Welcome and Verification Calling Optimised

Welcome calls for new regular donors are amongst the most important quality assurance activities you can perform. When done well, they significantly impact new donor viability. A good welcome call program, staffed by well-trained in-house callers, can be the difference between profit and loss. However, the cost of executing them well has always challenged all but the largest fundraising operations. They require a full call center of trained staff to cover all hours a donor might be available to take a call. Those economics only work at a scale larger than many agencies can support. Fundraising operations find they have to make compromises, such as instant verification calls, accepting a low contact rate, fully outsourcing, (predictive dialing!), or more recently even considering AI. Most technology only enables scatter gun approaches to calling, further compounding the problem.

In the last few years the challenges of in house welcome calling have only become more acute. A war is being waged between carriers, handset manufacturers, regulators, and spam/scam callers. These range from call screening tools to sophisticated algorithms that use pattern detection to warn callees that the caller is not to be trusted. Welcome calling is a legitimate, transactional activity whose sole purpose is checking the quality of a very recent transaction. It is getting caught in the crossfire. 'Tricking' people in to picking up the phone by randomising outbound numbers and other similar techniques is getting harder and harder.

Solving these problems requires a paradigm shift in ownership, placing the success of welcome calling directly on the fundraisers themselves. It involves treating every call like a business appointment. It involves a completely different approach supported by technology. The benefits of these changes are substantial: fewer calls per donor made by fewer callers and connecting with most, if not all, donors. This results in higher donor satisfaction, higher quality in the field and more profitable programs.

These were the originally intended goals of welcome calling and with the right technology they can now be a reality. But it requires a whole of business approach. That is not easy, it requires cultural change that comes from the very top. However, get this right and you are on your way to turning 2,000 calls speaking to 250 donors into just 500 calls speaking to 500 donors.

The business appointment

If you schedule a call with someone in business, and you call them at that agreed time, they will rarely fail to answer if they recognize your number. If that happens, you won't just call them back at a random other time, you'll send them a message, leave a voicemail. "Hi, it's me. We had a call scheduled. Call me back when you can." More often than not that person was just finishing a meeting and they'll call you straight back.

Welcome calling is no different. Set a day and time for the call during sign-up, and save a branded vCard on their phone containing the number you'll be calling them on. Treat every call like an appointment and you should expect the same result.

The first cultural change occurs here. Fundraisers are exceptional salespeople, arguably the best of the best. If they are motivated to find the best possible time for someone to be called, and to make sure that when they receive the call it'll display who is calling, they will make that happen. The cultural challenge here is that welcome calling has historically suffered from the problems listed above. Friction often arises between fundraisers and under resourced or outsourced welcome callers with scatter gun calling technology, who are seen as auditors or 'cancellers' likely to ruin hard work and positivity with detached call center energy. Honestly, they think it's best if they don't get that call. Importantly, don't put this cultural change on the calling manager. It has to come from the top.

Evergiving supports this cultural change in a number of ways. We make it easy for fundraisers to set a call back date and time within the form flow. We make it easy for fundraisers to store vCards on donor phones. We make it easy for you to have the best possible donor experience from a call center. We support implementation by making appointment setting mandatory and every vCard shared with a new donor is a unique, trackable link tied to that pledge and by extension the fundraiser, which can be used for reporting. Reporting can inform reward, training and disciplinary actions. For this to work, fundraisers must be incentivised on appointments (first call contact) made. Talk to us as we have a rich set of tools to support you in a way that suits your culture.

The power dialler

Evergiving helps welcome callers easily make these appointments by automatically calling records at the exact right time, with the right outbound number. Storing a branded vCard on a donor's phone with the outbound number also bypasses all screening mechanisms. If it is in their phone, it has ultimate trust. It also has superior donor trust.

As long as the appointments are set and sold you should expect a nearly 100% first call contact rate.

If appointments are missed, automated branded voicemails can be left, and branded SMS messages can also be sent. You can even set Evergiving to try again after ten minutes, on the second attempt only, with a different automated voicemail left.

Since you're encouraging a call back, Evergiving has an automated return call system that rings available callers when your missed appointment calls you back. If no caller is available they can leave a message and you can play phone tag until you get them. Like you would a normal business appointment where quality human interaction is expected.

If appointments aren't well sold, there might be a cohort of donors who are hard to reach. Evergiving is designed to intelligently serve records on autodial, with settings for time of day, call frequencies, even dial times per call attempt, and features that automatically leave different branded voicemails per call attempt.