5 ways to use AI & omnichannel outreach to transform your phonathon into a digital engagement center

For a long time, phonathons were the best solution to achieving personal engagement with donors at scale. Gift officers could never visit every donor, so student volunteers calling the rest was a great way to build engagement that led to greater participation rates, increased giving, and unrestricted support. This was achieved at scale through a one-time “smile-and-dial”-like push to contact a large percentage of the constituent base.

In a digital-first world, however, donors aren’t picking up the phone, and messaging is getting lost. Nearly 50 percent of Gen Z alumni cited “not being asked” as their reason for not making a gift, and major donors pick up the phone less and less for numbers they do not know due to the oversaturation of voice channels for commercial outreach and robocalls.

So, are fundraisers truly not asking or are asks blending in with the noise?

A phone call is still a valuable tool for engagement but as newer channels like email, online giving, crowdfunding, texting, video, social media and digital ads have grown, sticking to only one or two channels reduces the likelihood of connecting with a donor. The role of technology (especially AI) in this environment is to provide more opportunities to get in front of donors in increasingly personal ways, while not scaling costs.

Here are five ways AI can bring your phonathon strategy into the modern era of donor engagement.

Save time by completing background tasks more efficiently

Up to 70% of fundraisers’ time is spent on background tasks like completing contact reports, managing spreadsheets, segmenting lists and researching donors.

AI can automate these types of work to free up that time for the interactions that fuel your pipeline: authentic donor engagement. Student ambassadors should be completing multiple touchpoints for portfolios of 1,000 prospects or more, assisted in their outreach planning and execution by AI.

Use AI to prioritize top donors

How do you know the donors at the top of your student ambassadors’ lists are the best donors to talk to right now?

AI and predictive analytics look at your donors’ giving histories, engagement data, tendencies, communication preferences and other factors to surface the right donors at the right time. AI is more than just a tool to generate prospect lists. Many AI fundraising tools are designed to help fundraisers build human relationships by crafting a useful, hyper-personalized donor profile.

Engage donors across channels

With the oversaturation of voice channels for commercial outreach and ‘robocalls’ it has become more and more difficult for fundraisers to cut through the noise to grab a donor’s attention during a targeted campaign like a phonathon. As new channels permeate the advancement space, a trend is becoming clear: the new generations of donors prefer to interact on digital and mobile channels.

Texting as a key method of communication is undeniable with younger generations of donors: 75% of Gen Z and Millenials would rather text than talk on the phone and text message open rates are around 98%! Mobile giving is also becoming more prevalent with more than three quarters (76%) of Gen Z saying they choose to give online.

So how can you tap into these channels? Use an AI outreach tool to pinpoint who to reach out to. Rather than leaving it to a predetermined sequence, AI can analyze a specific donor’s engagement history to make suggestions on the next channel to try. If they have never opened an email, perhaps an ask in a personalized video over text has a better chance of being seen.

If all of these channels can live under one roof, it’s a huge bonus to productivity so your student ambassadors don’t have to switch between applications and donor touchpoints are integrated.

Write emails quicker with AI-generated content

It’s one thing to know who to reach and how, but it’s another thing to know what to say. AI can draft personalized messages from your student ambassadors to specific donors, reducing the time it takes to come up with a personalized message from scratch.

An AI outreach tool can use machine learning to understand a fundraiser’s writing style over time and propose hyper-personalized email drafts that reference the specific donor’s giving history, milestones, and other data points to reach them more effectively. Think of it as a full-time secretary for a fundraiser or student ambassador!

Give donors a seamless, ongoing experience

How many mass emails have you received today? Or spam telemarketer calls? The constant flow of information and competing messages are taking the focus of your donors’ attention. The key to breaking through the noise is to marry multiple channels together in a meaningful way that keeps your institution or organization top-of-mind for your donors.

AI allows these touchpoints to come from students directly, not from a generic email, while keeping up with the scale of outreach necessary to reach your constituents. One use case of AI aiding in the holistic donor experience is helping frontline fundraisers follow up beyond the gift.

For example, imagine driving donations from 1,000 new leadership gift donors during your phonathon campaign. How much time and effort would it save you to have automated prompts that remind you to follow up with each donor, eliminating the need to manually track each touchpoint? AI frontline fundraising tools can help you connect consistently with 4x more donors than doing it manually.

Success story: How the University of New Orleans transformed their student ambassador program & phonathon with the help of AI

The challenge

Facing declining donor engagement and inefficient outreach, the UNO Foundation needed a way to revitalize its campaign strategy. The previous year’s phonathon yielded diminishing returns, leading to donor fatigue and a disconnect between donors and the organization. UNO fundraisers also wanted to leverage a digital engagement strategy to other initiatives such as days of giving.

The solution

Leveraging Gravyty’s AI-powered fundraising platform, UNO fundraisers launched a comprehensive Outreach Center strategy, empowering student ambassadors to engage with donors more effectively and at scale. They also leveraged the new Outreach Center student ambassadors for their fall 2023 giving day, resulting in their most successful one yet (a 55% increase in dollars raised year over year) with nearly a third (32%) raised by their Outreach ambassadors.

The results

• 75% increase in total gifts raised from previous phonathon
• 180% increase in student engagement
• 25% increase in donor interaction rates
• 35% increase in fundraising revenue attributed to targeted stewardship initiatives
• Reduced manual workload by 40%

Transform your phonathon into a digital engagement center with AI

So, with all of this in mind, where does that leave the phonathon as you’ve known it?

Calling becomes one channel, but used far more strategically and less frequently than before. You still use phone calling to optimize retention and reacquisition at the end of the donor journey, but you move acquisition to digital channels like crowdfunding and giving days.

With the strategic channel transformation, ask yourself whether or not you still need a separate platform for phone, as driving down the cost of this channel while increasing engagement and outcomes is now top of mind.

This new, future-ready approach to a robust fundraising campaign that meets donors where they are (and how they want to be communicated with) ensures you not only reach fundraising goals of today but your organization is well-positioned to build a sustainable donor pipeline for years to come.

Interested in transforming your phonathon strategy into a digital engagement center to reach donors of today but not sure where to start? Download the guide to Next-gen Phonathon.