Literature Review on Effective Telephone Fundraising: The Ultimate Guide to Raising More Money by Stephen Schatz

Summary

Despite the advent of sophisticated fundraising methods via the Internet, social media, and other online platforms, good old-fashioned telephone fundraising still works, bringing in over one billion dollars annually from generous Americans. This book shows us how to secure more donors, raise more money, and build donor loyalty by making good fundraising calls. The author, Stephen Schatz, is an experienced cofounder of a direct mail/telephone fundraising service bureau that raised tens of millions of dollars in over twenty years. Thus, this is a book which reveals an insider’s evaluation of fundraising methods and strategies to making good fundraising calls.

Review

This book is very comprehensive as it starts off with the evaluation of different methods and follows through with a step-by-step guide to effective telephone fundraising.
Firstly, the author established various criteria for the most effective fundraising methods. These include the degree of personalization, type of channel, degree of interruption, message timing, dimensionality, time of attention, reliability, ability to reach large numbers of constituents, cost and flexibility. After all, the telephone medium is rated as the most effective method as it is very personal and able to reach large numbers of constituents.

Next, the author introduced different scripting strategies and weighed the effectiveness of prescriptive and non-prescriptive scripts. After analyzing both scripts, the best way is to generate a call outline, which has the advantages of both the prescriptive and non-prescriptive scripts.

After that, there is a detailed guide to the call process:
1. Identify the prospect
2. Introduce and identify yourself
3. Build rapport
4. Explain the purpose of your call
5. Negotiation
6. Facing the results

Every step is explained clearly with humorous examples. In my opinion, this is very engaging and professional.

In conclusion, the key factor for making effective telephone fundraising calls is to be flexible in every process. This book is definitely helpful to our current fundraising project as we have learnt some basic skills from it. Hence, we hope to become more effective in our fundraising project this year.