Mock Calling is a critical part of any new caller training session. It's also important for new major gift officers and leadership giving officers to practice in this same way. All-to-often, though, the exercise becomes stale and perfunctory. Here are 5 ideas to re-invigorate your mock calling practice, whether you work in phonathon, annual giving, or major gifts.
Voicemail Have your callers each call from their cell phones and leave a voicemail on your office line of an abbreviated script. Then have the entire training class listen to each voicemail and critique the caller based on enunciation, speed, sincerity and other qualities. Scenario Cards Create a set of cards with fake prospects on them. Create corresponding cards with background information on how the prospect is predisposed to react to an ask. Pair up callers and give them several sets of cards to work through alternating between caller and prospects. (This works for leadership and major gift officers too. Just practice asking for a visit and handling objections to taking the visit.) Observation Calls Have one caller go to a nearby office (far enough so they cannot see or hear the group) and have them call a line with a speaker phone function. Put the call on speaker phone so the rest of the class can hear the conversation. Make sure everyone gets a turn and that you debrief after every call what went well and what could be done better. Rapid Fire Objection Practice Divide callers into teams and have them stand in two rows. Give each caller at the front of the line an objection. “I can’t give this year. I just had a baby.” Caller must respond immediately. After each round, have an impartial judge (student supervisors or lead caller) award a point to the team whose caller handled that round best. Winning team gets a prize. Judge selects an MVP from both teams. (For full-time fundraising staff, just practice objections to taking the visit.) Power Intro Drills Practice just the first 10-15 of a call, including asking for the prospect, introducing the institution and yourself and lastly stating why you are calling. Every caller gets several chances and then everyone gets to go again at the end of practice. Select a most improved caller or two who show significant improvement. Judge their intros on sincerity, diction, energy and enthusiasm. Every fundraiser needs a strong introduction whether they are a student caller or the CEO. If you found this article helpful, you may also be interested in my e-book How to Staff Your Phonathon Super-Fast: Seven Secrets to Fill the Seats. It's on sale now for $40 with the coupon code fillseats (valid through 9/1/16). This book guides you through innovative ideas and practices to turbo-charge your phonathon staffing efforts and break free from the hamster wheel of turnover. It also includes an appendix full of templates and samples to get you started implementing this system fast.
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Before the fall semester ramps up, now is the time to check in and assess the effectiveness of your phonathon scripts. What follows is an excerpt from my book, Successful Fundraising Calls: A Phonathon Scripting Workshop from Academic Impressions. If your scripts need some punching up, this guide walks you through the process of giving your scripts a makeover step by step.
1. Does your script/policies require callers to do at least three distinct asks if the prospect is objecting? a) No way, we trust our callers to make the right decision and not pressure prospects. b) We require it but we don’t monitor it through write-ups or other disciplinary action. c) Yes, absolutely. Callers must overcome objections and ask for the next level. 2. Do you allow open-ended or soft asks without an amount? a) Yes. As long as they are asking, the amount is not important. b) If the prospect sounds mad or needs to speak to his or her spouse, sometimes we do. c) No. An ask is constituted by a direct question and an exact dollar amount. 3. Which of these sounds most like the rapport section of your call? a) I am not sure what our rapport currently sounds like. b) “Last year, ABU was rated #1 in biological sciences research by the American Society for awesome biological stuff…..” c) “Did you know that ABU continues to get more accolades? For instance we were recently named #1 for biological sciences research.” d) “I see you graduated in biology. Do you still work in that field? Wow. That’s interesting! Well, you’ll be pleased to know that we recently named #1 in biological sciences research. Isn’t that great?” 4. What percentage of your callers would know what an “assumptive” credit card ask sounds like a) Huh? What is an assumptive ask? 0% b) Some of the best ones. Maybe 40% c) Any caller that has been around awhile. Over 80% d) All our callers are required to follow an assumptive ask structure. 100% 5. How would you rate the transition between the rapport and first ask in your script? a) We let the callers figure that out. It’s important that the rapport be natural. b) It’s a little clunky. Sometimes when I am coaching that part feels awkward. c) Pretty solid. We try to tie the fantastic things going on at our school to the need for private support. For every A, give yourself 1 point. For each B you marked, give yourself 2 points, for every C give yourself 3 points and if you selected D give yourself 4 points. 5-8 POINTS Your scripts need some work. The scripts don’t provide callers with enough structure for them to feel confident and comfortable asking for money. If you are not requiring three asks or enforcing the delivery of those asks, you are leaving money on the table for your institution. Your alums might not be enjoying these calls as much as they could. Your callers are in danger of becoming de-motivated because they aren’t seeing success. 9-11 POINTS You are on the right track. Your scripts may be having trouble striking that balance between over-scripting and not providing adequate guidance for transitions or special circumstances. Some key tweaks to your system and scripts could result in huge improvements in revenue and fundraising success for your institution. Your callers might need a little boot-camp to get them on board but they’ll thank you as they begin raising lots of money and having a great time at work. 12-17 POINTS Way to go! Your scripts are making it happen! You might need to freshen up key sections, like rapport, your credit card ask, or your transitions. But, you have a great foundation from which to build. Perhaps most of what you need is to put a great coaching and pledge verification system in place to make sure that your awesome script is being put to use in calls. Rock on! If you found this quiz helpful, visit this page to learn more about my book. And subscribe to Real Deal Fundraising and you'll get a free copy of my e-book on Call Center Games. This is the final installment of my series on improving phonathon contact rates.
