Today I received a call from one of the charities I support. It was obvious why she was calling, but it took her 2.5 minutes of reading from a script to get to the point.
The sales pitch
She started the conversation with the usual “Thank you for your support, it’s really making a difference”, which is nice enough. After asking if I had a few minutes she went on to say:
Can I tell you a story? The other day I spoke to one of my colleagues who told me about….[insert sad story related to the charity and how a mum wanted to name her child after the charity].
It was bluntly obvious that she was reading from a script, and a bad reading at that. Normally, if I’m not intending to increase my donation I cut the conversation short. After all, the company doing the calls are costing the charity money, money that could go to the causes they support. But today I was actually interested in hearing what the charity had to say. Unfortunately what I got was fake, fakeness that I would guess is costing the charity a lot of money, not the least in lost sales.
No point pretending
Though I understand they don’t want to start the conversation asking for money, there’s no denying that as soon as we hear “I’m calling from….” we know what it’s about. They will be asking for money.
It’d be interesting to know what the difference in conversion rate and cost would be between a charity that cut to the point and asked for an increased donation straight after initiating the conversation, versus a charity like this one that spend 2-3 minutes on each customer who’s willing to listen to their pro-longed and clearly fake sales pitch. My bet is the former would far excede the latter.
Remembering your audience
This charity isn’t the only one doing a bad sales pitch. I’ve had a number of calls like the one today and common between all of them is that they seem to have forgotten that I chose to support their causes from the beginning so I don’t really need this type of sales pitch. It’s not going to make a difference to whether I increase my donation or not. However, there are other factors that would and with a bit more insight into and mapping of the audiences they are speaking to, I’m sure they could design their sales pitches better and increase their donations.
Image source: www.flickr.com/photos/greyhobbit/2494869923
