In an age when more and more people are abandoning landlines and screening all their calls, some universities are giving up on phone solicitations as telemarketing revenues slide.
Yet some institutions have made the opposite move. One is Colorado State University, which has updated its calling program over the past few years by investing in advanced data analytics and better training for the students who make the calls.
The upgrades have largely worked, fundraisers at the university say. While some institutions have seen stagnant or declining giving from telemarketing, Colorado State has experienced an uptick: from roughly 17 percent of call recipients pledging a gift in fiscal 2012 to 19 percent last year.
“Phone-athon is the most personal way for us to reach out to our annual donors,” says Meg Weber, the university’s executive director of annual giving.
The Chronicle spoke with Ms. Weber about the updates Colorado State has made to its phone-athon program. She offers the following advice for colleges that want to modernize this decades-old approach.
Take the long view. Driving revenue is not the main goal of Colorado State’s phone-athon program, Ms. Weber says. Gifts by phone accounted for less than 1 percent of the university’s private support in the last fiscal year.
University fundraisers take the long view. Through the calls, the university acquires loads of new, mostly small, donors who might make big gifts in the future, Ms. Weber says. About a third of the university’s 8,527 new donors gave by phone in the fiscal year ending June 30, 2015.
Ms. Weber says many donors who give by phone tend to increase their contributions after a few years and most keep giving — which is not true of those who give in response to mailings or digital appeals.
Callers also collect information that might be valuable for major-gift officers, such as whether a prospective donor holds a high-paying job or has specific giving interests, such as faculty research or scholarships.
Use data analytics. In 2015, Colorado State started prioritizing calls based on analysis of alumni data by Target Analytics, a division of the fundraising-software company Blackbaud.
Target explored numerous data points for each person and scored individuals based on certain characteristics that indicate a likelihood they’ll give by phone, such as high involvement in student activities during their time at Colorado State, or whether they majored in a lucrative field.
Don’t use scripts. In 2014, Colorado State issued new guidelines to its dozens of student callers. Instead of using scripts that sound stilted, callers are given general guidelines and trained to ask “rapport-building” questions, such as, “Where are you working now?” or “Are you planning any big vacations soon?”
Student callers sometimes ask for advice from alumni as a way to get the person to open up.
At the end of each conversation, callers fill out a short survey, which is loaded into the donor database. They note, among other things, whether the prospect is likely to support Colorado State in the future, or if he or she shared any “indictors of wealth,” like mentioning a vacation home or receipt of a signing bonus for a new job.
Innovate, then test. Ms. Weber says perhaps the most important aspect of a modern phone-athon program is the ability to adapt and try new tactics.
For instance, this summer Colorado State started to make “care calls” to recent graduates. In these calls, students don’t ask for money. Instead, they focus on updating information about the person’s job, living situation, and general well-being. They also remind new alumni that career services are available up to a year after graduation. The university will make follow-up calls in June 2017; after that, callers will ask the graduates for gifts, Ms. Weber says.
She’ll assess how well-received those calls are later this year, but for now she’s encouraged that roughly 70 percent of recent graduates answered the care calls this fall.
Ms. Weber recommends other colleges implement new ideas periodically, too, especially as people’s relationships to their phones change. “I like to disrupt things every couple years,” she says.
