Research phone calls

Photos: Samantha Hurley and (insert) Brodie Vissers, on Burst

This webpage is for trust fundraisers with three or more years’ experience. Beginners should use this page instead.

“Do I need to do this?”

Yes you do, if you want to be a really good fundraiser. You can get by okay if you only make calls when you feel you absolutely have to, but it will hold you back, at least sometimes. Trainer Luke Fitzherbert used to always ask successful fundraisers did they use the phone and he said they would nearly all say “Yes”. I’ve heard people say they significantly increased their income when they started making calls. Calls will enable you to:

• Get the right project / avoid wasting time on ineligibles
• Get the timing right
• Get the stage in the fundraising right
• Guide you on what to say in the proposal (long/short, what to include, etc)
• Occasionally it’s worth inviting people to meet
• Start to build the relationship with the individual you’re talking to – who might be an assessor but will at least know useful things
• When you get into it, it’s actually a good way to get your motivation up when you’re bored and tired.

It will probably give you a competitive advantage. A KEDA consulting survey found that ¾ of trust fundraisers only phoned the funder before applying if they had a specific question. However, (1) there’s almost always something you don’t know and (2) sometimes the most valuable things you learn aren;t what you called about originally.

Calls will actually very rarely annoy the recipient. If it does – they’re rarely the decision maker and in that case I’d probably leave it a couple of weeks, send the proposal in the name of someone more senior who’s a different gender and they won’t realize in the massive flood of applications. Anyway, the risks would be vastly outweighed by the benefits.

It needn’t be very frightening. Very few Trusts dislike it. (Asked what one thing would you get grant seekers to stop doing, Steve Grimmet, Head of the Zurich Community Trust, actually said, ‘Stop sending e-mails without picking the phone up’) They’re decent people who will either help or have clear policies that they won’t help and they’ll politely dismiss you. They’re also usually pretty nice. I’ve occasionally had lovely conversations with people, who’ve been fascinated by the work.

Some of it is in the manner, I think. I ring expecting to like the person I’m calling, I’m relaxed but upbeat and am trying to drop in the odd interesting thing. If you’re a solicitor, this is potentially a lot more interesting than the work you’d otherwise be doing. 

In the following video, I say a lot about how not to be nervous about calls. Since then I’ve revisited this and found more ideas:

