Call-a-thons as an integral part of a fundraising strategy

And how to organize one

Deep dive by “Dzīvnieku brīvība” 🇱🇻

Written by Alise Redviņa, a fundraiser and a fan of call-a-thons

For questions/comments, reach out to: alise.redvina@dzivniekubriviba.lv

What is this document about?

I will tell you about 3 successful call-a-thons “Dzīvnieku brīvība” organized during year-end fundraising campaigns of 2024 and 2025.

All of these call-a-thons:

✅ involved volunteers and people who are not telefundraisers;

✅ significantly boosted our results and,

✅ most importantly, all of them were engaging and fun for everyone involved.

The first call-a-thon was organized when we did not have a telefundraising department. The biggest source of learning and inspiration for that was a CARE presentation by the super-experienced telefundraiser Martina Neradova who is now our consultant.

I will share:

📞 Why call-a-thons are now an important part of our fundraising strategy and where they stand in it;

📞 How call-a-thons affect our overall team spirit and collaboration and how they inspired us to start a telefundraising department;

📞 Step-by-step process on how we organized the call-a-thons + a planning document and other relevant resources.

What to expect from this?

This document might be helpul to someone who is either:

🧠 considering whether call-a-thons are a good use of time and effort;

🧠 or is looking for tips to organize one.

OUR RESULTS

Call-a-thon 1: 7th Dec 2024

🎯 87 promised / 56 fulfilled donations (aka actually donated).

Donated/promised conversion rate: 64%*

Achieved by:

📞 8 callers (4 volunteers, 4 office members, 0 telefundraisers)

📞 24 total calling hours

📞 Avg. 2.3 donors got by caller per h.

Segment called: ex monthly donors + people with bigger or several single donations

*We tracked only people who donated from the caller’s UTM. But we’ve seen that in telefundraising around 20% people donate in another way after the calls, so the real conversion rate is likely higher.

Call-a-thon 2: 6th Dec 2025

🎯 62 promised / 58 fulfilled donations.

Donated/promised conversion rate: 93.5%*

Achieved by:

📞 9 callers (3 volunteers, 3 office members, 3 telefundraisers)

📞 24 total calling hours

📞 Avg. 2.4 donors got by caller per h.

Segment called: ex monthly donors + people with bigger or several single donations

*This time we tracked everyone who became a regular donor after making such a promise during the call – even if they donated later via fundraising email or something else.

Note that starting from this call-a-thon we also have telefundraisers but the results are similar. Which emphasizes that you can have a productive call-a-thon even with 0 telefundraisers!

Call-a-thon 3: 30th Dec 2025

🎯 29 promised / 19 fulfilled donations.

Donated/promised conversion rate: 65.5%*

Achieved by:

📞 11 callers (4 volunteers, 4 office members, 3 telefundraisers)

📞 30 total calling hours

📞 Avg. 0.63 donors got by caller per h.

Segment called: people who had clicked on the campaign's fundraising emails but had not donated

*This time we tracked everyone who became a regular donor after making such a promise during the call – even if they donated later via fundraising email or something else.

PART 1

How we incorporate call-a-thons as a part of our fundraising strategy

Call-a-thons as a prelaunch tool

When doing fundraising campaigns, one of the most important parts is the prelaunch: you need to have some donors on the progress bar before you even send the first email, because the rules of social proof dictate that no one will want to join if no one has already joined.

We once launched an email campaign with 2 donors on the progress bar and it was going so slow that we regretted it. 🙈

But where to get those first people if your colleagues and volunteers are already donating?

The first 2 call-a-thons we organized as a part of a prelaunch. We found that a call-a-thon is the PERFECT prelaunch tool.

We were calling only a small segment of our closest supporters.

We told people the truth:

✔️ that they are the first to know about this fundraiser;

✔️ that we are calling them before the campaign starts because others will want to join only if there are some people already on the progress bar.

✔️ We told them that they will inspire many people to join if they join now.

Judging from how people reacted in the calls, this message seemed to resonate with them.

Call-a-thons as a feedback tool

The third call-a-thon we organized on the day before the last day of the campaign and called people who had clicked the fundraiser emails but had not donated.

It was harder to convince this segment to donate. But we got some useful feedback from this one.

We learned about how people understood other campaign communications. For example, several people said that they had not understood from the emails that the campaign is focused on monthly donations (it was explained in the emails but people still somehow missed it). Some even thought it was a petition!

It would have been good to find this out sooner. So it might be a good idea to organize a call-a-thon mid-campaign.