With average student loan debt loads reaching astronomical levels, many institutions have questioned whether they should give their new graduates a break and exclude them from traditional solicitation methods like mail and phone. (Click here, if you’re interested in learning more about student loan issues.) This is a dangerous consideration for the immediate profitability and long-term viability of phonathon programs. The reason why lies in the history of cell phones. Here’s a quick history lesson and some other reasons why I don’t think you should stop soliciting your young alumni through mail or phone (regardless of student loan status). As I’ve discussed in this series, contact rates are a key statistic that governs the productivity of phonathon programs. Two macro-forces are at work which make young alumni some of the best pools for contact rate these days. Wireless number portability In 2003, it became mandated that users could keep their cell phone number when they transferred wireless vendors. Before that, cell phones numbers were much less stable. Today’s student will likely keep their cell phone number well into adulthood if not forever. The Virginia Tech Effect Since the shootings at Virginia Tech (2007), universities have been implementing systems to collect student cell phone data so that mass text alerts could be sent out on safety issues. The long-term implication of this process is that the numbers (at many institutions) migrate over to the alumni database upon graduation, which is great news for phonathon programs. ACTION ITEM: Check with Advancement Services to make sure that when they undertake their “grad loads” the cell phones on record are coming over as well and are being coded properly. Size of young alumni pools Aside from your institution being able to contact these alumni more easily, these are also probably some of your largest groups. Most institutions have grown leaps and bounds over the last 30-40 years. It’s likely that your organization graduates many more alumni each year now than the institution did 20-50 years ago. If you hopes to keep pace with peer institutions in terms of alumni participation, calling these large, well-connected groups is essential. ACTION ITEM: Do a quick experiment, find out how many alumni have graduated in the last 10 years and then see what just those alumni represented to your phonathon in terms of contacts, dollars and donors. The significance of the number will likely surprise you. Although the average gift is often lower than other groups, participation is usually higher and volume is on your side. Totals add up fast when you have such large groups. Case Building and Setting Expectations Even if a prospect tells you no this year, an important process of philanthropic education occurs. The student caller has still presented the needs of the university and planted a seed which may grow into future giving. The benefit of this cannot be overstated. Solicitation is important even when it results in a refusal. If, for instance, those with student loan debt cannot give this year, having a phone call begins a process of case-building which may resonate in the future when they are able to give. ACTION ITEM: I recommend capturing refusal reasons so they can be tracked over time. If possible, I recommend adding a custom refusal reason for student loan debt and utilize this over the next 3 years to track trends with respect to this refusal reason as an analytical tool. However, restricting solicitation is not the best method for dealing with this refusal. Building a better case over time would be a better way to handle it. Long-term lead generation A report on Cultivating Lifelong Donors (2010) from Blackbaud states: “Research shows that donors make $1,000 gifts to organizations most often when they have already been giving to the organization for about seven years. Long-term research with successful nonprofits also shows that those very same donors are approximately 900% more likely to make a major gift in their lifetime than individuals without that progressive history.” For those of us in higher education, this means that we must acquire our new alumni very soon after graduation. Otherwise, they will develop a habit of giving to another non-profit organization and any major gifts they might make later in life are less likely to be given to our institutions. I hope you found this blog post insightful and helpful. If you did, please subscribe to Real Deal Fundraising. This video tutorial shows you how to set up basic formulas in MS Excel. By using this method, you would be able find out your direct mail response rates and average gift. Also, I touch on how to "reverse engineer" your statistics if you only know the response rates and average gift, perhaps from a past mailer.
