Getting Your Calltime List Ready for Your Candidate

Our number one goal when building our product is to make Calltime as painless as possible, but that doesn't mean all of the work is automated (sorry AI, there's still some work for us humans after all). With your busy schedule, it's sometimes difficult to remember all of the leg work that goes into building the best Calltime list possible, so we've gone ahead and compiled a checklist for you to make sure that your candidate is as prepared as possible when they go asking for contributions! 

Checklist

🔲  Write and Associate Your Text and Email Templates

You never want your candidate to be in a situation where they make a call and want to send a follow-up text but there aren't any templates for them to use. You need to be sure that your candidate is armed to the gills with templates so they aren't left to their own devices to slowly recreate the text that you've already gone to the effort of writing! That's why it's important not only to make the templates ( learn how), but to be sure they are associated with the calltime list (learn how). 

🔲  Review Your Salutation Fields

When you're asking someone for money, you can't afford to do anything that puts you behind the eightball. One surefire way to do that is to call the donor by a name that they don't really go by. Calling someone by their formal name rather than what they go by makes the caller seem unprepared and overly formal, leaving the donor cold and less willing to donate. To avoid this, make sure that the salutation field is updated ( learn how to update from the calltime list). That way, their formal name remains intact to appropriately reflect their donor information, but the caller knows the actual name to refer to the donor.  

🔲  Pin Relevant Giving History

Giving History is an incredibly useful feature that saves you time researching donors' prior contribution history to other campaigns. You may want to save your candidate even more time by pinning relevant giving history contributions. That way, if there's one contribution in Giving History that you really want the candidate to see, they won't have to sift through a donor's entire giving history to find it - they can just see it at the top ( learn how).

🔲  Ensure All Donors Have an Ask Amount or Ask Notes Field Populated 

As you well know, the hard ask is absolutely necessary to get a donor across the finish line. Equipping your candidate with a well-supported ask amount saves them time and gives them confidence when making the ask, knowing that this is an amount that the donor can afford and might be willing to donate. You can edit the ask amount on an individual donor level or in bulk by using the bulk actions feature in the calltime list. 

🔲  Sort the Calltime List and Pin Any Relevant Donors to the Top

The order of a calltime list can also be important. We offer different sorting options for you - you can sort the list so that the contacts appear in ascending/descending order of ask amount, alphabetically by name, address, and more ( learn how). In addition to these default sorting options, you can also manually reorder the contacts on your calltime list by pinning contacts to the top of your page (learn how). This is a great tool if you have a large calltime list and want to prioritize certain calls on the list. That way, if your candidate jumps into calltime to make a few calls in their spare time, they can know who the most important donors are on a given list. 

🔲  Prepopulate Your Call Result Options

Your Numero account comes with the following default call results: Spoke, Left Voicemail, Team Follow-Up, Donated, Declined, Remove, Do Not Call, Bad Number, and Cohost. However, in many instances, teams need to customize these call results to meet their specific requirements for their process. If your candidate needs custom call results, make sure to add them before they start calltime! (Learn How)

🔲  Make Sure Your Candidate Can See Your Calltime List and All Relevant Donor Activity by Reviewing the Privacy Settings and Member Code Settings

This one is simple but very important. Make sure that your candidate has access to the list that you want them to call. When you created the calltime list, you set permissions for who has access to this list. You can either make a calltime list private (just the creator of the list), team (all users have access), or custom (you choose which users can see this calltime list). Make sure that your candidate has access to the list before telling them to start calling. 

If you're using Member Codes on a calltime list, ensure that you applied the appropriate member code to the calltime list and gave custom access to that list, so that only the candidate who matches that member code has access to that list.

🔲  Communicate a Plan for Who is Responsible for Logging Call Outcomes

This one also sounds obvious, but it's not to be overlooked. Because you need to manually log all calls, texts, and emails in Numero, it's important to communicate whose job that is. If the candidate is meant to make the calls and then log the calls from the app, that's great, but it should be communicated beforehand. If the candidate doesn't want to log the calls, then someone else on the team needs to know that so they can prepare to listen in on the calls and log them from the Calltime list on their desktop while the call is happening. 

🔲  Add a Contribution Form to the Calltime List (if using Numero Payment Processing) and a Source Code of "Calltime" 

If you're using Numero Payment Processing, make sure to attach a form to your Calltime List ( learn how).

The first value-add by attaching a contribution form to a calltime list lies in the SpeedyGive link which automatically populates all available fields on a contribution form for the donor based using the information you have stored on them in your CRM. This creates less friction at checkout which means contributions to you even faster. 

The second value-add is the Source Code. If you add a Source Code to a Calltime list without a form, it will automatically apply that Source Code to any pledges that you log. However, if you apply a Source Code to a Calltime List with a Numero Contribution Form, it will also apply that Source Code to any contributions made on that form, from that calltime list. This allows you to easily track the dollars coming in through Calltime vs. other avenues.

🔲  Send Test Texts and Emails to Make Sure Your Devices are Properly Configured and Have a Plan for Who is Responsible for Text/ Email Follow-up

Send a few test emails and texts to make sure your templates are formatting the way you want, links are linking, merge tags are working correctly, and the email or text is generating from the correct email or phone number (learn more). If you're calling or texting from the app and you're using OpenPhone, make sure to configure your device accordingly. 

🔲  Create a Calltime Report / Summary