’t responding to your appeal and quantify those responses. This is a very powerful tool that can be adapted daily, as opposed to sinking your whole budget into a single mailing and then hoping for good results. Most importantly, with technological advances such as script-on-screen and real-time reporting, you really have nothing to lose because ineffective aspects of a program can be identified and changed immediately.

Not striking while the iron is hot.
Here’s an all-too-common scenario: Your teleservices partner is achieving incredible results on a program and begging you to increase the budget so that can continue. But somewhere along the line, the request for additional expenditures gets lost, and the teleservices provider has to discontinue the calling program before it’s even penetrated the entire calling file. This results in thousands of lost dollars and frustration on both sides.

What’s the lesson in this case? Be flexible. You should view your fundraising efforts from a global perspective as opposed to viewing them as immovable silos. If your telefundraising campaign is producing a windfall, shift some of the budget from your direct-mail campaign to keep the momentum going. Remember, results are immediate, and you can always stop calling if they begin to slip.

Not fully integrating the phone into your fundraising mix.
Many organizations utilize the phone for one or two appeals per year. A common misconception is that using the telephone simply steals the donations from direct-mail programs. In reality, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Study after study has shown that telephone and mail complement each other and actually increase the overall value of a donor when used appropriately.

This is a point that cannot be exaggerated — you must consider telefundraising as a vital aspect of your overall strategy. Take full advantage of the potential of the telephone to test and measure the impact of different appeals and tactics on the lifetime value of your donors. Experiment with other types of telephone campaigns, including acquisition, reactivation, monthly giving, reminder and thank-you calls, and friends and family. Although it might feel like a risk to invest in a strategy you’ve never tried before, the right approach and a good relationship with a high-quality teleservices provider will ensure that you don’t regret the decision.

Ken Dawson is the chief marketing officer at InfoCision Management Corp.