• Build up slowly, trying to keep your relaxation. Like any phobia, the best cure is probably to go through it, building slowly as you develop confidence:
  • Mentally rehearse, visualising it working
  • Maybe have the odd practice go with colleagues. In training days, I set people up to do research calls and then pair them up. By the end of the call, people are usually enjoying themselves and confident to do the calls
  • Start with easier calls – e.g., calling to check when proposals are due – and work upwards. If you’re doing research calls on a project, start first with the ones that don’t matter. Do people that you know have professional standards and shouldn’t be rude, such as the local Community Foundation.
• Going blank
  • If you’re mentally trying to remember a script, you’re more likely to go blank. If you’re well rehearsed, it helps and it’s reassuring to have the notes. However, don’t rehearse word for word, practice a number of times, saying things a bit differently each time.
  • If you are in a call and go blank, the following are top tips from a professor of Communications at Stanford Business School:
    • Go back and repeat what you just said. It usually doesn’t sound weird to the listener, because it helps them retain/digest what you’re saying. It can be a good cue to remember what comes next
    • Having a pre-prepared question that buys you thinking time. E.g.,: “Is there anything I’ve covered so far that you’d like to comment on?”
• Worried you’ll made a bad impression? It’s useful to realize that you make a better impression than you think.
  • I try not to give my name until I’m clearly speaking to the right person, who seems a bit open to a call.
  • Occasionally someone who says it makes a good impression just to be calling. They see the people who call as brave souls who are doing the job properly.
  • You know a hundred times as much as the person on the other end of the phone does. You may be worried about “being found out” in some way (a perfectly natural reaction) but actually, when you’re calling someone out of the blue about a service they’ve never heard of, there’s zero chance that they’ll spot the little flaw in the work that you’re trying to get Services to iron out.
  • Your service doesn’t have to be that ready. As long as you present it as something you’re working up, there’s nothing wrong with gaps in your knowledge or the project.
  • You’re not actually submitting something to them at that point, you’re discussing a possible project. If they make a profound point, there area lot of ways you can take the conversation, from “I don’t personally know the answer” to “I’ve not thought about that personally, if the team haven’t looked into it I’m sure they will”
  • In my career I’ve only once or twice messed up horribly or had a very negative reaction when ringing out of the blue. (It’s hard to do.) When doing high volumes of proposals, though, it’s a bit easier to speak to people who don’t like calls. I left submission by a week or two and got someone more senior in the charity to sign the cover letter. The chance of a staff member, who’s swimming in applications, to connect call with a stranger two weeks earlier to this proposal was very low.
  • If a call was a bit of a mess – the person you speak to next won’t know that. If you keep being positive, you can quickly recover. 
  • Being intimidated by the trusts. Given that some trusts personnel do have egos, I don’t think it does you much harm to feel you want to treat them with real respect. However, having seen trusts staff tottering drunkenly around on the dance floor at an Association of Charitable Foundations residential conference, I’m under no pretensions that they’re other than fallible humans, like the rest of us (albeit hopefully with useful skills). A few things that might help:
    • If you’re speaking to someone from a firm of solicitors, spend a few minutes imagining who they are and their job. The chances are, they spend a lot of their time doing utterly unrelated professional work, interrupted every now again with a little chat to a charity. They may understand their trust, but there’s no way they’re really in a position to pass judgement on your charity and its work.
    • Look grants staff up on LinkedIn. Sometimes you’ll find they’re really a receptionist, or, like the Director of one foundation, the former nanny of the family of trustees. Quite a few of them used to do a job like your own (and that’s the basis of their qualifications). Another alternative is that they worked in some policy function. You only need to read a few policy papers and research reports to realize that this kind of knowledge is  either miles from the front line, or it’s quite basic when it comes to the “real world” (though the study gives you a fantastic theoretical framework). They’re not THAT well placed to be sitting in judgement on you, really – it’s just that someone has to do it and the job has fallen to them. Occasionally you DO speak to a real expert. However, my own experience is that, the better the grants officer actually is at their job, the better they also are at setting you at your ease, so they can have a good conversation.
    • If you’re still feeling intimidated, try imagining them in a ludicrous situation as they’re speaking – e.g., wearing Union Jack underwear and novelty glasses. You’re not making fun of them (any more than you want to laugh at them in calls!) People are just people and you need to get past the overblown image you’ve built in your mind.
  • A good way to start, to avoid getting too nervous at that point, is:
    • Go straight into mirroring and matching their voice
    • Be genuine from the off and clearly respectful of their time. That might mean:
      • Ask “Do you have five minutes?” or however long it is, as that’s genuine.
      • Keep things to the point, initially, so you’re clearly respecting their time.

How to make the research call

In many cases, as a colleague, Suzy Duggan, put it, ‘You just need to ask them a question and they will tell you what you need to know’. However, the following video breaks down a methodology:

Timings

If you’re calling early, late, during the holidays or at lunch, it’s more likely you won’t get anyone. However, it’s also a bit more likely that the person who screens the calls isn’t there and you’ll speak to someone else, who might be more senior. This isn’t worth considering if it’s a big, professional trust like Trust for London or Henry Smith Charity, where you go straight through to a Grants officer (who’s probably the most influential person, anyway). However, if it’s a Director, who’s making the decisions and an administrator who’s responsible for paperwork and screening calls, it might be worth considering.

Attitudes towards calling

It helps to go in with an attitude that, if you can, you’ll achieve ambitious goals with the call. That way, if you spot the opportunity to meet, or to persuade an actual decision maker a bit, you’ll do it.

However, you’ll also benefit from having your “usual” goal and secondary goals. There are two reasons:

• Firstly, it can be much more positive than if you’re only focused on the money. Yes, absolutely we should be focused on that. However, it’s not always there. You can still things at the end, like: “I now know the following about these trusts of interest to me…” or “I’ve tried out a particular style of approach and I know what does and doesn’t work about it in calls or with trusts” or “I know how to sell/value our work, segment our prospects” That can make the calls a positive step towards successful fundraising, even if it’s not clear that you can sit down and write bids that will meet the target for the project.
•  Secondly, it’s possible to get to the end of a job and not know that much more about key targets than when you arrived. What a waste. You should be working towards understanding and a relationship with the funder, even if it hasn’t turned into money yet.

Opening the call

It can help if you can establish interest in the listener at the start of the call. They might get more involved in the call. So for example, “Even though it looks like we fit your trust’s interests well, we’ve tried applying to you four times before. I wonder if you could answer a few questions that might help me identify what’s not working for us” “I’ve read everything I can find on the trust, but I still have a few questions before we can choose what best to send.”

