Is it really, really good to talk?

Howard Lake | 13 March 2007 | Blogs

How about trying an experiment?
Don’t worry, it won’t take long and you only need a pen and any old piece of scrap paper lying around on your desk. I’d like you to write down the first five fundraising techniques that come into your head.
Finished?
I bet telephone fundraising isn’t one of them (unless you are a telephone fundraiser that is) and I bet that even though you are reading a blog about telephone fundraising, you still haven’t got the telephone on your list of fundraising techniques.
I reckon you’ve got direct mail (the most common), face-to-face (the most controversial), corporate (most wished for) and major donors (most glamorous). And for your fifth choice it will be whatever your favoured fundraising method happens to be at the time… currently, maybe legacy or donor acquisition: but unless you work with the phone, I bet it is not the phone.
I’ve been working in fundraising now for about eight months. I joined The Phone Room last summer having spent most of my career working with retail clients to try and achieve excellent customer service and working for organisations such as NOP Mystery Shopping.
I had been in that sector most of my working life and had got to the point where I felt like I wasn’t learning anything new. I wanted to move on but I loved the working relationship I built up with clients. So when the job at The Phone Room became available, I thought that it had my name written all over it – a client-based role focusing on customer care but in a totally new sector!
And so far all my expectations are being met. With one exception.
I can’t understand why telephone fundraising has such a low profile compared to other fundraising techniques.
That’s why I started with that little test. There were no sessions on telephone fundraising at the Institute of Fundraising convention last year and there is no IoF special interest group for telephone fundraisers. Even Professional Fundraising a couple of years ago left the phone off its list of fundraising techniques.
It’s not as if telephone fundraising is an out-dated method of fundraising that doesn’t generate income any more. Indeed, not only does it raise significant sums of money but it is also an essential relationship building/donor care tool, without which recruitment methods such as F2F wouldn’t be half as effective.
There are real debates and issues involving the telephone as a fundraising medium:

• Will increasing take-up of TPS mean that we have no future or we will be able to adapt and survive?
• How do we integrate new media and SMS fundraising with the telephone?
• Can the phone be used to acquire new donors?
• Can high level donors be recruited by the telphone?
• And there are plenty more

As a newcomer to this sector, I was expecting there to be loads of activity around telephone fundraising, where I could both learn and pitch in. But no!
I mentioned earlier that there was no special interest group for telephone fundraisers at the Institute – I actually believe that one was started, (before my time in this sector), but it stopped after just a couple of meetings. Perhaps then, the reason the phone has a low profile compared to other fundraising techniques is not that the rest of the sector is not interested in us, but because we don’t shout about what we do!
But I can’t believe that we telephone fundraisers are not good at promoting ourselves and so I hope that with this blog, we can really get some debate going about the use of the telephone in fundraising.
That way we can avoid being ignored in the future!

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.