The telephone is every fundraiser’s greatest tool… if used correctly

Howard Lake | 11 June 2013 | Blogs

We all know that communication is at the very heart of every relationship. And that second only to a face-to-face meeting with a loved one is the ability to have a conversation, to hear each other’s voice.  If you’re old enough you might remember from pre-mobile phone days the red telephone boxes that took 5p and 2p’s, and recall as a love-struck teenager the lock that your parents placed on the number nine so that you couldn’t dial your latest childhood sweetheart.

Today’s love-struck teens have moved on from those days in the 70’s and 80’s. All now have the latest smart phone so they can Skype, text, face time and all the other miracles of 21st century communication, let alone just have an old fashioned conversation.

If the telephone is such an integral part of daily life, why then is it so often forgotten and left out of the fundraiser’s armoury?  Why is it seen just as a simple tool and not an integral communication device that will enable us, like those love-struck teenagers, to develop a long-term relationship that will lead to fundraising Nirvana – a lifelong relationship with your organisation?

Used correctly the telephone can and will deliver that dream of a lifelong relationship.

The telephone will be the window into your organisation and the window into your donor’s rationale for supporting you. There are several preparatory steps that should be taken by any organisation investing in telephone fundraising and decisions need to be made on how to use this important asset.

Primarily, this article focuses on using the telephone as an outbound resource, a way to communicate your organisation’s needs to your existing supporters, past supporters and potential new supporters whether through a welcome call, an upgrade call, a reactivation call, a ‘pre-call’ to a mailing or even a cold call to a potential new supporter.  These terms may seem very clinical and ‘internal’. Our supporters of course, the great British public, do not work in our industry – they have minds of their own and will make their own decisions on whom they want to support.

The fundraiser’s job is to make the most emotive ask possible and prove that his or her cause is worthwhile.

Building rapport

I’m convinced it will help you if you can change from the way that fundraisers traditionally think of these types of calls, to view them as our donors would understand them. If we can change our mindset and view our techniques not a tools but as the heart of our relationship, we will be able to start to build a meaningful rapport with our donors.

• A welcome call equals good news, affirmation of success, a two-way window into each other’s thinking.
• An upgrade call equals inspiration to do even more to change your world and fulfil your dreams

• A reactivation call is really a reminder of how things can be with your support and how easy it is to change the world and so fulfil your dreams.
• A thank-you call equals affirmation and celebration of your decision to change your world and fulfil your dreams.

Rapport is what we need to achieve to ensure that we can work towards lifetime value and build a mutually beneficial relationship between donor and cause.

Rapport is the quality of harmony, recognition and mutual acceptance that exists between people when they are at ease with one another and where communication is occurring easily.

For fundraisers, real rapport with a donor is the best place to be, a perfect state, well worth the effort of achieving. At R Fundraising it’s what we aspire to, day in, day out.

Among the many ways of creating rapport the most effective involve subtly matching non-verbal communication – especially voice patterns.  If you can show a genuine interest in the other person and in their world in such a way as to also meet the aspirations of your cause, rapport will become second nature.

Rapport and the phone

So how can we easily build rapport over the phone?

• Identification stage – use first and last name.
• Introduce yourself and the charity on whose behalf you’re calling.
• Speak with conviction – if you believe in the cause, the other person will believe you.
• Ask the donor what inspired him, or her, to support/take an interest in the charity – you will learn a lot about them, what’s important to them and what srives their emotions.
• People like people who are like themselves – remember – identify their processing style, is it visual, audio or a combination of the two?

• Personalise the call, use the person’s name naturally throughout the call.

Rapport is the secret of lifetime value and a long and meaningful relationship but… yes, there is a BUT!

For any organisation to move away from seeing the telephone as a tool there must be an acceptance of investment in other areas that come together to ensure that we can achieve rapport-based calls. Data, training and testing are foremost of these.

Data

All these other areas are equally important to the success of any campaign using the telephone. Yet the foundation stone of a successful campaign is the quality of the data that is supplied and the knowledge that surrounds that data.

Questions to be answered about your data:

• Do you have the telephone number? (Yes, it seems a stupid question, but…..)
• Do you have the donor’s full giving history, how much has been given, when was the last time he or she gave?
• Can you export and import the data seamlessly into your database?

Inspiration

Rapport comes from knowledge and as they say, knowledge is power.  Are you therefore able to visit and inspire the fundraisers making the calls on your behalf – and not just at the beginning of the campaign?  As fundraisers it is important that we can communicate the message of our beneficiaries but in the main this will be second hand.  Therefore, do you have a beneficiary, for example a field worker, a parent or a patient, who will be prepared to come and relay her story first hand? If you can, it can make all the difference to the agency’s ability to build rapport.  ‘Can I tell you about Hilary, who I met last week…?’

Testing

If we do all of the above we can begin to develop meaningful relationships with donors.  But we mustn’t forget that the world is constantly changing.  So we will be wise to build a testing culture into our fundraising, for two simple reasons:

• It will improve results.
• It will enhance relationships.

The telephone is not the fundraisers greatest tool, it is the fundraisers greatest ally and partner in the development of a long term, mutually beneficial relationship between your cause and your supporters.

My final point on the use of the telephone is for all those organisations that use the phone as an automated receptionist.  Automated systems cannot build rapport; they cannot answer the questions of the woman who wants to leave her house to you.  It cannot point the new patient to the person most suitable to help them in their time of need.  Automated systems cannot say thank you and welcome and be that friendly window into your organisation. That demands a sensitive, rapport-based, warm, committed human, every time.
© R Fundraising 2013

Gordon Michie is a director of Dunfermline-based international donor acquisition and development specialists R Fundraising Limited.

An abridged version of this featured in the May edition of the Fundraiser magazine.

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.