You can check out my other video tutorial on how to use Excel for fundraisers here. If you enjoyed this video please subscribe to Real Deal Fundraising. What follows is an excerpt from my upcoming e-book How to Staff Your Phonathon Super-Fast: The 7 Secrets to Fill the Seats. Subscribe today for a chance to win a copy of this guide to help phonathon managers get off the hamster wheel of caller turnover and begin raising serious money and loving their jobs.
Make your job "The Best Job On Campus" When a student on your campus tells other students that they work at the call center, what images are conjured in the minds of those other students? Does an image of a telemarketer pop up? Do they liken it to mind-numb drudgery like a drive-thru worker? Are they confused, not understanding exactly what they do at the call center? None of these images bode well for your future recruitment prospects. What image would you like there to be of your call center on campus? You have an opportunity to create it starting today. The brand I wanted to create at the University of South Carolina was simple. I wanted it to be seen as “The Best Job on Campus”. Nothing less in my mind was enough. To be considered anything less than that made my job ridiculously and unnecessarily difficult. I truly believed, having been a student caller myself, that this was the best opportunity on campus for student employment. What did it mean to be the best job on campus and practically speaking, how did I market that concept? Define for yourself what it is about your call center that makes it the best. Here’s some things to consider: Mission Pay Flexible Scheduling Skill Development Community Leadership Opportunities Resume Building Career Support Bonuses and Prizes Free Food (Sometimes) Communicating your brand (in words) The most important way your brand is communication is word of mouth within the student population. Make your call center as awesome as you say it is and you’ll garner the goodwill and support of your current callers as ambassadors. Don’t neglect this step. Simply listing the benefits is good but it should be as short as possible and not be a long list. Finding clever snappy ways to word the perks is essential. It will require your creativity. You have a ready-made focus group in your current student callers. Write 80-100 taglines and have them pick their 5 favorites. A shortcut to this is to name your group like it is a student organization. My call center was called Carolina Callers. The name is still in use today. It wasn’t the place that was important it was them, the callers. Being a Carolina Caller was an identity, joining akin to signing up with a student organization. When you name the group and student leaders join the group, you communicate everything you need to about your brand just by saying “Carolina Callers: The Best Job on Campus”. A good way to collect language to use is to ask your callers “What call center means to me?” or to finish the sentence, “I love being a caller because….”. When you have these quotes, you can use them in tandem with caller photographs to create advertisements that essentially testimonials for being the best place to work on campus. Communicating your brand (in images) Follow standard graphic design practices. Make sure you use consistent fonts (and not too many of them) to create your advertisements. Use classic images like simple and sleek black and white clip art or photographs of your current callers. In your images of callers, always have them wear tee-shirts of your institution in the official school colors of your institution. Don’t crowd your images. And make sure, whatever you go, that your advertisements stand out. Use fluorescent paper for bulletin board flyers. In photos, callers should have headsets on so it doesn’t look like any other job. Or maybe you show them eating pizza or cupcakes in a group to highlight that “perk”. Lastly, call center is a place where you can be a little bit silly. Find the popular meme of the moment on Facebook and create a similar one about call center. It will serve you well in social media promotions and it will show that the center isn’t too serious. This is the third in a five part series about ways to improve phonathon contact rates. Contact rate is one of the most important metrics in phonathon. To read the introduction to contact rates and first steps to take in improving them, click here. For more information about managing and acquiring cell phones numbers, click here. Remove known bad numbers from your calling pools A certain of the records loaded in last year’s phonathon were coded as invalid numbers. You should research them and only load those that you find a new number for this year. Don’t pay callers to re-code known bad numbers. This process is known as removing the “historic deletes” or "invalids". No numbers known identified as invalid should be loaded for calling this year unless a new number is found in the research process. Calling repeat invalid numbers is unproductive for callers but it is also is a budgetary drain on your program and lowers caller morale because they get very bored. The marking of bad numbers found through phonathon in your database (Banner, Raiser’s Edge, etc.) and then excluding them from new phonathon data loads should happen anytime new data is loaded, not just at the beginning of the fiscal year. Diversify your constituencies Is there a school/college that you don’t call for? Could you approach them? Do you call parents? What about friends? Removing these invalid records from the pool available to call will lower your record counts for this year, until you are able to undertake