Tracking refusals from phonathon calls

Diane Pierce

Hello,

I'm interested to hear how others may be tracking the refusals received from calls made via phonathon programs.  We are hoping to track these so we can better target those who respond versus those who always refuse if we decide to take our student calling program in-house. Is it better to track these as actions or as appeals?


Any feedback is appreciated.


Diane    

Jen Claudy

We don't do phonathons at my current org.  At a previous org, we did one, but that was about 10 years ago, I think.


You could use Appeals and the Response Field, or Actions and an Action Attribute.  From what you described, I would be inclined to go with Appeals, as you can use the Response Field more easily, I think (it's not as far down as an Action Attribute).  You could also set up your call lists using Appeal Packages.  If you need to track notes from those making the calls, you could either also use Actions for those records, or you could, if you know there will be an Action for every name on your list, use the Action Attribute and not do double data-entry.  You could also use a Solicit Code or Constituent Attribute (it has Date and Comment Fields, so that's where I keep my solicit codes to begin with).  So long as whatever you chose is consistently entered, you can also set up a Business Rule that will pop up a message to alert someone to skip a name.  (Particularly helpful if your callers are using RE and recording their own Action Notes.)

Roseann Guinan

Jen Claudy:

We don't do phonathons at my current org.  At a previous org, we did one, but that was about 10 years ago, I think.


You could use Appeals and the Response Field, or Actions and an Action Attribute.  From what you described, I would be inclined to go with Appeals, as you can use the Response Field more easily, I think (it's not as far down as an Action Attribute).  You could also set up your call lists using Appeal Packages.  If you need to track notes from those making the calls, you could either also use Actions for those records, or you could, if you know there will be an Action for every name on your list, use the Action Attribute and not do double data-entry.  You could also use a Solicit Code or Constituent Attribute (it has Date and Comment Fields, so that's where I keep my solicit codes to begin with).  So long as whatever you chose is consistently entered, you can also set up a Business Rule that will pop up a message to alert someone to skip a name.  (Particularly helpful if your callers are using RE and recording their own Action Notes.)

Agree with using Appeal.  The Response Field/Package can be tailored to track types of responses you need.  Also have the Comments field to add additional/relative information about the constituent.

Daniel Bayer

Diane Pierce:

Hello,

I'm interested to hear how others may be tracking the refusals received from calls made via phonathon programs.  We are hoping to track these so we can better target those who respond versus those who always refuse if we decide to take our student calling program in-house. Is it better to track these as actions or as appeals?


Any feedback is appreciated.


Diane    

We currently track these as actions. The day after a phonathon session, a student worker goes through all the call sheets where contact was made, and creates an action for each call - Category is Phone Call (obviously), Action Type is Phonathon, and the Status is set to either Pledge (for those who made a pledge), Refusal Considering (for those who said they'd give but did not set an amount), or Refusal (for outright refusals). We like this because it allows us to track our Phonathon callers and how well they're doing. I can see the benefit to putting it on the Appeal record, but there's not a way to connect that to a specific solicitor after the fact (since we don't know who will be calling whom ahead of time).

Jane Kenny

Jen Claudy:

We don't do phonathons at my current org.  At a previous org, we did one, but that was about 10 years ago, I think.


You could use Appeals and the Response Field, or Actions and an Action Attribute.  From what you described, I would be inclined to go with Appeals, as you can use the Response Field more easily, I think (it's not as far down as an Action Attribute).  You could also set up your call lists using Appeal Packages.  If you need to track notes from those making the calls, you could either also use Actions for those records, or you could, if you know there will be an Action for every name on your list, use the Action Attribute and not do double data-entry.  You could also use a Solicit Code or Constituent Attribute (it has Date and Comment Fields, so that's where I keep my solicit codes to begin with).  So long as whatever you chose is consistently entered, you can also set up a Business Rule that will pop up a message to alert someone to skip a name.  (Particularly helpful if your callers are using RE and recording their own Action Notes.)

We update the response on the appeal on the consituents record to no, refused.  If they give then it is updated to gave.