Phonathon Data

Tonight was our school’s Annual Fund phonathon.   I’ve been involved for either five or possibly six years now.   Initially I was paralyzed at the though of calling someone and asking them for money over the phone.   I sat at a desk and looked at my cell phone and didn’t have the nerve to make the first call.

But it gets easier.   I’ve helped coordinate the phonathon for the last three years.   Tonight I gave the callers some education on the process, what to say to callers and what to ask.   A lot of the information that I discussed with them I’d written up three years ago into a call sheet patter for myself.   The consultant we had had a workbook with lots of good information in it but it was too much, too many things and the nuggets of data I needed, specifically the phrases I wanted to use such as, “we hope you will consider a gift that is meaningful and appropriate to your family” was hard to find in her packet.

So I boiled it down.   I wrote up a, “do this in this order and you’ll know exactly what to say” sheet with paths for new families, families that had given before, families you didn’t reach by phone, families that weren’t sure and families that did want to make a contribution over the phone.   So that part was easy and done.   The data part was what took the work.

What families should we call?   We couldn’t call every family that had ever attended the school and grandparents.   So we selected larger historical donors and all new families.   What information do we need to have when we call them, such as names, children’s names and classes, phone numbers, email addresses and past giving history.   What amount should we ask them to contribute (typically a larger amount than prior years).   And who will be calling whom?  

It’s a lot of data to organize and then it needs to be formatted into call sheets so each caller has a sheer for each person they’ll be calling and information to follow-up the next day with an email.   I went through eight versions of the spreadsheet, asking for more data from the school multiple times.   I think I went through five versions of the mail merge word document getting everything right for the call sheets.  

But by this afternoon it was all ready to go and tonight our callers, plied with wine and pizza, made calls.   We had a matching challenge from our Annual Fund chairs for new and higher donations and we not only made that goal, we exceeded it.    We got a good number of donations and will probably have more coming in from the emails our callers will send out tomorrow.  

So it was a good day.   Hopefully someone will want to manage the phonathon next year, because three years may be my limit.   Although don’t tell anyone, I did have fun working with the spreadsheet though.

The Big Boy Update:  My son saw Dhruti today about the behavior issues he’s having at school.   Dhruti says she thinks it’s how some things are going at school, possibly a more challenging time with the work he’s doing as he’s getting more difficult work to do.   She’s going to explore with his teacher and we’ll have him go back to see her next week.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter can do a pull-up.   We knew she had a lot of arm strength but we didn’t realize she could easily do a pull-up until we got her a bar to hang on her door frame and asked her.   My son couldn’t do one, but then again he doesn’t spend half his waking hours at home hanging from the door frames.