“Don't you love New York in the fall? It makes me want to buy school supplies. I would send you a bouquet of newly-sharpened pencils if I knew your name and address.” – You’ve Got Mail
Unfortunately, where I live, school starts while it is still more than 80 degrees and 90% humidity. But, still most K-12 institutions have already started classes. And colleges and universities begin very soon. That means more time trying to find a parking spot for those of you working in higher education. All kidding aside, this is the time. That “back-to-school” feeling is pervasive in our culture. Donors feel it too and get nostalgic for their time at our institutions. It’s the time of very when education is naturally on the mind of our constituents. If educational fundraisers don’t have a plan ready to turn that nostalgia into gifts, we have lost ground and will have a hard time catching up this year. Also, it’s time the perfect time of year to connect back to the mission of your institution. If you work in higher education, there are new students on your campus that are beginning a transformative journey. The classes they take, the things they learn and the people they meet could change their lives. You play a role in that. From raising funds for scholarships and library acquisitions to raising the profile of the institution through outstanding alumni support, advancement is part of that student’s path. So, take a walk on your campus today. Watch the students making their way. Visit the campus bookstore and buy yourself some new pencils. Sharpen them. You have work to do.
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Chronicle of Philanthropy The gold standard for philanthropy and fundraising jobs. I find it a bit frustrating that you have to select individual states in order to limit your search geographically but we can forgive that small frustration. If you are serious about growing your career, check this job bank regularly. (PS - I found out about my current position on this site.) Chronicle of Higher Education Pretty much the same as the Chronicle of Philanthropy, but specific to higher education. If you don't mind combing through or scrolling past lots of faculty positions, this is another great source. CASE Job Board The Council for the Advancement and Support of Education is the trade organization for higher education fundraisers, alumni relations, and communications/marketing folks. Their job bank is pretty good as most colleges and universities recognize it as a go-to place for higher education advancement professionals. AFP Job Board The Association of Fundraising Professionals website is super-clunky, but if you want to work for a smaller non-profit, arts organization or hospital, AFP's job bank is just the right place to search for that kind of a position. Higher Ed Jobs.com This site has done some significant upgrades since the last time I looked at it. They now have the capability to search by administrative area, which means you can restrict your search to just development and fundraising. There's also a nifty feature allowing you to search by region or metropolitan area. Nice! Individual Institutions pages Keep a short document with a list of institutions you would love to work for one day and copy their Human Resource job bank link into that document. Set a reminder in your calendar to check those at a regular interval (determined by your urgency to change jobs). Some institutions can't afford to advertise positions or feel that they are prestigious enough that they don't need to advertise. Keep tabs on what's happening at these institutions by checking at the source regularly. Head hunters Myers-McRae is the one I'm most familiar with, as I've been on search committees using this company to fill positions. It may take some searching but you want to find the one that is most popular for your preferred type of university and region. Myers-McRae tends to specialize at 4-year schools in the South. Google "higher education executive search firms" to begin your research process. A note: It is unlikely that this will be fruitful for you unless you have at least 5-10 of experience in a given area. Idealist.org This website is great for those that want to work for an organization that has an activist edge. A quick search and I found fundraising jobs at organizations that focused on women's rights, child welfare, climate change and disease prevention/cures. For profit serving not-for-profit You can develop a wealth of skills by working for a for-profit company that serves the not-for-profit industry. Companies like Blackbaud (Raiser's Edge database), Ruffalo Noel Levitz (phonathon and fundraising management), and Stelter (planned giving marketing) to name just a few are worth checking their career pages if you are looking to make a move. That's how I developed expertise in the area of phonathon by working with Ruffalo Noel Levitz (then RuffaloCODY) for five years. These organizations have established training systems and practice excellent benchmarking. There's no better way to learn best practices. 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. If you're at least my age, you probably remember the old Gatorade commercial featuring Michael Jordan with the jingle "Like Mike, if I could be like Mike. I wanna be, I wanna be, I wanna be like Mike!" The theme was excellence and striving for near super-human ability.
Well, I'm not much of a sports person, but dance I understand. So, today, I present one of my favorite ballet numbers and ask you to "Be like Mikhail!" Mikhail Baryshnikov is one of the most outstanding dancers to ever perform. The choreography in this routine from Le Corsaire is so vibrantly energetic and obviously difficult but delivered so effortlessly that it takes your breath away. He soars across the stage. He's in control of each movement but so comfortable because of his practice and repetition that it appears spontaneous. Glorious! This number shows off Baryshnikov's excellence in all aspects: technique, performance, athleticism, musicality, and panache! Can you strive to be this confident, this excellent, this marvelous at your job? This is what you are spending your life doing, why not be great at it? Can you complete your role with such a high level of awesomeness that your inspire others to "wanna be" like you? Show your optimism and passion so obviously in your work quality that it is absolutely contagious! That's fun fundraising! Over the last few weeks, I've been posting about a wide variety of best practices to improve contact rates in phonathon. This post will serve to consolidate this information and recap the recommendations.
