Best Telephone Campaign
Howard Lake | 22 May 2007 | Blogs
For the campaign that demonstrates innovation linked to success in the use of telephone fundraising. This can be in any stage or aspect of the fundraising process including door recruitment, donor development, stewardship or research.
The shortlisted nominations are (in alphabetical order):
British Red Cross: profiled list regular giver recruitment
The objectives of this campaign between April 2006 and February 2007 were to recruit 1,400 new regular givers; to establish the telephone as a viable acquisition source for recruiting regular givers and; to reduce reliance on other regular giving recruitment channels. The British Red Cross worked in partnership with GoGen and Response One who managed the outbound call handling and the list planning and purchase respectively. The campaign was implemented in three phases with the results of the previous stage being analysed on a list-by-list basis so plans and programmes could be adapted to include the most recent learnings.
Profiled list testing found that the most responsive donors were those whose profile was similar to regular givers recruited online or in response to DRTV. These donors tend to be younger, more affluent, more committed, more likely to Gift Aid their donations and more likely to give higher average gifts than traditional donors, making them a very attractive audience.
Success was measured using a projected four year RoI, allowing direct comparison with other egular giving channels. The campaign beat all targets, resulting in a PDD rate of 4.9 per cent, 2,232 new donors and an average gift of £84. Callers had three extensive training sessions and the Red Cross produced monthly fundraiser newsletters that enabled the callers to represent the organisation passionately and professionally.
Crisis: Cold Telemarketing – Profiled List Summer 2006
Crisis’s objective for the campaign was to find a viable year-round cold acquisition tool. Much of its fundraising activity has traditionally been focused on the Christmas period and it is looking for ways of ‘balancing out’ the fundraising year by establishing strong summer campaigns which will help provide year-round income.
The targets were to contact up to 35,000 potential supporters, to recruit 1,000 doors by PDD, to achieve a PDD rate of three per cent and an average gift of £75 including Gift Aid. Crisis worked with GoGen to handle the outbound calling activity and to source and profile the data. Half the data came from postcodes where Crisis has operational projects and the other half fitted a more general profile.
The campaign performed better than projected and garnered 1,157 new donors from 33,84 people contacted. There was little difference in results between the two groups of data. Crisis will now be able to fundraise with confidence to a much wider data-set which increases the potential fundraising pool many times over and helps to balance fundraising programmes throughout the year.
NDCS Dedicated Fundraiser Test
NDCS worked with Pure Associates to undertake this campaign that gave NDCS exclusive and dedicated interaction with three specialist fundraisers coached and based at Pure, but in constant and direct relationship with the charity. These fundraisers were used to call on the more bespoke areas of NDCS’s database over a six month period, covering potentially difficult campaigns such as legacies, events, membership, alongside general donor development work such as Gift Aid, upgrades and reactivations.
The charity felt this is a very sophisticated approach to the use of the telephone in fundraising and forms strong links between the charity, the agency and the donor or prospect. Campaigns can be extremely well targeted.
The success of the campaign was measured through straightforward RoI and the establishment of strong fundraising relationships that would materialise in legacy pledges, events uptake, and gift aid uptake together with solid donor retention. Results were impressive and included £14,028 unlocked from 657 contacts through Gift Aid, 1,318 prospects either leaving a legacy or requesting information to take the process forward and 210 out of 323 members contacted, reactivated.
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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.