🌱 Another interesting example: after our plant-based eating challenge, we decided to telefundraise all the participants who had given single donations for it. It turned out that many people thought they did not receive any recipes in the daily emails because the emails were quite long and the recipes where at the end – they just did not notice for a whole month! 🌱

Call-a-thons as a tool for team engagement

Fundraising works best if your whole team is engaged and excited about it, not only the fundraising department.

And we found that call-a-thons are a great way to:

✨ involve everyone

✨ make the team excited about the campaign

✨ give them first-hand experience of who are the donors that make their organization’s work possible.

This, I think, deepens the connection and sense of importance that employees feel towards fundraising.

As a prelaunch tool, a call-a-thon seemed to serve also as a festive kick-off for the campaign that made all the team more excited about the rest of it, too.

Call-a-thons as a tool for the team members' personal growth

Call-a-thons also worked as a training in communication.

Everyone learns how to
💪 better articulate the organization’s campaign;

💪 explain the theory of change in an engaging, motivating way to supporters;

💪 be more courageous in communicating with people directly.

These skills are highly beneficial in all areas of activism. Because of this, after participating in the call-a-thons our organization’s leader decided that most employees should do some telefundraising or other kinds of calling as a part of the recruitment process and also later from time to time.

Call-a-thons as a tool for strengthening the TLF department

If you have a telefundraising department, then having call-a-thons is a great way for telefundraisers to bond with the rest of the team. Our telefundraisers work part time and mostly remotely so they are more at risk to not feel like a part of the team. Our telefundraisers were very happy to share work experience with other members of the organization. And other team members become more appreciative of telefundraisers after having a “taste” of their work.

💡 If you are looking to hire some telefundraisers, then organizing call-a-thons is also one way to pick out the next potential stars. We haven’t had success in hiring from the call-a-thon yet, but one of the volunteers was a star caller, getting significantly more results than everyone.

How a call-a-thon led to us starting a telefundraising department

It all started with a presentation from Martina Neradová at CARE – she made calling sound so fun and easy that I was inspired to try to organize a call-a-thon.

After the great experience, I found that I now have enough enthusiasm and capacity to start our own TLF department. But most of my career has been spent writing texts. I still had very little knowledge and skills regarding TLF.

That’s where Martina came in – we collaborated with her through all the process of recruitment and training, and setting up the processes, and now for ongoing management of the department as well. She consults all 3 of our callers. She also consults me both as a coordinator and as a caller myself who is working to improve my calling skills as well.

Our department has been working more than 6 months at the time of writing (March 2026) and I can attest to the fact that you can start such a department without knowing much about TLF yourself – especially, if you get a consultant. 😊

We started in a simple way:

📞 The recruitment took only a couple of weeks and the most important parts where roleplay in the interview and trial calling real people in the office;
📞 The basic training took only 3 hours online on the first day, and people started calling right away;
📞 We do not have a well-functioning CRM for TLF, so we are calling from a spreadsheet for several months (worked fine in the beginning but is getting really complicated now;
📞 Skills are improved as we go – in weekly calls with Martina or me;
📞We meet in the office 2x a month and call together online at least 2x a month.

Current department: 2 callers with 50% FTE, 1 caller with 25% FTE.

Current average of donors that callers bring in per h: 0.36
All regular donors they have brought since started working: 264 (~44 per month)

These are the basics – feel free to get in touch with me if you have any questions about how our department functions.

PART 2

How we organized call-a-thons: practical steps

Here you can see a check-list of all tasks + their deadlines that we used to produce a call-a-thon. Below I will explain the prep process in 7 steps.

Step 1: decide when to have a call-a-thon

When using call-a-thons as a prelaunch tool, we first asked some employees and volunteers to join and then had a call-a-thon a few days before sending the first email. This way, when making calls, we could already mention that some people are already joining, and we had a tight deadline for the called supporters to join before the campaign launch.

During the campaign, I think calling close to some kind of deadline works well. But there are probably many possibilities to incorporate call-a-thons also in other moments to give your campaign a boost.

I imagine it could be a good idea to do it also before the social media launch to get some feedback on how the soft launch people are reacting to the message.

Here’s the timeline of our campaign of year-end 2025:

Both in 2024 and 2025 we organized call-a-thons on a Saturday. This worked well for 2 reasons:

it was easier to get volunteers to come;
we could take over the whole office building since others were not there – we gave each caller their own separate room for calling.

But one we did it on a workday and that works, too.

Step 2: make a list of people to call

Choosing the right segment of contacts to call can make or break your call-a-thon. For getting money, generally best contacts are the ones that are the the most recent + have donated in the past. For getting money + feedback - people who were clicking around your emails or donation page but did not finish a donation.

