How long should I be on the phone for fundraising calls?
The most important resource of any campaign is time, so it makes sense to be mindful of the length of individual calls. After all, campaigns must typically make a relatively large volume of calls each day to hit their financial goals, so lingering too long on those calls can make meeting those goals very difficult. So is there a rule-of-thumb when it comes to the target amount of time to spend on the phone with a prospective donor during call time?
There’s no perfect call length that’s ideal for all prospects and campaigns. But we examined over 50,000 connected calls since February 2020 to see if we could learn anything about call length from the data. (We excluded calls that weren’t picked up, were answered by machines, or where the outcome of the call was only to leave a brief message with someone other than the intended recipient of the call). Here’s some of what we learned:
Overall, calls tend to be brief
Before diving into the details, let’s start with overall call length for all calls reviewed: a little over 55% of calls lasted under 90 seconds, and nearly three-fourths of all calls were under 3 minutes in length. But while calls tend to be quite brief, there is a fair amount of variation — bout 10% of all calls were about 10 minutes or longer, with a little over 3% lasting longer than 15 minutes.
This kind of variation and tendency towards brevity makes a lot of sense when you consider all the variables here. Many calls may be simply to remind someone they have an outstanding pledge, or to re-solicit them for additional dollars, or even to make a brief introduction and schedule another opportunity to have a lengthier conversation. All of these very common uses of fundraising call time would necessarily lead to brief encounters. That’s worth keeping in mind as you consider the data presented here.
Average call lengths have increased since the pandemic began
We had heard from our partners involved in voter outreach that phone conversations seemed to be lasting longer than they had in prior cycles, and many hypothesized that this was a consequence of the pandemic and all the associated events that have occurred since. You could draw a similar conclusion about fundraising calls.
In fact, just between February and March 2020, the average length of a call jumped 79%, up to ~3.7 minutes from just over 2 minutes. The average call length stayed in that general range throughout the Spring, before falling to ~2.8 minutes in August — the first month to dip below 3 minutes since the pandemic began, and still almost a full minute longer than the average call length had been back in February. As the election draws nearer people tend to call colder leads and those leads tend to be more receptive to having a conversation with candidates, as their outreach feels topical and timely. This, coupled with the fact that many are still largely confined to their homes, may help explain the sustained period of time for which average call length has stayed relatively high.
Successful calls tend to last longer
Calls that successfully end in a “yes” or a “maybe” in response to a financial solicitation tend to last longer than calls that do not, though the gap is not typically that large — until recently.
Since February 2020, these “successful” calls outlasted, on average, the other calls in every month except for June. But before August, the difference had generally been pretty small, with the biggest gap occurring in March. That month, calls that resulted in a “yes” or “maybe” lasted an average of 71.9 seconds longer than calls that didn’t.
In August, however, the gap has grown very wide. Successful calls lasted an average of 7.5 minutes, while other calls that month lasted just over 2.5 minutes. This discrepancy persists if you consider the median (rather than the mean) call length. This is a trend we’ll be keeping our eye on throughout the rest of the cycle.
Larger pledges tend to come from sightly lengthier calls
For those calls that yield a specific financial pledge, there seems to be some positive relationship between the size of that pledge and the length of that call. It is most apparent when looking at the extremes: calls that yield pledges under $250 last under 3 minutes, on average, while calls that yield pledges greater than $2,800 last an average of 20% longer (~3.6 minutes).
In between those ends of the spectrum, however, that relationship is less obvious. For example, the average call length for those conversations that result in a pledge between $250 and $999 is almost identical to the average length of calls that result in a pledge between $1,000 and $2,800.
Which phone number you call matters
Breaking down the observed calls by phone type- home, mobile, work, or other- reveals some interesting trends in call length. Most notable is that reaching someone’s work phone number tends to yield the shortest conversations, whether or not that conversation ultimately yields a financial commitment. Work phones also represent the smallest proportion of “yes” or “maybe” financial commitments of all calls; only ~12% of all successful calls occurred when reaching someone on their work phone number.
By comparison, the other reviewed phone types all showed noticeable gaps between the length of calls that ended positively and those that didn’t — the greatest gap was on mobile phones, where a positive call averaged 4.2 minutes, while a negative one lasted under 3 minutes, on average.
As mentioned at the outset, this data necessarily only tells part of the story. In addition to the wide variety of purposes for calls (i.e., pledge collection, re-solicitation, etc.), we might also expect the data to look different based upon characteristics of the campaign that we didn’t examine in this article, such as: whether the caller is an incumbent elected official, or not; or, whether the candidate is running for federal or state or local office; or, whether the candidate is calling a donor prospect that may also be a prospective constituent, etc. It is likely all of these factors would influence the average length of the calls.
But more importantly, it is important to remember that fundraising is about building and nurturing authentic relationships so there is certainly no magic amount of time you can spend on the phone with someone to ensure it will be a successful call — and the success of a call can’t be entirely reduced to the financial pledge it delivers in that one moment. However, being mindful of how you are using your time is a critical component to any fundraising operation and so tracking how long you are spending on your calls is wise. You may find that there are trends- like those described above- that you can use to better manage your limited fundraising hours.