The second example touches on a key point by telesales guru Art Sobczak. The call recipient will be much more interested if it seems like the call is about them, rather than a random, uninformed approach. Sobczak would say to phrase things so that, although you’re expressing uncertainty, you’re looking to solve an actual problem for the prospect. (E.g., “I know you’re introducing some new plant and our widget typically increases productivity by 25%. I have a few questions because I wondered if it was worth sending you some details about something that might suit you.”) In our case, I imagine the people with the problem are usually the service users, not the trust on the phone, but you see the parallel.

Listen well

Sobczak suggests to telesales people that they pause for 2-3 seconds after the prospect answers the question. It’s a way to encourage more full answers and it also gives the speaker a chance to review a little what they’ve said. It means you can really focus on the answer, without having to think up a next question. If, like me, you don’t easily take good notes, it could also give you the chance to get them right! Or, it helps you ensure that your next question is the best one.

It’s worth capturing the trust’s language on key points – you can repeat that back in the proposal.

Use “verbal nods”: “Aha”, “I see”, “Interesting”. Encourage people: “Go on”, “Tell me more”.

If someone lowers their voice, so they can’t be heard by the rest of the office, they’re possibly giving you sensitive information.

A listening approach that encourages people to disclose

In Sales EQ, Jeb Bllount makes the interesting (for us) point that people like being able to disclose – there’s actually a positive emotional response you can monitor called the dopamine cycle that’s triggered by it – but people need to feel safe and listened to to go there. He proposes a method of sales prospecting that could be modified for trusts research, that encourages disclosure:

1. Begin with an easy open question
2. Reward the speaker for talking through listening and interest
3. Avoid interrupting
4. Pause 3-5 seconds before speaking (allow them to fill in the silence)
5. Once the loop is running, centre your follow-up questions on the disclosures to unearth the concerns that are motivating them. (In sales, that would be the pains that the product could address, but I think in our field the key emotions of grant makers are somewhat different.)

Be a little assertive – but in a very respectful, listening way

It’s easy to come away without the detail you need – especially if you’re feeling a bit intimidated by the caller due to feeling judged / the power imbalance. However, it’s worth asking yourself: “If I go for clarity or stop at this point, which will help my service users more?” Then, go with the right thing.

However, if I’m pushing a little, it helps to balance that with being that bit more respectful and nice. Summarising what they’ve said can be a good technique – it shows you’re really listening, but also helps you to show the gap in what you need to know: 

“It sounds like you’re saying that for a charity of our nature, there’s a good chance we’ll get squeezed out by the sheer weight of competition, but your trustees would always be pleased to see an exceptional project, and one thing that is exceptional is if the project’s highly original, like nothing anyone else has proposed. Is there anything else you can think of that the trustees have sometimes seen as making a project outstanding?” [Note the use of past tense with a potentially difficult to answer question – it’s harder to avoid answering a question of fact than something that’s more speculative.]

Trusts’ objections to helping you

If you go too far in trying to get answers from the trust, you’re breaking the Fundraising Code of Conduct. We’re not supposed to be cold calling. I’d say that you could argue that “cold calling” is ringing a tonne of trusts and robotically making the same pitch to all irrespective of whether they’d want the call. What we do ISN’T cold calling – we make carefully targeted calls about the specific needs of trusts that have advertised that they want to speak by advertising their numbers. However, if you’re actively trying to get round their reluctance to talk, or pestering someone, you’re really cold calling, in breach of the code.

On the other hand, I’d say it’s reasonable to distinguish what’s a complete brush-off from what’s just a misunderstanding of what you want. So, if they say, “Sorry, we’ve committed all our funds,” it’s not unreasonable to clearly acknowledge that (so they feel heard) and ask: “Is there a date when we could try approaching you when you might have some free money, again?”

It’s worth having considered what the trust might say and having follow up questions where appropriate.

One technique which helps is what salespeople call a “pattern disrupt”. This would help if the person you’re speaking to isn’t terribly helpful, though it’s their job to help. If you can do something (100% appropriate) that simply jolts them out of their habitual (probably bored) pattern of thinking and responding, you might be able to connect with the real person and maybe engage them a little and learn something. For example, because most people don’t do it, the “”few projects” example below is a pattern disrupt. Another would be something as simple as asking a grants officer “How’ve you been?” if you’re ringing back, rather than “How are you?” or making a good, relevant, joke.

