Your development team probably already knows who it would like to call.

A first-time donor deserves a thank-you. A lapsed donor may be worth checking in on. Someone who pledged a gift may need a reminder. An alum may need an invitation. A member may be approaching renewal. A supporter may have a question that another email will not answer.

The problem is usually not knowing that a conversation could help.

The problem is having enough people and enough time to make those conversations happen.

That is why telefundraising still matters.

The old mental picture may be a phone room full of callers working through a list. That is still one version of it. But telefundraising today can also involve remote staff, volunteers, professional fundraising companies, dialer software, AI voice, SMS, email, and automated follow-up.

The phone is still useful because it can create something most fundraising channels cannot: a real-time, two-way conversation.

And the ways organizations can scale those conversations have changed considerably.

In this post, I’m going to cover:

• What telefundraising is

• Why organizations should consider it

• What the data says about why phone outreach can work

• How to build a telefundraising campaign

• 4 different ways to run one today

• What modern telefundraising looks like with AI voice and multichannel follow-up

Let’s dig in.

What Is Telefundraising?

Telefundraising uses telephone outreach to support fundraising and donor engagement.

Sometimes that conversation includes a direct ask.

Sometimes it does not.

Organizations can use telefundraising to:

• Thank first-time or recent donors

• Renew previous gifts

• Re-engage lapsed donors

• Invite supporters to become monthly donors

• Follow up on pledges

• Support annual giving or year-end campaigns

• Invite alums or members to events

• Conduct surveys

• Confirm interest

• Share a next step

• Learn more about why someone gives

That broader definition is important.

Telefundraising is not simply calling people and asking for money.

At its best, it creates a personal conversation around a relationship that already matters to your organization.

Blackbaud’s current phonathon guidance makes a similar point: phone outreach gives fundraisers a real-time, person-to-person conversation that can build trust, surface donor intent, and create momentum for giving.

That is why telefundraising remains relevant even as email, SMS, digital fundraising, and other channels continue to grow.

EverRaise: A Modern Way to Run Telefundraising

EverRaise is a modern telefundraising option for teams that want to create personal, two-way outreach without staffing a traditional phone room or outsourcing every call.

With EverRaise, your team can:

• Use AI voice for structured conversations

• Leave voicemails when people do not answer

• Follow up through SMS and email

• Route interested or sensitive responses to staff

• Validate contact data before launch

• Track conversations, clicks, responses, and next steps

It is especially well suited for repeatable campaigns such as donor thank-yous, lapsed-donor reactivation, pledge follow-up, event invitations, surveys, and annual giving reminders.

Explore EverRaise’s Engagement platform.

Why Should Organizations Consider Telefundraising?

You shouldn't add phone outreach to your fundraising strategy just because organizations have used it for decades.

Use it when a conversation can move a relationship forward.

Here are five reasons to consider it.

1. Retaining Donors Is Hard, and Personal Follow-Up Can Matter

Fundraising teams are working in an environment where keeping donors is difficult.

The Fundraising Effectiveness Project reported that the number of donors fell 3.6% in 2025, even as total dollars raised increased. Overall donor retention was only 43.3%, and first-time donor retention remained essentially flat.

In other words, organizations are raising more money from a smaller donor base.

That makes the relationship after the first gift increasingly important.

Phone outreach can help there.

In a Ruffalo Noel Levitz analysis of more than 30,000 higher-education donor records, donors who received a thank-you call were 51% more likely to make another pledge the following year than donors who were not thanked by phone.

The difference was even clearer when the thank-you actually became a conversation. The following-year pledge rate was 64% among donors who received a live thank-you call, compared with 44% among donors who did not receive a thank-you call.

That research is from higher education, but the principle is broader: A call can do something a receipt or mass email often cannot. It can make a donor feel noticed.

2. A Phone Call Can Influence Future Giving Even Without an Ask

One of the most useful telefundraising examples I have found did not begin with a fundraising ask at all.

The Thistle Foundation ran a split test with 2,000 monthly donors

One group of 1,000 donors received a courtesy call that thanked them for their support, shared how their gifts were helping, and made no request for additional money. The other 1,000 did not receive the call.

Several months later, both groups received the same telephone campaign asking them to upgrade their monthly contributions.

Donors who received the earlier thank-you call were 5.4% more likely to upgrade. More importantly, gross revenue from that group was 41% higher.

That is an older study, but the lesson remains useful.

The phone's value isn't limited to making an ask.

Stewardship can strengthen the later ask.

3. Phone Outreach Creates a Two-Way Conversation

Email is useful.

Direct mail is useful.

SMS is useful.

But none of them naturally creates the same real-time back-and-forth as a conversation.

A supporter can ask a question.

You can learn why someone stopped giving.

An alum can tell you they moved.

A donor can say they want more information about a program.

A member can ask to speak with someone.

A person can tell you the timing is wrong, but the cause still matters to them.

That information is valuable because good fundraising is not only about sending messages.

It is also about listening.

Blackbaud describes this as one of the central strengths of phonathon: a real-time conversation can build trust, reveal donor intent, and turn one contact into a longer donor journey.