an adequate amount of research and initiatives to recover good phone numbers for your lost alumni. Therefore, I recommend that you diversify your constituent base by adding calling for new colleges, schools or units that you have not called for in the past. I encourage you to break through the campus politics in order to grow your phonathon. At the very least, approach these colleges, schools and units who are not currently part of phonathon about conducting a statistically significant test. This would be beneficial for all. It is a commonly held fallacy that you need callers from a particular program to call a particular group. (For instance, law school students calling law alumni.) What is most important is that you need well-trained and well-coached callers in order to produce great results. By doing a test, you are able to bring in some funds for the unit and you have a chance to prove the worth of phonathon with statistical results. It also gives phonathon the opportunity to clean-up the data for these new colleges by identifying and marking their invalid numbers while they collect new information (such as cell phone and employment) from the alumni they do reach. When you report back to them, don’t just focus on dollars and donors. See my post on the 5 pillars of annual giving. By adding in new groups you will offset the potentially damaging effect of lower record counts due to historic deletes. This will mean that instead of calling invalid numbers or running out of records to call by the end of the year, your callers will have new, fresh groups and new challenges to undertake. This will make for good call center morale while you rebuild your contact rate. If you found this article helpful, sign up for my mailing list to keep in touch. You will immediately receive a free e-book, "15 Best Call Center Games" and you'll be entered to win a copy of my upcoming e-book "How to Staff Your Phonathon Super-Fast: The 7 Secrets to Fill the Seats". Click the button below to sign up. If you don’t know Adam Grant, let me brighten your Monday. He’s a powerhouse business writer and an amazing TED talk speaker. Today I want to walk you through three takeaways from his book, Give and Take.
Grant states that people can be divided into givers, takers and matchers based on whether they are motivated by giving, getting or some combination thereof (respectively). In one chapter he looks at the concept of burnout and he ends up (of all places) in a university call center. He assessed whether the callers were givers, takers or matchers. He assumed that the takers would not be good at the job but is surprised to see that the way in the job is marketed (highest paying job on campus) and the way the motivation is structured ("win", "be the best") is actually highly motivating for the takers. Grant wonders what could be done to improve the results of the giver callers. What he finds is remarkable: spending 5 minutes reading letters from scholarship recipients motivated the giver-callers to close the performance gap between themselves and the taker-callers in ONE WEEK! So, Grant brought in an actual scholarship recipient to chat with a random group of callers about the impact that the funds they were raising had made in their lives. All callers (regardless of motivational type) saw a drastic increase in performance (as measured in calls per hour, number of minutes on the phone and dollars, which quintupled versus the control group). Givers saw an even more dramatic increase in performance. Then Grant writes a line that takes this lesson far beyond call center: “The turnaround highlights a remarkable principle of giver burnout: it has less to do with the amount of giving and more with the amount of feedback about the impact of that giving.” (Page 165). Wow! Takeaway #1: Many, if not most, of our donors are givers. So, what Grant is saying is that DONOR burnout is within our control. Make it your goal this year to make your donors as aware of the impact of their gift as possible. If 5 minutes reading a note from a scholarship recipient can make a huge difference in the performance of a student caller, what could consistent, impact-oriented messaging around these issues do for your donor’s happiness and willingness to give again? Takeaway #2: Think about the ways in which we are marketing the student jobs in our call centers. Are you only recruiting and motivating for the takers/matchers? What are you doing to be mission and impact focused in your recruiting and training materials for callers? What are you doing for all of the students to reconnect them with the mission and impact during the normal shift? You should incorporate strategies like Grant suggests not only because you have giver-callers who need the motivation but remember ALL the callers saw an increase in performance when given explicit and emotional examples of impact. Takeaway #3: Here's one last thing to think about: What type are you? If you are a giver and you're feeling burnt out, what can you do to connect back to the mission? Maybe you need to take a walk on campus and go speak directly with students and faculty, the beneficiaries of all of your hard work. Nurture yourself to your type so that this important work can be completed. If you like Adam Grant, check out his TED Talks here. If you found this information helpful, please consider subscribing to Real Deal Fundraising by clicking the button below. You’ll immediately get a copy of my e-book, “15 Best Call Center Games”. In Depth: Four More Reasons Why Recruitment should be the #1 Priority of a Phonathon Manager7/5/2016 If you don’t staff up quickly, you lose valuable momentum.
