Fundraising for Social Change, 8th Edition

chapter SIXTEENPhone Banking

From about 1985 to 2003, telemarketing grew as a fundraising technique and, although people complained about receiving these kinds of calls, it did work with a large cross section of the population. In the late 1990s and early part of this century, it was not unusual to receive two or three calls in an evening, made to your landline, with paid callers selling anything from credit cards to rain gutters. In 2003, Congress passed a popular piece of legislation, the “Do Not Call Act.” You can now opt out of receiving commercial telemarketing calls by registering your phone number with a master “Do Not Call” list (nonprofits are exempt from the Do Not Call list). This one law decreased the volume of calls enormously. Then, over the next 10 years, as email increasingly replaced the phone as a communication tool for all of us, and fewer and fewer people had landlines, we all started doing much of our communication on our cell phones by text and email. The phone rarely rings. This situation has led many people to proclaim that the strategy of calling people and asking them for money is over. Stanford University took this state of affairs so seriously that in 2016 it announced with great fanfare that it was ending its alumni phone‐a‐thon (https://web.stanford.edu/dept/OOD/communications/telefund/index.html).

Yet, many of us observe, we still get a lot of prospecting calls—from politicians, from insurance companies, from companies wanting to extend our warranties ...