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| Calling
all donors |
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| The
call centre is a necessity for any organisation running big
campaigns or ongoing fundraising initiatives. The question
is whether it is more cost effective to outsource this function
or keep it in-house. Sandra Haurant investigates both sides
of the argument |
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Whether
you only use it during big campaigns, or it forms part of
your funding strategy every day of the year, telephone fundraising
is likely to feature somewhere in your list of money-making
methods. As such, many charities are faced with a quandary:
just how do you go about using the phone to encourage new
donors or upgrade existing ones in the most efficient way?
The answer will depend on a whole heap of variables; the scale
of your organisation, the number of staff, the size of your
premises, the style of your campaign, the nature of your mission.
The list is endless, but the answer usually falls into one
of two camps. Either you set up your own in-house call centre,
or you outsource this part of your fundraising to an external
company.
Cerebra for example, a charity working to prevent brain damage
and to help brain damaged children and their families, found
that its own solution was to set up and staff its own call
centre facilities. The charity employs around 100 telephone
fundraising staff, including students and full-time workers,
at two different sites. The vast majority of staff are making
outbound calls to try to convert one-off donors into regular
givers or to increase the donations of existing supporters.
Sian Morgan, head of fundraising at Cerebra, says: “We
have always had our own call centre and it is the most cost-effective
solution for us.” All of the charity’s fundraising
is carried out over the phone, so using an external company
to carry out the work simply did not make sense.
The call centre has been in place for a decade and the set-up
costs have been outweighed by its success rate. Just one small
team of staff work on the charity’s lottery fundraising
scheme, encouraging supporters to give at least one pound
a week, in return for which they are entered into a weekly
draw and could win £1,000. Cerebra has 23,000 people
giving at least £1 a week now, and in January it raised
£1 million in one week for the first time. All the support
was drummed up through the call centre.
Morgan was brought in as fundraising manager but has become
a call centre manager on top of her main role, and has clearly
done well. But while a 100-strong in-house fundraising team
works for some charities, for others it is not an appropriate
approach.
Indeed, according to Vanessa Blake, managing director of The
Phone Room, a call centre service that deals purely with not-for-profit
clients, “a large percentage of larger charities outsource
their call centre needs rather than setting up in-house operations”.
The RSPCA, for example, has a very small team of just three
people working in- house calling to reactivate lapsed donors,
but aside from that all its telephone fundraising activities
are outsourced. The organisation uses a company called Sitel
to take in-coming calls, including the influx following TV
campaigns, for example. Another company, Personal Telephone
Fundraising (PTF), is engaged to make outgoing calls converting
one-off gifts to regular donations and encourage donors to
increase the amount they give, and even to deal with legacies.
“The reason we use them is that we don’t have
the resources here, and they have the skills required to do
the job,” explains Brendon Elliott, marketing manager
of the donor development department at the RSPCA. “It
does cost us, but the returns outweigh the costs.”
When it comes to incoming calls, it would simply not be practical
for the charity to set up a call centre capable of dealing
with potential calls from hundreds of people responding to
a campaign advert that has just been aired. The space needed,
the cost and the resources involved would soon negate the
benefits of the campaign.
And while the charity uses outgoing calls to raise funds all
year round, its strategy means it makes more sense to buy
in the skills on offer from PTF. Elliott feels the skills
of the callers, coupled with the volume of calls being made,
make outsourcing a wiser choice. “It’s been very
successful,” he says. “If it wasn’t, we
would not do it.”
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There is suspicion in some parts of the sector that outsourced
call centre staff are not well-equipped to properly represent
the charities they are working for. For example, they may
struggle when asked difficult questions and may do an inadequate
job of explaining a charity’s mission.
Elliott is confident that this is not the case. He, like many
of the PTF’s client’s, personally briefs and trains
the call centre staff who will be working on the RSPCA’s
behalf. “We always invite charities to come and train
the staff,” says Jane Cunningham, founding director
of PTF.
“If we are doing a lot of contacts for a charity they
might not come for every campaign. But if it’s an ongoing
campaign then we would encourage ongoing training.”
And it’s not just the fundraising department that makes
it to the call centre; field workers from other areas of the
charity also make an appearance, something Cunningham feels
further helps the call centre staff to engage with a charity’s
mission.
PTF feels strongly that its staff are personal fundraisers,
not casual staff or people looking for a career in a call
centre. The minimum contract is 20 hours a week, and the organisation
does not encourage people who see this as a short-term job.
“The longer they have been here, the better they become
at the job. We have staff who have been working for us for
five or six years and they are the best callers. Not just
in terms of results but in terms of their call handling skills.”
There is no room for robot-like script reading. Indeed, argues
Cunningham: “You couldn’t do this job on automatic
pilot.”
The Phone Room takes a similar approach. Blake says that its
staff, from mature members through to students, have one thing
in common: a level of empathy for the causes for which they
are working.
Employees at the Phone Room work on one campaign at a time,
but are trained to work on up to five or six different campaigns
and are often moved around in the interest of keeping their
motivation high and preventing them from becoming stale. As
at PTF, organisations are encouraged to brief staff in person,
and The Phone Room keeps in daily contact so that any questions
its staff are unable to answer reach someone at the core of
the charity who can.
According to Blake, the response rates bear out the success
of the model. The Phone Room converts around 25% to 30% of
contacts who have given a single gift into regular givers,
and sees around 65% to 70% success in upgrading existing regular
donors. The level of success reached by Sian Morgan’s
in-house team at Cerebra hovers around the same mark, converting
around 20% of ‘cold’ donors, and 75% for ‘hot’.
Anecdotally, at least, outsourced staff seem to be as good
as in-house employees at drumming up donors, so perhaps this
fairly new breed of specialist call centre company is responsible
for the success.
But while measuring the success rates of outsourced call centres
is relatively straightforward, comparing the costs involved
in setting up and running a call centre against outsourcing
is more difficult.
It all depends on the size of the facility you want to set
up, the number of staff, the number of phone lines, technology
packages required, rent for the premises, furniture and so
on. If you are going to use the facilities long term and all
the time, it may well be worth considering. But for short-term
campaign purposes, many charities find the external route
more economical. PTF charges charities a price per contact
made, and that charge includes its entire service, from the
call through to the paperless direct debit administration,
with a few exceptions.
Clearly, it’s not for everyone. “Outsourcing is
good for a campaign-by-campaign basis, but not for an organisation
using a call centre all the time, like us,” says Cerebra’s
Morgan. But it is certainly a solution for many charities
not willing or able to invest the sums, or indeed find the
skills required, for a successful permanent call centre. “There
are very few charities who have the in-house skills to run
an effective fundraising call centre,” says Blake.
The same can not be said of Cerebra. Its call centre activity
has been so successful that it is now starting to look at
providing outsourced telephone fundraising services to other
charities.
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