Welcome to Fundraising Season, or Make the Call – And Maybe Lose the Donor

Mark From Marketing Says...

 

Meet Caitlyn, who wants you to become an
amateur fundraiser for her charity!

Every business has selling seasons. Auto dealers work hard in the summer to get you into one of their new cars, because it's late in their model year. In fall, heating companies will remind you to check your furnace for the winter ahead. Early winter brings the holidays, when everything goes on sale. And in the spring, yard retailers want you outside fertilizing your lawn and planting flowers.

Spring is also an important season for another kind of business. For charities, this is the start of Fundraising Season.

Charities target spring as a prime time to hold fundraising events. The psychology is simple: potential donors have been stuck indoors all winter, and now they're ready to get out of the house and have some fun. This is why, during the next two or three months, you'll see lots of charity walks, runs, lock-ups, wine-tastings and other fundraising events.

To recruit event participants, charities use many of the same promotional tools that for-profit companies are familiar with. They run print and broadcast advertising, circulate promotional emails, post banner ads on websites, place announcements on social-media websites, send direct-mail notifications, and will lobby local media to print articles about their event. Some will even hire telemarketers to drive event attendance.

You're familiar with telemarketing, of course. They're the folks who call you from morning until mid-evening, at home or at work. Telemarketing is effective because the seller is able to directly confront a prospect with a sales proposition, and to demand an instant sales decision. The answer is usually no – if the prospect even allows the telemarketer to complete their pitch – but this sales method generates enough "yeses" to remain an important sales tool.

Telemarketing is particularly attractive to charities because of the perceived "goodness" of their cause and message, and the ability to deliver their message directly to prospective donors and participants. The charity believes this "goodness of mission" will allow the telemarketer to at least complete their pitch, and their direct appeal for help will close the sale.

However, charity telemarketing represents a high-risk event-recruitment technique, because it's difficult to find anyone who truly enjoys receiving a telemarketing call. Indeed, while most marketing communications practitioners work hard to avoid any potential damage to their brand that unwanted telemarketing calls may generate, charities that use this technique simply view any negative perceptions as "collateral damage," an unavoidable cost of meeting their fundraising goals.

Here's what one such charity telemarketing call might sound like, and the negative perception it might create:

Imagine you're running an auto repair shop. You're busy helping a customer. You hear the telephone ring, and someone else in the shop answers it.

"Tony, it's for you," says your assistant manager. You put the receiver to your ear, say hello, and you hear, "Hi Tony, how are you this morning?! My name is Caitlyn, and you've just been named as..."

Your eyes glaze over. It's a telemarketing call from a charity, and they want you to participate in an "business networking event" to be held at a local restaurant six weeks from now. You then hear her say that between now and then, it's your job to raise a not-inconsiderable amount of money on behalf of the charity by calling your business associates, vendors, friends and family.

"It's easy," she assures you.

You look back at the customer you just walked away from, and at the other customers who are waiting to behind her. You make a decision. The telemarketer is still talking as you hang up.

You think it's a great cause, a national organization that provides support for children who have a catastrophic disease and their families. The charity also funds ongoing medical research into possible medical cures and treatments. But the telemarketer called you in the middle of your working day, and took you away from your customers to listen to an indifferently-delivered scripted sales pitch. You're not unwilling to help, really, but customers are more difficult than ever to come by these days. If you want to keep your customers' business, you have to take care of their needs first. And fundraising?! You run an auto repair shop! You don't have the spare time to be an amateur fundraiser for them!

Back with your customer, you'll probably apologize for stepping away for a moment, and you may identify the charity that caused the interruption. The other waiting customers might hear your apology as well. Later, you could also complain to the guys in the shop about being taken away from a customer by the charity's telemarketer, too.

Remember the Rule of the 100: now you're the dissatisfied customer, and because of your bad experience with this charity, potentially 100 other people might ultimately hear about your brief, yet irritating conversation with their telemarketer. And should the charity's telemarketers contact any of these people, they will remember your experience. And possibly hang-up on the charity's telemarketer, just like you did.

For the charity, the name of this game is Volume. That is, in order to recruit the 200 participants needed to make an event a success, a team of telemarketers might call as many as 5,000 contacts on a call-list, some several times if they weren't able to reach them the first – or subsequent times – they called.

Most likely, the charity will get their 200 participants for their event. And just as likely, the charity may also leave as many as 4,800 negative impressions among those they considered as potential donors.

It's a hard calculus, one that many charities seem willing to accept. But bear in mind that your organization's good name means everything to your continued success. Telemarketing may generate sales, but it also generates negative perceptions of your organization. And more importantly, it's hard to make friends for your cause when your potential donor hangs-up on your telemarketer.

Dial carefully.

 

Mark Paulson is a marketing communications advisor and strategist with extensive experience in for-profit, charity and professional membership association settings. No matter the channel or setting, he is an eloquent communicator who can tell your organization's or product's story to your customers or specific audience groups.

 

Copyright ^©Mark E. Paulson 2013