Guidelines, tips, and other notes about handling calls:
Watch this first!
How should I answer the phone?
Simply – “Hi, thanks for calling KGNU, may I take your donation?”
That way, you’ll know right away if you’re taking a donation or need to pass the call to someone else.
Important: If the call is for anything other than a donation, rather than trying to answer the queestion, please put the caller on hold and pass them to the shift captain or a staff member on duty. For callers who just want to chat, please promptly and politely disengage with them, as we want to keep the lines open for donation calls.
Familiarize yourself with the flow of the form before taking calls.
Manage the flow. Often the donor will be excited to share why they’re calling now, and so forth. That’s good, but it’s fine to say “great, hold on a sec, let’s get your information first.”
Your shift captain can best answer questions about thank you gifts, challenges, or other drive related things.
“Let me put you on hold and find someone who can best help with that.”
If the call isn’t about a donation, put the call on hold and pass it to the shift captain, front desk, or staff person on duty. This is more efficient than trying to figure out the answer yourself.
If the auto complete doesn’t work, don’t worry.
Simply type in the caller’s info. Some donors might not show up, even if they think ‘they should be in the system’.
If the caller has questions about their membership details, such as the last time they gave, what their current monthly contribution is, place the the caller on hold and ask someone in the membership office to take the call.
The membership office may have some other things for you to do during slower times.
Important!
Confirm the payment method first before moving on to the rest of the form. But sometimes people do change their minds.
When switching payment methods, it may take a few seconds for the auto-fill to work. If the auto-fill doesn’t reload, just type the info in yourself as you would with someone who isn’t in our system yet.
If you switch payment methods in the middle of the process you may need to re-enter some information.
Confirm the caller’s contact info and payment info whether it auto-completes or if you type it in yourself, it helps us a lot when validating member info.
Keep the caller on the phone from when you press submit until you see the confirmation page.
That page is similar to the confirmation email the donor will receive.
Other:
To begin a new donation, press the “New Donation” shortcut in the bookmark bar or the “Home” button on browser. Just hitting the ‘back’ button may accidentally re-populate some of the fields.
Use the term “Donation” as, in the majority of cases, we’re taking actual funds, not a “pledge” to pay later.
Say “Fund Drive”, we’re moving away from saying ‘pledge’, as again, in most cases we’re taking actual contributions rather than a ‘pledge’ to pay later.
Thank You Gifts are generally mailed or can be picked up after 3 business days.
Questions? Feedback? Let us know!