My career has been in higher education philanthropy and I can attest, if you ramp up slowly and lose those early weeks in September, you’ll struggle all year to build momentum. There’s nothing quite like the feeling during that hectic back-to-school timeframe and if you miss it, you’ll lose the warm-fuzzies from donors waiting for their annual fund call. You’ll also miss out on the most competent students, most of whom will have secured a part-time job by October. Low volume of work is the most common reason a phonathon fails. It’s not typically a bad script or lack of caller motivation that causes phonathons to stagnate or fail. It’s not even bad data alone. Usually, it is simply that not enough calls were placed. If you loaded 50,000 records and only complete 10,000 calls (a 20% completion rate), chances are that is why you aren’t raising any money. Sometimes, this low completion rate is due to improper budget resources for the size of your program, but more than likely it is simply a staffing issue. There weren’t enough callers in the seats and therefore not enough dialing took place. The more effort you put into generating applications, the more selective you can be in hiring. If you need to hire 10 new callers, and you have 14 applications on file, you’re doing pretty good, right? Wrong. You need at least 2.5 times the number of needed callers in applications. In this example you need 25 applications at minimum. This target is often a much higher number than you think is acceptable. Keep striving to recruit more applications and interview more. You can be much more selective with hiring decisions, which will save you time later dealing with bad employees and prevent turnover. If you don’t use those funds budgeted for caller salaries, you’ll surely lose them. As I mentioned in #4, if you have a problem year with staffing your results will suffer. However, the problem becomes systemic when you sit down with the higher-ups to discuss next year’s budget. You had a budget for 1,250 calling hours but you only used 825. “Surely, you can get by with only 900 this year, right?” Now, even if you use all 900 hours, your phonathon will not be working to its full potential. By not staffing properly, you may hinder your phone program for years to come. Enter to win my upcoming e-book about phonathon staffing If you subscribe to Real Deal Fundraising, you will be entered to win a copy of my upcoming e-book How to Staff Your Phonathon Super-Fast: The 7 Secrets to Fill the Seats. Click the button below to sign up today. Call Center is hard work. It was where I started my career in fundraising, at the tender age of 18. I think many young people enter the philanthropy industry through the phonathon and leave feeling that this career path isn't for them.
I'm committed to giving these young professionals the support and training they need to survive and thrive in call center, so that they can ultimately move on to other areas of development and contribute in big ways to the non-profit world. To that end, I'm offering some training materials. For anyone who subscribes to Real Deal Fundraising over the next month, you get two gifts from me. 1) You will get immediate access to the e-book "15 Best Call Center Games" for FREE 2) You'll be entered to win a free copy of my upcoming e-book "How to Staff Your Phonathon Super-Fast: the 7 Secrets to Fill the Seats" I hope you'll subscribe today. If you aren't a phonathon manager, please share this information with the phonathon managers and other development professionals you mentor. Thanks! Jessica A solid strategic plan is not an easy thing to write. Ideally, it should have a balance of big picture thinking and sufficient detail so that it can be implemented. A strategic plan cannot be pie-in-the-sky but it also cannot be a user’s manual full of which button to push.
I would advise that strategic planning begin with 3 steps:
Do you have staff and budget to promote planned giving opportunities? What can you afford to do in terms of direct mail, phonathon, donor relations, etc.? Don’t forget about crucial areas like stewardship and fulfillment (pledge follow up). Also, pay special attention to data integrity and enrichment. You cannot afford to ignore those important areas. Now, you have to combine your various vehicles for communication with the content: the case for support. What will you be focusing on this year? What are the needs of your institution? Scholarships? Program support? Operating expenses? What’s the impact that the donor will have in the world if they make a gift this year? Begin to weave these messages into thoughts about how to segment your data this year. The final part of your strategic part is to have a calendar. You know enough now to lay out the steps. Don’t go into too much detail but have a month-by-month list of what major action steps need to happen to accomplish your goals. Review this calendar regularly at staff meetings. It is inevitable that you won’t get to all your great ideas in one year. I’ve found it helpful to add a section at the end of my plan called “And Beyond” where I can stash my great ideas for future years. It keeps me inspired and helps me not to forget. Encourage other staff to join you in adding to that list throughout the year. Most importantly, the strategic plan cannot be a lifeless document. If you aren’t referencing it at least once a month (preferably more), it isn't working for you. Start over. Make it a living document that guides you to your goals. |
Jessica Cloud, CFREI've been called the Tasmanian Devil of fundraising and I'm here to talk shop with you. Archives
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