Thoughts for Thursday: Launching a Phonathon Program (Interview with Markus Jones)

This week's Thursday feature is an interview with Markus Jones, Senior Vice President for Development of the Sigma Nu Educational Foundation. His organization launched their first ever phonathon last year and I asked him some questions about the process and what the results have been for his organization.

• Why did you feel it was important for Sigma Nu to start a phonathon program? 

 Our foundation employs a small staff and operates on a very limited budget (I’m sure that sounds familiar). We are always trying to maximize the return on our various development efforts. Additionally, we are an organization with a widely diverse donor base that extends across the nation - reaching new donors and cultivating those relationships is extremely costly for such a small shop.
 
Phonathon fundraising represented a method of communication that I felt our organization had not fully explored in the past. Likewise, it offered a unique opportunity to reach non-donors, friends and parents of our members, whom we had never previously contacted.
 
As a major gift fundraiser, I also saw the Phonathon as a means of prospect generation for future campaign efforts. We needed to resupply the pipeline for our mid-range and major gift officers to cultivate in the very near future. We have been very carefully referring outliers from this effort to those gift officers.

• Did you face any concerns or resistance to starting fundraising calls? How did you handle those?  

At first, I faced heavy resistance from our own staff, which was unexpected. Various members of our staff seemed to project their negative past experiences with phonathon solicitations onto our own phonathon plans. I addressed each individually during the planning phase and invited them to assist with certain aspects of the planning process. For instance, one staff member was very vocal about the “pushy attitudes” he experienced from callers in the past. I invited him to help write certain sections of the call script.
 
Additionally, we were met with similar concerns from other members of the staff who are not directly involved with the fundraising operations. I worked with our communications team and other fundraising staff to develop internal communications that addressed their concerns in advance of launching the campaign. We shared FAQs, details about database segments, call schedules, and sample call scripts with everyone on staff prior to making calls. We also invited them to actively engage with donors who may have questions or concerns along the way. After the first week of calling, we distributed “canned responses” to commonly heard objections to the staff assigned to the front desk at the Fraternity Headquarters.
 
We also created a page on our website dedicated to the Phonathon which carefully identified the company we contracted to conduct the calls, constituents who would receive the calls, why we were calling, and the timeframe in which calls would be made. This also helped to mitigate some push-back we received from outside constituents and, I believe, added some validity to the callers’ efforts.
 

• What sort of results did you have from this first round of calling? Will you be doing it again?  

We contacted roughly 64,000 individual records in our database as a test. Our callers used the same ask across all segments and we raised roughly $14,000 in hard cash almost immediately, with $85,000+ in 3-year pledged gifts. These were extremely profitable numbers for us and we have now incorporated phonathon solicitation in to our full annual fund plan for the year. We are now only contacting certain segments by phone since they performed better than others during our test.
 

• Did the concerns turn out to be valid? Were there challenges in implementing the calls?  

In the end, the major concerns of our staff were not valid. We did not receive any hate-mail or experience widespread donor revolt. We received maybe 10 total valid complaints from donors that could all be traced back to inaccurate data provided to the callers from our records or individual caller error. I provided the call center manager with approved responses to common objections based on feedback from the callers which seemed to make the calls run more smoothly at the onset of the campaign. Anything additional objections were forwarded directly to me and I handled each personally. There were very few.
 
Side note: Our vendor employs a very diverse group of callers and actually worked with us to recruit collegiate members from one of our Sigma Nu chapters near the call center. The feedback from the callers was also really great. They all enjoyed working on the campaign and speaking with our alumni on the phone. This was very encouraging for future partnerships.
 

• Long term, what are your hopes for the Sigma Nu phonathon?​ 

We have now included phonathon into our full annual fund schedule. We are now using nearly every type of communication and solicitation tactic when reaching our donors. We have reserved the phonathon for only two segments of our database: parents of our members and non-donors – the segments that tested best during our initial phonathon test earlier this year. 

More about Markus Jones: Prior to joining the staff of the Sigma Nu Educational Foundation, Markus served as a Development Officer at the University of Southern Mississippi Foundation. He began his career in nonprofit development and volunteer management following Hurricane Katrina as the Director of Marketing and Resource Development for the United Way of South Mississippi in Gulfport, MS. Markus has worked in the nonprofit development field for his entire professional career and strives to continue this path in the future. He holds a bachelor's degree in Advertising from The University of Southern Mississippi and in his spare time Markus enjoys books, the outdoors, volunteering and traveling.

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