Yes, Fundraising via the Phone Is Still Alive!

Recently, the good folks over at The Agitator wrote a blog post about telemarketing, "Telemarketing Lives!"

As someone who works in the marketing intelligence world for nonprofits, I continue to be surprised how many organizations don't use this important channel or — even worse — have used it before and stopped using it. The Agitator articles sums it up nicely with its title — and I'm going one step forward and providing just one of many case studies we, at Eleventy Marketing Group, have seen.

Simply put, folks, don't miss out on this channel. But take my advice on this — this is not a "willy-nilly fundraising channel." It takes the right data science to make it successful. Don't shortcut this step, or telemarketing will not live long for you.

The challenge

A national children's hospital was using telemarketing to convert one-time gift donors into monthly sustainers. This was a stellar, mature program but had begun to fatigue, and performance degradation was driving up the cost per dollar raised. Eleventy delved into the data to develop a model to make the program more effective and efficient.

Using data from the calling program and attributes from Eleventy's consumer database, 50 different demographic and psychographic variable attributes were overlaid onto the file. A scoring algorithm was then used to determine which attributes to use in a predictive model based on the relative ability to separate records and deliver the desired result.

No one will ever convince me that all donors are alike, and for that reason, generic modeling will not work when it comes to really helping an organization with a challenge. With this particular organization, 12 specific variables were identified as having impact on performance. And, in case you were wondering, no. the variables were not all elements of RFM, and perhaps more importantly, some of the 12 were "external" data that was overlaid to help the program.