Earlier this month, we attended the Chartered Institute of Fundraising (CIoF) Convention. Which is the charity and fundraising sector’s largest UK event, and with it being their last national face-to-face event for a while, it was bound to be a great turnout. For this exact reason, we decided to exhibit.
There’s no better opportunity to have direct, honest, conversations with charities, rather than through their face-to-face (f2f) marketing agencies as we often do now. It is one of those events where you go in expecting to talk about what you do, and inevitably come out thinking more deeply about how you do it.
What struck us about the conversations we had was one common theme, the ‘supporter journey’. A few years ago, the topic was all about the resurgence of f2f fundraising and private sites, and how they still offer the best ROI for acquisition of new supporters. Whilst this still remains the same, the topic of conversation seems to have shifted.
This time round, it was all about how do we (charities) ensure we are investing our time, resource, effort and real process into the full supporter journey.
The Question That Started Everything
We had our stand set up and, naturally, people were curious. But the interesting point was, as you can see from the photo, we had a sentence that makes reference to “human led conversation, supported by digital and AI technology”. And naturally, everyone locked in on one word. AI. Which as it turns out, was actually a great conversation starter.
We use digital and AI tech to create efficiency, but we’re a human-led organisation as we believe that real human beings create the relationships (i.e. real, live, telephone calls).
Our Team Are Built for the Right Kind of Conversation
At the event, when chatting to attendees, I got to understand their role and the charity that they represented. As the conversations progressed, I was then asked to explain how the VST Group and VST Venues support the industry.
To simplify things, I often describe us as a call centre within Northamptonshire that books private site venues for the fundraising industry. But also, a business that specialises in welcome and stewardship calling. So, in other words, VST help you acquire new supporters, look after them, and grow them. Which effectively helps charities complete the circle of the supporter journey.
Why are we built for charitable conversations? Well, our team is largely made up of back-to-work mums. School-run-friendly shifts and hybrid working with most hours spent in the office. It sounds like a simple staffing model, but it is actually a strategic, and hugely beneficial, one. Not only for our business and our employees, but also for our clients and their supporters/customers. The main benefit being, we’ve cultivated an environment with very high-calibre callers, and one of the highest retention rates in our industry.
Our outreach demographic, i.e. our typical employee/caller, tends to be a woman in her late 30’s early 40’s, based in Northamptonshire (accent neutral), working 20-30 hours per week, with school aged children. She has high empathy and tenacity, she listens well, she responds best to people, real conversations, and not scripts.
We believe the best sales people aren’t hard sellers, they are the best listeners. So in turn, they end up being the best storytellers. These types of values are always required when one needs to convert the work of an international aid charity, for example, into a local story for the general public to engage with.
That is exactly who your supporters will engage best with on the other end of the phone.
Additional to this, we have won awards for the careers we have created for women returning to the workforce. The model works because our team’s life and business experience makes them brilliant at their jobs. Our teams consistently outperform expectations because they understand and empathise with the people we are speaking with.
What Does A Supporter Journey Look Like at VST?
What does this all look like in practice?
It starts with a welcome call. Not a pitch. Not only a thank you, but very importantly, a why.
When someone signs up to support a charity, whether at a supermarket, a train station or a town centre venue, the most important thing you can do in the following hours is ring them up and thank them. Not to ask them for anything. Just to acknowledge the appreciate as to what they have done but really, really, understand why.
That “why” is everything.
Why did they stop at your stand, why did they sign up? What caught their attention? Why is that cause close to their heart? If we can understand their motivation behind the decision they made, we have the best foundation for a relationship that can last years. If you do not ask, you are guessing.
