Audio: How Colorado State Fundraisers Make Phone-athons Work

If you want to overhaul your phone-athon program and make calls more lively, Colorado State University’s telemarketing might offer a good model.

The university doesn’t use stilted scripts when calling alumni. Instead, it offers broad guidance to student callers and trains them to make interactions feel natural.

Specifically, callers are told to ask “rapport-building” questions, like “What advice do you have for a student who is about to graduate?” or “Are you going on vacation any time soon?”

Such queries can elicit responses that reveal important information — like whether a donor prospect is wealthy.

Colorado State fundraisers say the conversational nature of the calls has also helped keep donation pledge rates steady at a time when other colleges are struggling to get alumni to give by phone.

Listen on the player below to a mock call between Chronicle reporter Timothy Sandoval and Meg Weber, Colorado State’s executive director of annual giving, to get a sense of how student callers speak to alumni.

Once calls are completed, the university has student callers answer the following survey questions to help fundraisers keep track of information about the donors:

After student callers mark complete the questionnaire, they enter the information into the university’s donor database.

Because of the tactics used by callers and other upgrades, the number of people donating to Colorado State by phone has increased in the past few years. Nineteen percent of call recipients pledged a gift last year, while roughly 17 percent did in 2012.