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By Abny Santicola

Oxfam Canada Picks Up the Phone

International development organization Oxfam Canada acquired 18,000 new donors post-tsunami, with about half donating through its toll-free number and half giving on the Web.

Dave Lavoie, core donor officer for the organization, says that emergency donors generally aren’t known to convert well to giving to core programs “because essentially their allegiance or connection is to the emergency and not necessarily the organization.The organization just happens to be the convenient vehicle they’re found to execute their donation with,” he explains.

Knowing this, Oxfam Canada created a monthly giving program — separate from its regular monthly giving program — specifically focused on converting emergency donors and highlighting three emergency issues faced by the organization: immediate emergency response, reconstruction and emergency preparedness.

Step one was to establish a relationship with these new donors. About a month after tsunami donors gave, they received a postcard from the organization that highlighted what it was doing on the ground. Lavoie stresses that the postcard didn’t have an ask.

“We had to go for coffee first,” he says.

Two months later, donors received a newsletter that provided more in-depth information about the organization’s response to the tsunami. Four months after sending the newsletter, Oxfam Canada enacted its contact strategy for conversion. The strategy broke donors into three groups: donors who gave through the Web after the tsunami and were sent e-mails asking them to join the monthly giving program; those who gave through the Web after the tsunami and received a phone call ask to become monthly donors; and those who gave over the phone after the tsunami and received a phone call to convert them to monthly giving.

What the organization found is that the test segments that were contacted by phone were the best responders.

Four months after the first conversion effort, Lavoie says, the organization enacted a second conversion effort for about 7,000 or 8,000 of the tsunami donors not contacted the first time. This time, all donors were called on the phone, but there were two scripts. One script focused on emergency response, the other on the organization’s core programs.

Lavoie says it was a surprise, but donors responded better to the core script because, as he learned through donor anecdotes, by that time they had seen so much money go to the tsunami.

“They felt the emergency aspect was not necessary ... they were more interested in our core work,” he adds.

When used in concert with each other and with your other fundraising strategies, omnipresent technological companions such as TVs, cell phones and computers can help you net more quality donors and perhaps even nudge them into the fundraising holy ground that is monthly giving.

Michael Johnston, president of Toronto-based Internet-fundraising consultancy HJC New Media, talked about this in his session on direct-response fundraising trends at the 43rd AFP International Conference on Fundraising in Atlanta in early April. His focus: integrating online strategies with other mediums — a case of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.

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