Maggie’s Centres to test cold calling for new monthly donors
Howard Lake | 2 June 2008 | News
Cancer caring charity Maggie’s Centres is to test recruiting monthly donors by cold calling following the launch of Maggie’s London, the charity’s first centre for people affected by cancer to be built outside Scotland.
The trial is being carried out by telephone fundraising agency Relationship Marketing. If it is successful, Maggie’s Centres plans to employ cold calling to support the launch of its five new centres due to open in England and Wales by 2012, as well as other cold telemarketing activity, such as around anniversaries and to support events and community fundraising.
Elley Martin, donor development manager at Maggie’s Centres, said:”We know it’s unusual trying to recruit regular monthly givers by the telephone, but the launch of Maggie’s London has really raised awareness of us in the capital and we want to build on that with a campaign to recruit regular givers.”
She added: “We are very much a community-fundraising based organisation, getting support from the communities that are most likely to need and use our centres. Using the telephone to contact those potential supporters is an extension of that ethos.”
The test began in May with callers working out of Relationship Marketing’s call centre in Dunfermline contacting people in postcodes in the London boroughs that Maggie’s London serves, to ask for a paperless direct debit (PDD) contribution of between £5 and £8 a month.
The cold calling will be combined with a campaign to upgrade Maggie’s Centres’ existing direct debit givers and convert cash givers to direct debits.
As the cold recruitment segment of the campaign is a test, Maggie’s Centres and Relationship Marketing have not put a target on the number of new donors. However, the warm component has targets of 10-12% conversion of cash donors to direct debits, with the aim of securing an average annual gift of £60; and upgrading 30% of existing monthly givers by an average of £3 a month.
Relationship Marketing’s director of development Gordon Michie said: “Common wisdom says that you can’t use the telephone to recruit new donors, but there’s no reason why that should be so.
“Fundraisers know that people respond to a direct one-to-one conversation and you can do this over the telephone. As long as you’ve looked at your data and chosen those people you think are most likely to respond, then there’s no reason why we can’t mount a successful donor recruitment campaign using the telephone”.
Michie believes that a resurgence in the use of the telephone as a fundraising tool is likely. He said: “With falling response rates to DM and moves towards more personal contact with stewardship, I think the telephone is primed for a fundraising renaissance.”
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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.