Telefundraising Case Study

In 2017, the fundraising team realised that times were changing.

To continue to engage their supporters, and fund their volunteers’ efforts to conserve our natural environment, traditional door-to-door fundraising and cold calling just wasn’t going to cut it.

The future was in digital strategies: nurturing and engaging their current supporters and prospective donors through social media channels, and search engine marketing.

We made a big decision 18 months ago to just focus purely on the phone team providing digital leads, and of course the platform that connects those together is contactSPACE.

If the team were to successfully execute such a significant shift in their fundraising strategy, they knew that the solution they were using to engage these leads as soon as they arrived, and re-engage their existing donors, had to be up to the task.

Not only did this new platform have to be able to process the data as it came in, the solution also had to have the capability to handle dozens of different datasets across multiple concurrent initiatives – as inbound leads were arriving from a number of different sources.

Crucially, the leaders were looking for a solution which was able to provide comprehensive insights into the conversion rates and outcomes the telefundraising team were achieving, to allow for effective ongoing performance improvement.

As the not-for-profit launched with contactSPACE, the team set up their initiatives to manage the wide array of datasets their contact centre was working on.

After learning more about the data strategies available for use on the contactSPACE platform, the team were able to develop incredibly granular tactics to get the most out of each specific dataset that their callers were targeting.

For example, the team can now prioritise fresh records as they come in from social channels such as Facebook, while systematically working through their reactivation efforts with previous donors.

contactSPACE allows us to [use] many types of platforms, so it’s flexible and efficient… we didn’t have the same freedom with our previous system.

Having moved to contactSPACE from a legacy provider, the fundraising team found the benefits on offer, both in terms of efficiency and better call outcomes, from using a platform developed on a philosophy of human-centred design.

It’s a system that is very easy to use, from both an administrator’s point of view, and a caller’s point of view.

Team leaders can now on-board new agents in as little as 10 minutes, as the solution is designed to be as intuitive as possible to use from the very beginning.

…the brilliance is… we can have a caller come in on contactSPACE, and within a 10 or 15-minute period of showing them how the system works, they understand it straight away.

With contactSPACE, team leaders were able to design beautiful interfaces for their callers, manage initiative settings, keep on top of agent performance, and design custom reports – all without the need for external support.

…on the previous system… if we wanted to change something in the system, we had to go back to the original developer, and actually ask them to change something. So contactSPACE is great from that point of view… [we] can create a lot of [our] own functions.

An an NGO, the organisation found contactSPACE CallGuides® incredibly useful in helping their callers articulate the organisation’s mission, and promote the results their worldwide network of volunteers strive to achieve.

Rather than relying on static plain-text scripts, or clunky external programs, the team can now create beautiful, engaging interfaces on the contactSPACE platform, complete with customised call outcome buttons to ensure the accuracy of their reports.

…it’s sort of like this bottle of passion that we unlock… the more visual we can be in presenting that, the better the outcome is going to be… contactSPACE allows us to do that.

As the NGO initially implemented the contactSPACE platform, it immediately became clear the benefits that the solution could provide.

[before we got fully up and running] we could clearly see that contactSPACE drove a really good contact rate for us.

Moreover, the team now had much greater visibility into their conversion rates, and began to see their targets being met.

And we’ve now seen that we’ve got stability with our conversion rates across a really broad range of programs that we’re really happy with – we’re meeting our targets in that area.

Importantly, this visibility team leaders the ability to quickly troubleshoot any issues their initiatives were facing, minimising lost revenue as a result of one-off problems.

And we can very quickly identify within contactSPACE if there’s a drop in contacts per hour, what the problem is there and resolve it, and we can also see very quickly where we’re tracking behind in our budgeted hours and take steps to remedy that quite quickly.

As a result, the organisation’s transition to purely digital donor engagement strategies has been a resounding success.

The team are not only able to better-optimise their contact strategies, they now have the capability to monitor results in real-time, and make tactical tweaks as necessary – all without the burden of having to rely on a third party to make the changes on their behalf.

Ultimately, this agility has been a crucial factor in unlocking better contact, conversion, and reactivation rates, allowing the NGO to achieve outstanding results from their refined donor engagement strategy.

…our relationship with contactSPACE is so important…