It is not possible to raise money from someone that you can't get in touch with, so contact rate is crucial to a healthy phonathon. When your contact rate improves, you will raise more money even if call quality doens't improve at all. It is not optional. You must have a plan to get your data clean and valid and keep it that way. First Steps to Improve Phonathon Contact Rates: This post outlines the importance of contact rates and details the basic research processes that every phonathon should be doing prior to loading data for the year. Next Steps to Improve Your Phonathon Contact Rate (Wireless ID and Wireless Append): This post lays out the trends with respect to households transitioning to wireless only. Your database must manage phone types properly to accommodate this shift. There are also new data research tools that you need to make use of to acquire cell phone numbers. Continuing to Improve Phonathon Contact Rates (Most Best Practices): In this installment, I recommend that you manage your data so that you do not load known invalid phone numbers for calling again. Once you remove those invalids, you'll need to find more groups to call and I show you how to lobby to call new colleges, schools or units. Improving Contact Rates in Phonathon with Where-Are-You-Now Emails: Besides making good use of data research services, you should also go to your constituents and ask them to update their information. In this post, I give an overview of sending next day "where-are-you" emails and "where-are-you" email blasts. Young Alumni, Contact Rates and the History of Cell Phones: This post shows why young alumni are a strong group for contact rate and gives a comprehensive argument for why you should not remove young alumni from phonathon. I hope you find these tips helpful. If you implement these strategies, your contact rate will improve. Improved contact rate in your phonathon will mean more money for your institution. Please comment below and let me know your results. For the love of sweetness, goodness and light, please create web addresses that are simple to remember. Your web addresses should be both easy to say out loud and easy for people to remember. As an example, I’m finishing my graduate degree in English literature. Whenever I need to reference the English department’s website, I just hope over to www.usm.edu/english. Simple, right? But, I always have to google the graduate school’s website because the url isn’t easy to remember. It’s www.usm.edu/graduate-school. I’m sure if it was www.usm.edu/gradschool, I would have no trouble remembering it. This is a matter of mere inconvenience for me, as a current student. But, this could have real implications for prospective graduate students and for the effectiveness of the Graduate School’s marketing materials in general. Many websites will assign automatic web addresses to newly created pages and they can be complicated long strings of words and dashes and underscores. If you can’t get the actual URL to be simple and easy-to-remember, have your tech support shop set up a URL that redirects to your page. Here are some good (theoretical) examples:
Now here are some examples of what NOT to do:
True, you will be promoting your web links in HTML emails and on social media, where you can provide a hyperlink. But still, you will also be promoting your websites in print and direct mail and announcing the giving page web addresses at various events throughout the year. Make them memorable and easy to type in. Don’t put up more barriers to communication with your constituents. Don’t make it more difficult to give. Like many fundraisers, I’m goal-oriented. I love that feeling of accomplishment when the goal number has been exceeded or the big gift comes in. In fact, I might be addicted to this feeling. Because when I am plugging along doing my regular work without the big hoopla, sometimes I don’t feel like I’m being productive.
I was feeling unproductive this week. Not because I wasn’t busy or hadn’t made significant progress, but because July is this time of sowing, not reaping. One of my marketing colleagues was complimenting me on some of the important steps I had made for my organization this year and particularly this summer, and suddenly, it was clear to me. I need to honor the sowing part of my work, not just the reaping. Success is not all about the big gestures, the payoff, or the celebration party. Most of the time, success is about the small but consistent daily efforts that move your career and your institutions forward. The real measure of success isn’t like skydiving, it’s more like ten minute daily walks. So, put your plans together. Write those daily thank-you notes. Build those relationships. Plant those seeds. The harvest will come. But it’s those unremarkable daily actions that pave the path to success. Today my first e-book is available for purchase: How to Staff Your Phonathon Super-Fast: Seven Secrets to Fill the Seats. The information in this book has the power to revolutionize your call center operation by starting at the beginning. Staffing.
I will show you how to:
You can’t afford to spend another year spinning your wheels with staffing. Break the cycle of caller turnover for good and begin loving your job now! In this book, you get all the secrets: Everything you need to staff YOUR phonathon FAST. And here’s the bonus: These techniques not only get you the most callers possible with the least amount of time invested. This method will also give you the very best callers and insulate you from caller turnover both in the short term and in the long run. If you want to be a rock star phonathon manager, have amazing fun at work, and ultimately grow your career in philanthropy, this book will put you on that path. There’s no doubt about that. You’ll have great students to train, you’ll quickly get busy raising tons of money for your institution, and your success in crushing your goals will be rewarded with accolades and future job opportunities. What are you waiting for? Let’s get busy creating your staffing plan. Purchase your copy of How to Staff Your Phonathon Super-Fast: Seven Secrets to Fill the Seats today. It doesn't take much money to make an event look special. You might be a top flight organization whose donors have high expectations, if so you'll likely have a budget to match. However, if you are with an organization that has a tight budget, you'll need to get creative to make your events sparkle. I like to create "vision boards" with pictures from the internet put together as a collage so I can pitch my ideas about how I want the event to look and feel. Here's one I did recently as an example. This shows many of the actual materials I planned to purchase and the colors I wanted to work with as well as the way I would deploy the decorations at the event. My budget was only $500 and I had to make these decorations work for 4 different events and they would end up being shipped across the country 4 times.
One of my favorite websites for party decor is Shindigz. Amazon also has some great deals and their Prime shipping is great when you need something for an event last minute. I like to start with gossamer from Shindigz, which can be used as table runners or to tie up tablecloths around highboy tables. Gossamer comes in a 40 foot roll and can often be used for more than one event. Usually I pair it with some other material with some texture for variety. Burlap would work or tulle or in the case above, I used a shiny, fuzzy black material. Everything I bought was interchangeable variations of the school's colors, so I could switch up the way I used the materials at different events. Flowers cost lots of money and cannot be reused, so paper lanterns with LED lights are a good option with candles on the table too. Confetti also adds budget sparkle to a table but check with your venue before using as it can be difficult to clean up. I'll be returning to donor events as a regular topic on Real Deal Fundraising. Future posts I have planned include creating playlists for donor events, what should be on your donor event planning checklist, working with event vendors and several others. Subscribe today if you don't want to miss a post. Here are some pictures of how the materials above actually looked at one event: 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. |
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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