Phoning Alumni For Event Notices and Alumni Relations
By Lee Simonson
If you want to phone alumni to announce upcoming events, using phone broadcasting is the fastest and easiest way to get messages out. The process is simple, straightforward and you can get thousands of notices out almost instantly.
Most colleges and universities still use underclassman to make live outbound calls. There is nothing wrong with that strategy, and in fact, it has been proven to be a very effective way to conduct fundraising drives.
However, using live bodies to make calls is expensive, time consuming and not good for every application. For example, a fund raising campaign is one thing, but to use the same effort and expensive to announce a regional party is another. You would not want to spend a few days making several thousand calls to a region of the country, when the same thing could be accomplished in less than 15 minutes by sending a pre-recorded message over the phone.
If you have a project that entails sending out event notices to alumni, or to get other non-fundraising information out, your best bet is retain the services of a phone broadcasting, or voice blast, company that can get the notices out fast.
The process only takes a few minutes. Once you establish an account, usually at no cost, you only have to do two things. First, you email your phone list to the service bureau in an acceptable format (Excel is fine) and then you record your announcement over the phone. Tell the phone broadcasting service when you want your message to go out -- and presto, it's done in a flash.
Your pre-recorded announcements can be left on answering machines and/or delivered to live pick ups. That way, you cover all your bases and achieve the highest penetration rate, usually about 85% of your entire phone list.
Depending on how often you send messages to alumni, you may also want to consider getting a do-it-yourself account set up that enables you to upload your own lists and do your own recordings. You get a user name and password, and can log in anytime you want to launch a job. The big advantage to having web access is that you can send a job at anytime, from anywhere -- even from home. However, for security purposes you might want to make sure you have the system set to get a compliance officer approval before anything is sent.
Many colleges and universities have found that phone broadcasting is a very powerful tool in getting important information and announcements out to alumni. It's very fast, very convenient and a much less expensive way to send announcements -- a fraction of what it costs to send a post card. With some creativity, you can also boost attendance to events by offering special "voice coupons" in your announcement -- special codes that folks can use to get discounted tickets to athletic events or other occasions.
For more information on how to phone alumni with special announcements, click here: http://www.orangepoint.net/schoolalerts.html
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