One of the most effective segments to call are ex-monthly donors (aka relapsed regular donors).

In our first 2 call-a-thons the list we made consisted of people who:

💵 had either donated monthly

💵 or had several single donations in the past.

The list was organized in such a way that on top of it were people who had donated most recently + the biggest sums. It was not easy to make such a list and distribute the contacts in a fair way among callers but the effort totally paid off.

In the latest call-a-thon on 30th of Dec we chose to call a segment of people who had clicked on fundraising emails, most of whom had never donated. I think that’s the reason why this call-a-thon produced significantly less monthly donors. Many of the callers had participated in previous events, so they could tell that these contacts seemed way less responsive.

It’s a lot harder to convince someone to donate if they have never done it before than it is to convince a previous donor to donate again.

I think I would not use this segment in a call-a-thon with volunteers anymore. Some people, especially ones who had participated before, were upset about the less responsive nature of the calls.

Here’s an example of how our calling sheet looked.

Step 3: plan out the day

We found that 2 x1,5h for calling is a good amount of time. It's not too little, not too much. Training takes a significant portion of the start of the day and you should also plan time for feedback, lunch and celebration.

The program for all call-a-thons was something like this:

🕙 10:40-11:00 Arrival of participants, coffee, snacks

🕙 11:00-12:00 Energizer, intro and training

🕙 12:00-13:30 Calling round #1

🕙 13:30-14:30 Lunch + group photo + energizer #2

🕙 14:30-16:00 Calling round #2

🕙 16:00-16:30 Round of group sharing of experiences and feedback

🕙16:30+ Afterparty: going out for drinks or something else

Intro and training consisted of a speech from our leader, explaining the call structure, handing out the scripts, demo call, explaining the organization of the day. In reality it took even a bit more than 1h.

In the calling rounds, each person was calling alone in a separate room. The caller would open the calling sheet and their email, and after each successful call send out an email from a pre-saved template.

For lunch we treated everyone with pizza or something tasty.

We put effort into making it nice, making it fun. As a result, the day did not feel like work, more like party!

Step 4: invite participants

How to make people excited about your call-a-thon?

The first step is to be excited yourself!

✨ Present this as something fun, not as work that needs to be done. Talk about how great the previous call-a-thons were. Use social proof and soothe fears. ✨

For each call-a-thon I cherry-picked the people I wanted to invite and invited them personally. I chose people I knew were dedicated and trustworthy. By the way, extroversion is not a must – introverts make just as good callers!

I don’t advise just posting the ask in a group chat: people are way less responsive that way for all kinds of tasks and even more so for something scary like a call-a-thon.

I tried calling a couple of the volunteers to invite them but it seemed to me that it’s hard for them to make a decision to come or not right away in the call. I found that sending a personal message works best.

To maximize chances people responding:

💙 explain why are you inviting them specifically – what makes them special;

💙 acknowledge that calling and asking for donations is somewhat scary and uncomfortable;

💙 soothe their fears by explaining that there will be training and most supporters are super nice

❌ We chose to NOT offer prizes for best callers, because we want to promote team spirit and not competition.

❌ We did not pay volunteers or give any gifts apart from a tasty lunch.

❤️ The main promise was a fun day and an opportunity to do something really meaningful for animals – and this was enough for people to want to come, even more than once! ❤️

Here’s an example of a Slack message I sent.

Step 5: prepare the training

People do not need to know everything about the campaign to ask for donations.

Homework before the call-a-thon

To prepare for the call-a-thon, I only asked people to do one small technical homework: to save a template of an email that they would send after each call that ended in a donation promise. On Gmail you can easily do it so that emails can be sent super quickly after calls. Each caller also had a personalized link that they put in the template, so we could later track how many donors each caller got. Here’s the template saving instruction.

It’s important to ask everyone to send a test email to you and check if the link works. One person did not do it and it later turned out she was sending emails with a completely broken link.

On-site training

The rest of the preparation happened on the day of the call-a-thon: during the 1h alotted time. Here's how it happened:

1️⃣ Step 1: intro about the campaign

First, our leader told what’s been happening in the campaign in a few sentences. And explained the general idea of this fundraising campaign.

2️⃣Step 2: call structure

Then she introduced a simple call structure, using a 5 finger analogy (we drew the parts on a whiteboard).

