Campaign Fundraising Deep Dive: Preparing for Call Time

This is the first in a four-part series on how to get the most out of call time. Learn here how to maximize your campaign fundraising by preparing to have highly effective call time sessions.

One of the reasons many candidates and staffers dislike call time so much is because they are going into each session without having sufficiently prepared. Frustration grows as you struggle to figure out who to call or what to ask them for, in real-time. Campaign staff becomes frustrated that the candidate isn’t moving more quickly from call to call, and the candidate becomes frustrated that they don’t feel like they have enough information at their fingertips about the calls they’re supposed to make. This routine quickly grows tiresome. Luckily, it’s also mostly avoidable.

Below are several important ways you can prepare for an effective call time. You might also consider leveraging technology to help facilitate this work, as it will significantly improve your performance, and save you on your campaign’s most precious resource: time.

NOTE: Even before you start prepping calls, make sure you’ve created your fundraising goals, and also excavated your network.

Cut a List

Calling from your full database can be overwhelming, messy, and inefficient. Instead, pull a list to call through. This will help you make intentional choices about who to contact, and keep you focused on completing a finite list over a specific period of time. Deciding who to reach out to each day is the most important decision you will consistently make that impacts your fundraising. So here are a few things to keep in mind, so you’re consistently making smart choices:

• Prioritize your best leads. Your best leads are those that are typically larger political donors, and are part of your network. Software like CallTime.AI can help you identify and score these people so you can spend your time pursuing them. And that time is worth the investment: someone who could contribute $2,000, for example, should take up twice as much of your call time as someone who can contribute $1,000. If you’re reaching out to your $1,000 prospect as often as you’re trying to reach your $2,000 prospect, then you’re not being smart about prioritizing your best leads.
• Get in touch, and stay in touch. Almost all of your prospective donors will require several attempts to reach, and then potentially multiple “touches” to earn their financial support. It’s important to have a system to ensure you are consistently trying to get in touch, and then getting back in touch at regular intervals that build and grow these relationships, and donations to your campaign. Re-soliciting existing donors is often a strong way to boost fundraising, too, so it’s important to be thoughtful about when you go back to your existing supporters.
• Cluster by content. It can be helpful to cluster your calls around a particular message or ask you are making. For example, if you are having a fundraiser in two weeks, you might want to cut a list of your prospects and donors who live in that neighborhood and call to encourage them to attend. Or, if you just received an endorsement from a legal group you want to fundraise on, you might call through all the attorneys on your list one day. The advantage of this is that you don’t have to spend much time between calls considering your pitch/message from person to person.

Prepare Your Call Sheets

Calls and outreach run more smoothly when you have key information about your prospect handy. While different candidates and callers will have preferences about what information is most useful at-a-glance, here are some items that- in the hands of the right candidate- can be a powerful way to further the relationship:

• Past donation history. Not only is this information crucial to identifying your leads to begin with, a quick glance at it can also tell you a lot about the kind of investments they make in politics, and to which kinds of causes and candidates. If they usually only give to state offices and you’re running for local offices, be prepared to make the case for why your position should really matter to them. (Pro-tip: Finding local, state, and federal donation history is incredibly important and incredibly painful — let technology do it for you.)
• Past interactions with the campaign. You want to seamlessly pick up where you left off with each person, so having a log of your past emails, texts is important.
• Biographical and other contextual information. You’re juggling hundreds and probably thousands of donor/prospect relationships (not to mention all your other campaign contacts!), so it’s understandable that you won’t always remember exactly what the person you’re about to call does for a living, or what her spouse’s name is, or if he has children, etc. But having that information handy can go a long way in furthering your relationship with the person on the other end of the phone. Pulling together those key background facts will be worth the effort.

Test Numbers & Schedule Calls

Inevitably, you won’t have working phone numbers for all the people that you’re trying to reach. It can be incredibly frustrating to sit down to do several hours of call time only to discover that you can’t even attempt to reach the people on your list. A great volunteer activity is calling through your list ahead of time. Here’s what they can do:

• Confirm a number reaches the intended prospect. Whether by reaching an assistant, or by listening to the names on a voicemail, a pre-call can ensure you’re reaching the right person.

• Update the call sheets. Aside from confirming an accurate number, calling ahead can also glean helpful information to put on the call sheets, such as whether the person uses a nickname on their answering machine, or the name of the assistant who screens calls, etc.
• Find better contact information. Keep track of inaccurate contact info and have a system for consistently searching for better info. Remember, your investment of time should always match the quality of the lead — don’t spend hours hunting for a working phone number for someone who can’t be of too much support to your campaign, and don’t easily give up on someone who has the capacity to be a big supporter.
• Schedule calls. What if your volunteer actually reaches your prospect or an assistant while testing calls? Even better. They should try and schedule a specific time for the candidate to call and connect. The more scheduled calls you have during call time the better.

While all of the above can take a lot of discipline and time, it will be well-worth it, in terms of the additional value you get out of your call time — you’ll raise more, and do so more efficiently. But you can supercharge that equation even further by leveraging technology that will do much of the prep outlined above for you — another worthy investment.

Click here to read the next part in this series: Campaign Fundraising Deep Dive: Making Calls.