If they try and get you to just send something, I normally ask “There are a few projects I need to choose from, would you mind if I ask a couple of questions to choose which?” if that’s not true, a fall-back position is: “I wouldn’t want to send a proposal that wasn’t worthy of your consideration. Would you mind if we just cover a couple of the most key points?”

Questions as a form of selling something

You’ll be well aware that we’re usually not selling anything on the phone, we’re researching things with a view to selling them well on paper and in subsequent assessment meetings. However, if you’re speaking to someone whom you know will assess you – you’re calling the TNL Community Fund, Trust for London, Henry Smith Charity or another grants officer who’ll actually make a recommendation, there’s no harm in trying to influence them a bit.

Telesales guru Art Sobczak’s Smart Calling sales method involves a lot of asking questions as a way of persuading people. He thinks this works better in sales. For example, in our context, “Our volunteer peer-led approach to information provision both enables us to reach a lot of people for the size of grant and to really inspire those with the lowest confidence. Do you think that either issue would be a priority to go into for your trustees?”

 If I was to advise you from a business to business sales perspective, I’d say to site the discussions over a pain point for your prospect – and to use the questions to bring that situation to life for them, as it’s very motivating. It’s rare that you’ll get the chance to do that, but if you spot it, doing so could help. In my experience, trusts don’t actually experience that much pain where we can help. The pain they do have that might be relevant, though, is:

• Is there a better use of the money? (Be aware that under the Fundraising Code of Practice, you’re not allowed to criticize another named charity or indicate that it would be a mistake to fund another named charity.)  
• If we don’t fund this, might something terrible happen? (If you’re going in this direction, you’d have to be very careful (1) not to come across as badly run and therefore in trouble; and (2) if you’re implying that they’re the only ones who could help, they might hear “no one else thinks this cause is important – possibly because it isn’t”)
• Occasionally, I’ve worried as a grant-maker about the consequences of not funding something that’s actually a truly brilliant idea. However, I’ve had colleagues who’d think that, if it’s a brilliant idea, someone else might pick it up if we pass.
• Some projects are so incredibly moving that they invoke a particularly powerful compassion reaction. (Perhaps it’s because I’ve been around for decades, but there aren’t many that really stand out in that way – a lot of projects have compelling needs, when you really think about it.)

Sales EQ

Again when you’re in that minority of cases where you talk to a grants talking direct to the grants officer who’ll assess you, it’s worth bearing in mind the key points of Jeb Blount’s book Sales EQ, which is about how you influence someone on a more emotional basis. The relevant material complements the material on moving people as regards your cause (discussed in the general proposal writing menu) but is different.

This might include:

• Developing real empathy, to go along with your excellent listening – so you can completely “get” where the person you’re approaching is coming from
• Getting people to get themselves to the point you want them to understand, by asking questions, rather than arguing for something so much
• Being likeable, which covers things like: politeness, smiling, voice tone, being very engaged, speaking in the same language, being enthusiastic and confident
• Looking to connect with the grants officer a bit if the chance comes up – Bill Bruty suggests looking out for things you may have in common, asking them about them and then expressing your own opinion that brings out the commonality. I expect he would also very much agree that connection is also about things like talking from common values and aims. 
• Generating genuine trust by behaving in a deeply trustworthy way. For example:
  • Demonstrating deep understanding of the funder
  • Congruency with a reliable concern for and prioritisation of the funder: listening, keeping promises, showing up on time, following up, following through, managing your message, etc: Jeb Blount says that trust is only rarely lost through big disasters, it is normally chipped away through small failures to evidence the right attitude and behaviour
• Getting very small commitments from the grants officer, to encourage them to think in terms of being supportive of you
• Giving them your 100% attention rather than spending as much time actively putting your points across to them. When you deeply listen, not only do you learn what you need to cover, you are also giving the funder something and they will feel a little bit of need to reciprocate.

Resources

Apollo Fundraising’s blog has a nice article entitled “The Curse of Embarrassment” on research calls.

If you do a lot of calls, it’s worth considering reading a book or two on telesales. I like Art Sobczak’s Smart Calling. We don’t do telesales and it would be unwise to get on the phone with that aim in mind. However, as with many things in our field, there are similarities to the work of others and telesales people have a huge amount of experience with phone calls that impress people and get what you want.