Annoyed yet?
Somehow, somewhere back in the days when the “rules” for fundraising were determined, it was decided that calling a prospective donor over and over again would result in success. As a donor, I wonder if the person or people who decided that have been able to prove that true, because it sure is annoying. In fact, it’s so annoying that I start to have a negative response to the brand (organization) overall.
This doesn’t happen after the first call, or the second, or even the third. But after I read the recent “Future of College Phone-athons” article in the Chronicle of Philanthropy, and learned about Colorado State University’s innovative and “counterintuitive” program to change their phone-athon methods, I found myself reacting strongly.
One of CSU’s changes was to stop calling people who hadn’t answered a phone-athon call in 10 years of regular calling. 10 years straight? Really? It seems preposterous to me, and I wonder what those stats look like — how much they really raised in years, say 4-10, relative to associated costs. (Think direct staff costs, database maintenance costs, and the opportunity cost of not being able to do something more effective than making the same calls over and over again.) I loved the quote from Meg Weber, the school’s Exec Director of Annual Giving: “If somebody asks you out on a date for 10 years straight and you keep saying no or ignoring them, at some point it becomes stalking, right"?” Yes, Meg, it does, but I think it’s creepy long before the 10 year mark.
Turns out that, at CSU, 70,000 people fit into the category of having been called regularly for 10 years without answering the phone. My assumption is that the calls were actually going on for more than 10 years, but CSU made the cutoff at 10 years when she started this new program in 2016. Thank goodness the university implemented this change.
Another shocking revelation, to me at least, is that there was a program in place — that CSU cut, thankfully — where alums who “gave frequently but never by phone” were still being called. What?
You might say those calls were to thank the person for their non-phone based donation. Great to think about thanking the donor, but could it be that there’s a message that the donor is giving you — that by not giving by phone, they prefer a different form of communication? It also seems that the donor’s number was in the phone bank list, which means that the donor gets solicited again and again despite donating in a non-phone manner? Since this is a university, you’d think that they realize that most millennials (and others) prefer text messaging and other forms of communication instead of calls.
Unfortunately, this happens all the time with many institutions. The best institutions and non-profits have figured out how to glean and parse their lists (which couldn’t be easier in this tech age), but many have not. It’s quite strange when I make a $500 or $1000 or more donation to an organization, only to receive a postcard or a call asking me to donate $100 the next week. My interests, needs, and personal giving history are being ignored. I see this happening a whole lot with political campaigns, by the way, and, as with the nonprofits, it starts to give me a negative impression of the organization.
If they can’t figure out that I’m either not interested by 10 years of calling, or that I already donated more than they’re asking for — by different means — then I can’t help but think that maybe they don’t have their “act together” running the organization as a whole.
At CSU, it seems that the ship is moving, slowly but surely, towards success with this new program, and it sounds like their costs have been reduced. My hunch is that they’ve already had success in not annoying tens of thousands of non-prospects who they were calling to a ridiculous extent, and maybe those folks now feel better about the CSU brand.
The article ends by briefly describing a new program, launching in just a few months, that seems to take into account the prospects on the other end, and does do some parsing and targeting and “alternative” (non-phone call) communicating. I wish them all the best, and I hope that others take notice.
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- Lisa