Me: what’s my name and where am I calling from
You – why am I calling you specifically? (...because you’ve done so much for animals, thank you…)
Why – digging into their motivation, asking why they decided to help animals
Opportunity – explaining that we have change to ban cages for hens in Latvia, that a monthly donation is the most effective way to achieve this and now is the best time to join
Contract – if the person agrees, we agree on a specific sum they will donate and a specific time (preferably asap) when they will set it up. This raises the chances that they will actually do it.

4️⃣ Step 3: script

Then she handed out documents with this structure written down + ready-made phrases they could use in each part. The document also included answers to some frequently asked questions. People had time to read it and ask questions. Here you can see the scripts we used for our call-a-thons of 2025: on Dec 6 and on Dec 30.

4️⃣ Step 4: the calling spreadsheet

I asked them to open the calling sheet on their laptops and walked them through each section. It was important to tell them to make notes correctly so we could later transfer this info to our CRM.

5️⃣ Step 5: demo call

Our leader made 1 or 2 calls to real people, putting them on speaker while everyone was listening. The callers later said that the demo calls were super helpful.

And that’s it, then we were off to call!

Step 6: celebrate!

I cannot emphasize enough how important this part is. To make the day fun, to foster excitement, a team spirit and gamification, celebrate each donor got as soon as you can and as much as you can!

For us the celebration had several parts:

🎉 We had a common Whatsapp group where after each donor got you could write a short message like “yay, I got one!” right away;

🎉 We could also run into the hallway and scream “woohooo!” (this was fun for the beginning, then people stopped doing it;

🎉 During breaks, everyone colored each promise they got on a progress bar on the whiteboard.

At the end of the event we popped open a (non-alcoholic) champagne bottle and went off to party!

Step 7: reminders

This happens after the event.

You will always have a significant amount of people who promised to donate but did not set up a donation. People procrastinate, forget, lose emails… You can significantly increase the fulfillment rate if 3-5 days after the call-a-thon you do reminder calls to people who have not started donating yet.

We made a short instruction on how to make these calls here. If you cannot call, at least send them reminder emails.

Challenges and ideas to explore

Challenges 🤔

Getting employees excited about this year after year. The first time they all wanted to partiicpate because this was something new and interesting but the second year we did call-a-thons, only the org's leader (who was also the leader of the event) and me participated repeatedly. I might need to think about some new strategies to make the next call-a-thons "fresh".
Figuring out what is the best contact segment to give to people who are calling the first time. I think I prefer to give them lapsed monthly donors instead of people who just clicked the emails. That way they get a more positive experience about call-a-thons in general and are more likely to come to the next ones. First impressions matter. But if we get a lot of newbies, we might not have enough lapsed monthly donors for everyone. It might be a good idea to run a lead generation action not long before the call-a-thon - because people who recently completed some action are also good contacts to call to.
One thing I consider a mistake is that we did not teach the callers to ask when/if it's okay to call again if the supporter does not donate in the call-a-thon. Some people probably would have said that after 1 month is okay, some might be angry about receiving another similar call a year later.

Ideas 💡

Call-a-thons are the ultimate engagement tool not only for the donors but also for the volunteers who become more involved in activism by participating here. So I have a brave idea I am considering – asking not only volunteers that I know personally but sending an email to some of our most loyal long-term monthly donors (whom I've never met) and ask them to come to a call-a-thon.
Another idea that is worth exploring at some point – organizing a fully online call-a-thon.

✨ Key lessons learned ✨

1. People don’t need a lot of training

Even volunteers who don’t know too much and even people who have never called before can be good callers after 1-1,5 hours of training if you do it right. Sure, they may not be perfect, but if you have “warm” supporters to call then the conversation will be good anyways.

2. The contact list changes everything

Your success rate depends A LOT on the type of people you decide to call. The best contacts are those who have donated in the past + are still active followers. So please invest time in preparing a list of warmest contacts that you have.

3. Call-a-thons can bring a lot of joy and a lot of money

The day of the call-a-thon never felt like work. It was so fun and inspiring to spend it with likeminded teammates, talking to people who care about animals, celebrating every step. Several of our volunteers attended 2 or all 3 call-a-thons: giving away their full day without any compensation whatsoever. I think that really shows something!

I hope this inspires you to organize your own call-a-thon and that you have fun doing it!

Resources / materials

These materials were scattered in the document already but I'm also providing them here for convenience. Note that they are auto-translated by Google - if the language seems weird in some places, that's why!

Planning document for organizing a call-a-thon.

Message for inviting someone to the call-a-thon.

Instruction on how to save an email template on Gmail.

Scripts we handed out to people during our call-a-thons of 2025: on Dec 6 and on Dec 30.

Instruction on how to do reminder calls.

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