On Phone Banks & Courage
| By Courage Campaign Team Morongo Basin - May 23, 2010 11:24:13 AM PT |
| Also listed in: High Desert Courage Team |
When Field Rep Phyllis Lozano began pressing me to organize a phone bank to 'get out the vote' in my area I knew what I wanted to do right way ... RUN LIKE HELL!
Having had no experience at phone banking, my mind conjured up images of high pressure telemarketers on one end, angry radical right conservatives on the other with my team and I in the middle. These notions couldn't have been farther from the truth.j
The greatest challenge to a successful phone bank is fear of the unknown by those who've never done it. If you can get volunteers to overcome the fear with just enough courage so that they show up on the day of the phone bank, the rest is easy. It only takes a few quick calls for phone bank volunteers to realize ...
that each call is a two way conversation.
When you make contact and introduce yourself to someone on the other end, 99% of your contacts will be eager to hear what you have to say. And with each call, your confidence is bolstered with the sense that you are making a difference. You're offering like-minded people answers on about issue they want to understand.
Accepting that making the calls and having the conversations is the easy part, still leaves us with the greatest challenge -- getting your volunteers to show up for the first time. Courage Campaign's Team Morongo Basin recently held our first successful phone bank. Success, here, translates to 'volunteers showed up'! Achieving this required that I motivate each caller using a variety of approaches including confidence building, negotiation, deception and bribery.
Our team already knew the aim was to call voters to encourage then to vote and inform them of Courage Campaign's endorsements on the propositions. Everyone at our planning meeting agreed this was important and all were fired up to make it happen, but in the intervening days I began to sense waning enthusiasm was spreading like a cancer. As team coordinator, I went on the offense using a variety of strategies.
INSTILL CONFIDENCE
I phoned or emailed everyone who'd previously committed to reiterate what to expect: I tried to cover the following tips, each designed to calm any fears and let your callers get a sense of who it really goes.
- Courage Campaign was providing call lists of supporters, progressive voters who already believe in the work we're doing.
- When you introduce yourself as a volunteer, contacts aren't expecting you to be an expert on every subject. They want you to succeed and understand that if they ask a question you don't have the answer to, then your referral to the website is a reasonable response.
- The majority of numbers dialed, maybe 90%, are going to voice mail, disconnected line, or wrong number, any one of which is a piece of cake to deal with. So when you have a goal of making 50 calls, this is no where near to 50 conversations, more like 5 or 8, plus some voice messages.
- We asked each volunteer to bring someone with them. Those who did found the kinship was motivating and promoted some competition as in who made the most calls. It's also very helpful to hear the other conversations to pick up tips, find alternative ways to phrase things, gain from others experiences.
- The script is a guideline. It's unnatural to try to follow it verbatim. Conversations are two-way. Familiarize yourself with the script so you know the talking points, then just keep it handy for reference.
USE BRIBERY NEGOTIATION & DECEPTION
- We positioned the Phone Bank more like a festive brunch with bagels and bloody mary's.
- We asked people to come with a buddy even if they said they didn't want to make calls. When they got there we'd ply them with food and drink and put a phone in their hands telling them to just try one call.
- When anyone wanted to leave, we implored them to "just make one more call." They almost always did.
- For people with schedule conflicts, we told them it would be okay to make calls from home if they could just swing by to pick up the materials. Once they did, we usually convinced them to stay long enough to hear a few sample calls and then try some themselves. About half the time they decided to stay and make all their calls then when they saw how easy it was.
- People often wont have a 3 hour block to devote to making calls. No problem, just ask if they can come for 2 hours or even 1. Our willingness to negotiate and accommodate definitely won us participation from a handful of callers who otherwise wouldn't have come.
Anyone charged with setting up a phone bank must really employ all of these techniques in order to give volunteers the courage turn up for the effort. Most will have to be contacted and convinced more than once.
They all want to do the right thing, and when you chat with them, they'll give you a commitment and mean it, but with each passing day, their motivation will give way to insecurity as they look for reason why they can't come after all. You will very likely need to call volunteers more than once and even then, you can expect some are going to break and run on the day of the phone bank.
For all those who turned out for our first phone bank, the next time around will be no challenge at all. We made 100s of calls. Thanks to Caitlin from Courage Campaign and Phyllis, our field rep, we had all the resources we needed and good direction from which to operate.
