When the Ocean Conservancy dialed out to the home phones of thousands of supporters to invite them to stay on the line to learn about ocean trash, Phil Gresh listened in. He had been invited to a telephone town hall, often described as a conference call crossed with a radio call-in show.
First, he heard a leader from the environmental group welcoming participants, and then, while waiting for the program to start, he joined in playing a fun-fact quiz game about oceans by pressing numbers on the keypad. After a top scientist at the conservancy spoke briefly, the call was opened up for listeners’ questions. When the moderator asked them to press 7 on their phones to make a donation, Gresh, a former board member who contributes regularly, did so.
“What I heard triggered me to support them, even though I wasn’t planning to that night,” Gresh says, noting his gift doubled his usual annual donation.
Deep Connections
The Ocean Conservancy raised about $8,000 during the call. But Charlotte Meyer, director of planned giving, says the group’s telephone town halls — they started in 2018, with two or three each year — are less about short-term fundraising than about informing and building ties with supporters and potential supporters. In fact, she notes, the event about the group’s Trash Free Seas program was the only one so far that included an explicit solicitation.
The town halls “let us connect with people more deeply around something we already know they care about,” Meyer says. “They get to know what [the CEO’s] voice sounds like; they get to hear how excited our experts are. It brings together brains and souls and hearts, and that elevates the relationship between the Ocean Conservancy and its members.”
The popularity of telephone town halls has been on a slow rise, an unexpected trend at a time when fewer and fewer households even have landline phones — federal regulations largely prohibit mass dialing to mobile phones — and many charities are cutting back on their telemarketing appeals. The technology to dial as many as two million numbers in just minutes and manage the response is less than 15 years old, but it has been well tested by elected officials and political candidates who were the earliest adopters of telephone town halls. The technology is newly relevant as charities cancel events because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Plenty of nonprofits are seeing benefits, too. A telephone town hall is less expensive than a direct-mail appeal and can have a better response rate than email blasts, charity officials have found. Most important, they say, the events give them a direct connection with thousands of supporters at a time, opening up what feels like a one-to-one channel to promote their work, thank members, encourage activism, or solicit contributions.
“What’s a better way to get 10,000 people in a room, so to speak, for an hour every quarter?” says Steve Kehrli, vice president for development at PETA, which hosts about four town halls each year. “What’s a better way to get those people together, on some Tuesday night, and be able to connect with them — all of them — in an interactive way on a personal level?”
Overall data are not available, but figures from Tele-Town Hall, a company that calls itself the leading provider of the technology, and Stones’ Phones, a consulting firm that specializing in telephone strategies, offer a rough idea of what call participation looks like.
Tele-Town Hall reports that the average number of outgoing calls for a charity event is 40,000. As many as 20 percent of those who receive a call answer it and stay on the line for up to 10 minutes. Participation time increases to 25 minutes, on average, among people who have been notified of the event in advance. Less than 5 percent of participants stay on until the end of the calls, which are usually an hour long.
Tele-Town Hall also reports that 2 to 5 percent of participants make donations during calls that include a direct solicitation, and that 6 to 8 percent of those contacted directly by a charity within a day or two after a call will contribute. Average gift size of all those donors, the company says, is $50 to $80.
On its website, Stones’ Phones has a calculator to estimate participation rates. With 40,000 as the number of outgoing calls, the calculator determines that 7,434 people are likely to participate, with 7 percent staying on the call for more than 30 minutes.
Depending on the number of outgoing calls, organizations pay consultants or vendors at least $2,000 per event and as much as $20,000 if they use other services, such as paid staff members to act as event moderators, screen call-in questions, or process donations. Additional features of the calls can include the ability to run real-time polling questions or patch listeners through to the offices of legislators. Consultants can also help organizations work with the data collected from the call, such as by cross-referencing participation — for example, question asked or time spent on the call — with donor rolls, measuring interest by demographics or identifying which supporters the charity should follow up with.
In preparation for a telephone town hall, nonprofits also usually pay third parties to update their donor files and add home phone numbers. Only supporters who have provided their cell numbers to opt in to participating in a town hall would be called.
Clear Goal Is Key
For the best results on these calls, practitioners say, nonprofits must have a clear reason, agenda, and, especially, a script for the event. The central feature of the call might be to allow participants to ask the organization’s CEO questions, hear from an expert about advances in the field, or learn how they can participate in a timely advocacy event, like signing a petition.
The key is planning the event with basic questions in mind, says Will Wrigley, at Stones’ Phones: “Who is the target? Who will talk? What do they have to say? How interactive will it be?”
“Whether it’s for stewardship, fundraising, advocacy, or all those things,” he says, “you have to have something worthwhile to say, and you have to be compelling and entertaining.”
On the Ocean Conservancy’s telephone town hall about ocean trash, Nick Mallos, senior director of the Trash Free Seas program, made a startling comparison to illustrate the extent of the problem. The 18 million pounds of debris removed from beaches around the world during a one-day coastal cleanup, he said, roughly equaled the weight of 200 Boeing 737 airplanes.
“That is incredible and sad,” Gresh, the call participant, said in an email, recalling how he felt.
“Hearing directly from the experts about interesting things with a personal touch is what the telephone town halls are about,” he said. “These are not just robocalls.”
