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.
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.
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:
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:
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:
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.
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:
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.
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.
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:
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.]
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?”
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:
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:
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.