Having had the experience, those who turned out for it have now broken into some smaller groups to make calls at times most convenient for them. They don't need me to do any more arm twisting and that's a good thing!
Author: Mike Lipsitz, Hi-Desert LGBT News
Having had no experience at phone banking, my mind conjured up images of high pressure telemarketers on one end, angry radical right conservatives on the other with my team and I in the middle. These notions couldn't have been farther from the truth.j
The greatest challenge to a successful phone bank is fear of the unknown by those who've never done it. If you can get volunteers to overcome the fear with just enough courage so that they show up on the day of the phone bank, the rest is easy. It only takes a few quick calls for phone bank volunteers to realize ...
that each call is a two way conversation.
When you make contact and introduce yourself to someone on the other end, 99% of your contacts will be eager to hear what you have to say. And with each call, your confidence is bolstered with the sense that you are making a difference. You're offering like-minded people answers on about issue they want to understand.
Accepting that making the calls and having the conversations is the easy part, still leaves us with the greatest challenge -- getting your volunteers to show up for the first time. Courage Campaign's Team Morongo Basin recently held our first successful phone bank. Success, here, translates to 'volunteers showed up'! Achieving this required that I motivate each caller using a variety of approaches including confidence building, negotiation, deception and bribery.
Our team already knew the aim was to call voters to encourage then to vote and inform them of Courage Campaign's endorsements on the propositions. Everyone at our planning meeting agreed this was important and all were fired up to make it happen, but in the intervening days I began to sense waning enthusiasm was spreading like a cancer. As team coordinator, I went on the offense using a variety of strategies.
INSTILL CONFIDENCE
I phoned or emailed everyone who'd previously committed to reiterate what to expect: I tried to cover the following tips, each designed to calm any fears and let your callers get a sense of who it really goes.
- Courage Campaign was providing call lists of supporters, progressive voters who already believe in the work we're doing.
- When you introduce yourself as a volunteer, contacts aren't expecting you to be an expert on every subject. They want you to succeed and understand that if they ask a question you don't have the answer to, then your referral to the website is a reasonable response.
- The majority of numbers dialed, maybe 90%, are going to voice mail, disconnected line, or wrong number, any one of which is a piece of cake to deal with. So when you have a goal of making 50 calls, this is no where near to 50 conversations, more like 5 or 8, plus some voice messages.
- We asked each volunteer to bring someone with them. Those who did found the kinship was motivating and promoted some competition as in who made the most calls. It's also very helpful to hear the other conversations to pick up tips, find alternative ways to phrase things, gain from others experiences.
- The script is a guideline. It's unnatural to try to follow it verbatim. Conversations are two-way. Familiarize yourself with the script so you know the talking points, then just keep it handy for reference.
USE BRIBERY NEGOTIATION & DECEPTION
- We positioned the Phone Bank more like a festive brunch with bagels and bloody mary's.
- We asked people to come with a buddy even if they said they didn't want to make calls. When they got there we'd ply them with food and drink and put a phone in their hands telling them to just try one call.
- When anyone wanted to leave, we implored them to "just make one more call." They almost always did.
- For people with schedule conflicts, we told them it would be okay to make calls from home if they could just swing by to pick up the materials. Once they did, we usually convinced them to stay long enough to hear a few sample calls and then try some themselves. About half the time they decided to stay and make all their calls then when they saw how easy it was.
- People often wont have a 3 hour block to devote to making calls. No problem, just ask if they can come for 2 hours or even 1. Our willingness to negotiate and accommodate definitely won us participation from a handful of callers who otherwise wouldn't have come.
Anyone charged with setting up a phone bank must really employ all of these techniques in order to give volunteers the courage turn up for the effort. Most will have to be contacted and convinced more than once.
They all want to do the right thing, and when you chat with them, they'll give you a commitment and mean it, but with each passing day, their motivation will give way to insecurity as they look for reason why they can't come after all. You will very likely need to call volunteers more than once and even then, you can expect some are going to break and run on the day of the phone bank.
For all those who turned out for our first phone bank, the next time around will be no challenge at all. We made 100s of calls. Thanks to Caitlin from Courage Campaign and Phyllis, our field rep, we had all the resources we needed and good direction from which to operate.
Having had the experience, those who turned out for it have now broken into some smaller groups to make calls at times most convenient for them. They don't need me to do any more arm twisting and that's a good thing!
Author: Mike Lipsitz, Hi-Desert LGBT News
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