Lessons from Chichester Festival Theatre’s capital appeal telephone campaign

Howard Lake | 16 April 2013 | Blogs

Telephone fundraising specialists The Phone Room have shared details of their recent successful campaign for the Chichester Festival Theatre's latest capital fundraising campaign.

The need

When Chichester Festival Theatre was founded in 1962, it ran for 11 weeks a year to audiences of 75,000. Now the theatre runs almost all year round to audiences of over 300,000, staging musicals, comedies, tragedies, dramas, classic texts and new writing. Not surprisingly the Grade II listed building needed to be refurbished to ensure it continued for the next 50 years.

The capital campaign is being led by Sarah Mansell, Campaigns Director responsible for fundraising strategy and specific campaigns since she joined the Theatre in 2000. 

She explained: "The RENEW project is going to cost at least £22 million and remarkably, by October 2012, we had raised pledges of £21 million, including £14 million from public sector sources including Arts Council England and the Heritage Lottery Fund.  We now need to raise the all-important remaining £1 million."

Beginning the campaign

Chichester Festival Theatre's 50th Anniversary season, Festival 2012, ran between April and October last year. The telephone campaign began at its height in August.

The Phone Room won the tender for the campaign, and had already worked with the Theatre on a previous capital campaign in 2004/5. 

The campaign targeted audience members who so far had not been approached about or donated to the project, and the fundraising target was set at £100,000. 

The Phone Room first cleaned and update the theatre's database of supporters, and then worked with the Theatre staff to segment the data, with a view to identify patterns of theatre-going habits.

The campaign included a pilot phase. For this, various audience members were selected from several audience sections – ‘Friends’ of the theatre, those who made one to two visits a year, those making three to four visits a year, and those who visited more than five times a year. 

Before making any calls, The Phone Room recommended that each individual was sent a personalised letter in the post, letting them know about the appeal and advising they would be receiving a call.

Gemma Buckley from The Phone Room adds: "To start with, we provided an opt out line in the introduction letter so that those people not wishing to receive a call had the opportunity to remove their name. Funnily enough, we do find that some people will actually make a donation at the same time as choosing to opt out."

Before the calling could begin, The Phone Room trained its callers. This included all callers visiting Chichester Festival Theatre, to familiarise themselves with the theatre and the space, to see a show and, most importantly, to see first-hand the challenges and reasons for the improvements.

The campaign

For the first pilot phase of the campaign, 2,000 people were called, taken from an even cross section of the theatre’s audience in order to compare response rates and ‘giving’ reasons with confidence. This approach lets The Phone Room monitor and review the calling guide, as well as gauge the level of engagement and the theme of the conversation with the supporters, before moving on to make more calls.

Analysis of this data by factors such as caller gender and postcode area helped inform the next stage of the campaign. 

The second phase included more ‘Friends’ and more people making more than five visits a year, reducing numbers from the other sectors.  The focus was also shifted to concentrate on particular post code segments and the pre-call letters and callers’ guide were refined before making a further 2,000 calls.

Campaign results

The original plan was to raise £100,000 from 5,000 conversations, but The Phone Room was able to generate over £99,000 (not taking gift Aid into account) after making only 4,002 calls.

As well as the target income being reached, The Phone Room also captured additional information which is likely to be of value to the theatre in the future. This included what types of shows they preferred, whether they would like to go on a backstage tour, or where there was any interest in legacy information.

Analysis of contacts led to discovering what day of the week resulted in the highest ratio of calls to gifts, as well as whether pledges were made by credit card or cheques.

The rebuilding of the Chichester Festival Theatre is expected to take until Spring 2014. There are likely to be more fundraising initiatives before the re-opening.

About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale. He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.