6 Tools for Telephone Fundraising

Love it or hate it, telemarketers are still in the business and billions of dollars a year are raised through telephone fundraising programs.

If you decide it’s the right strategy to execute for your organization, here are five practical and essential tools you’ll need to run a telephone fundraising campaign.

Pay-by-Phone Capability

The most important tool in telephone fundraising has to be the ability to accept credit card payments over the phone.

Pay-by-phone functionality allows the person you’ve called to enter their credit card info directly through their key pad, including the credit card number, expiration date, and dollar amount.

Telzio has an integration with Stripe that makes accepting payments by phone easy and secure. There’s no programming or technical setup involved, and you can seamlessly add or create a new account.

Let’s say as the fundraiser, you have someone on the line who’d like to make a donation.

Transfer the caller to a special extension you’ve created for the payment feature, and there, the donor will enter in their payment info. This way, you nor your staff members will be personally collecting donors’ payment details.

Once the payment is complete, you can choose to send the donor back to you, a prerecorded message, or another destination.

Local or Toll Free Phone Number 

The first step in setting up the whole program is choosing a local or toll free phone number from where you want to make calls. You may have an existing phone number you want to use, or you may want to choose a dedicated phone number for fundraising.

If you’re a local organization with grounded roots, a local area code might be the way to go. In some regard, it may yield a better answer rate than calling from a toll free number. From a budget standpoint, local phone numbers have lower rates.

Mobile App for Making Calls

After you’ve crafted a compelling (and compliant) fundraising script, you’ll need a way for all your staff and volunteers to make those calls. You may have a VoIP phone system and enough IP phones in place for the operation, but if you have an extra army of volunteers contributing to the effort, you’ll need our mobile app.

Staff members can download Telzio’s mobile app to make calls. Telzio offers unlimited users, meaning it costs nothing to add another staff member and provide them with an individual login to use the app.

What’s more, Telzio is an internet-based phone service, so staff members and offices can be remotely dispersed and still share the same phone number.

Custom Caller ID

You want people to know it’s your organization calling, so let them know right off the bat. Telzio offers a feature called CNAM, which allows you to customize the name on the caller ID people see when you call them. It makes the introduction easier when they already know where you’re calling from.

Reliable Quality

The last thing you want is bad or broken service when it’s time to hit the phones. Just last week, Telzio provided a hotline service to a well-known artist, which surged up to 6,000 calls in a second following posts to his 3M+ followers on social media. The system handled smoothly and it was evident the call quality was clear when fans began posting their conversations with the artist to Twitter.

Even with thousands of simultaneous calls hitting the same phone number, Telzio’s platform holds up, and what’s more, incoming calls don’t get a busy signal, no matter how many callers are on the line at the same time.

Flexible Service

Whether you need automated menus, call forwarding, or pay-by-phone capabilities, you can use Telzio’s interface to easily customize different scenarios and manage greetings, calls, and recordings in real time.

You may simply need outbound calling functionality to run your telephone fundraising campaign, but if you expect inbound calls, there’s much you can do with Telzio. From voice to messaging services, Telzio is an easy-to-use platform to customize a complete business phone system.