We have seen the same dynamic in EverRaise campaigns. In a recent university engagement campaign, 868 people were reached in less than five hours, and 163 answered live, a 22% live-answer rate.

That is 163 real-time opportunities to learn something, answer something, or create a next step.

4. A Call Can Make Your Other Channels More Effective

Modern telefundraising should not operate in isolation.

Someone may answer a call and say:

• “Send me the link.”

• “Email me more information.”

• “Can someone follow up next week?”

• “I would rather register online.”

That is why the next step matters almost as much as the call itself.

In that same EverRaise university campaign, voice outreach was connected with SMS follow-up. The campaign generated 116 link clicks and a 15% SMS click-through rate.

The phone started the interaction.

The text made the next step easy.

That is a better way to think about telefundraising today.

Voice can support email.

SMS can support voice.

A voicemail can create awareness before a text arrives.

A warm response can be routed to a staff member.

The goal is not to use every channel.

The goal is to let each channel do the job it does best.

5. Telefundraising Gives Lean Teams More Capacity

This may be the most practical reason to consider it.

Most relationship-driven organizations have more people worth engaging than staff available to engage them personally.

The fundraising team may know exactly what should happen:

Thank these donors.

Call these lapsed supporters.

Follow up with these pledges.

Invite these people.

Ask this group a question.

But manual calling is slow.

That is why telefundraising has always involved some form of scale, whether through volunteers, student callers, fundraising agencies, or dialing technology.

Modern tools extend that idea further.

In the EverRaise university campaign mentioned above, reaching 868 people in less than five hours saved the organization more than 20 hours of staff time.

That does not mean every conversation should be automated.

It means your staff doesn't have to personally perform every repeatable step to create a personal outreach program.

That distinction is important.

How Does Telefundraising Work?

A good telefundraising campaign begins long before anyone makes a call.

Here is a practical way to think about it.

1. Start With One Clear Purpose

Do not begin with:

“We should call our donors.”

Begin with:

“What do we want this campaign to accomplish?”

For example:

• Thank first-time donors

• Renew annual donors

• Re-engage lapsed supporters

• Invite recurring gifts

• Follow up on outstanding pledges

• Support a Giving Day

• Invite alums to an event

• Ask members about renewal

• Conduct a short survey

One clear purpose makes the audience, conversation, follow-up, and measurement much easier to define.

2. Choose the Right Audience

Calling everyone in your database is not a strategy.

Segment the people you want to reach.

That may include:

• First-time donors

• Repeat donors

• Monthly donors

• Lapsed donors

• Event attendees

• Alumni by class year

• Members approaching renewal

• Donors to a specific program

• Volunteers

• Supporters who previously expressed interest

A relevant reason for calling makes the conversation easier for everyone.

3. Start With Clean Contact Data

A great conversation cannot happen if the number is wrong.

Before outreach begins, validate your list and make sure you are working from current information.

Good campaign preparation includes accurate phone numbers, useful segmentation, recent donor history, and updated communication preferences.

This is one area where older phone programs and modern telefundraising have something in common:

The quality of the list matters.

4. Build a Conversation, Not Just a Script

A script should provide structure without making the conversation sound scripted.

Your caller or voice agent should know:

• How to introduce the organization

• Why the call is happening

• What question to ask

• What information may be useful

• What the desired next step is

• What to do when someone wants more information

A thank-you call should sound different from a renewal campaign.

A lapsed-donor conversation should sound different from an event invitation.

The purpose should shape the conversation.

5. Choose How You Want to Make the Calls

Organizations can run telefundraising in four common ways today.

Staff or Volunteers

Your staff, board members, volunteers, students, or other supporters make the calls themselves.

This gives you strong human context and direct ownership of relationships.

It also requires caller time, recruiting, training, scheduling, and management.

Outsourced Telefundraising Companies

A professional telefundraising company provides callers and manages some or all of the campaign.

This can give your organization immediate human calling capacity without building the team yourself.

It is a useful option when the campaign requires a significant amount of live human conversation.

Calling or Phonathon Software

Software helps human callers work through lists, follow scripts, record outcomes, and manage campaigns more efficiently.

This is a good fit when you already have people available to call but need a better operating system.

AI Voice

AI voice gives fundraising teams another option.

Instead of requiring a person to place every call manually, an AI voice agent can conduct a structured conversation, capture responses, leave a voicemail when needed, trigger follow-up, and route interested people to staff.

For a deeper explanation, our guide to AI voice agents shows how conversational AI fits into donor and supporter outreach.

This model is particularly useful when the call's purpose is clear and repeatable, such as a thank-you, reminder, invitation, reactivation campaign, or simple follow-up.

6. Make the Next Step Easy

Do not design the call without designing what happens after it.

If someone wants a link, send it.

If someone asks for more information, email it.

If someone wants to talk with staff, route the response.

If someone does not answer, decide whether voicemail or another follow-up channel makes sense.

This is where modern telefundraising becomes more than a phone campaign.

EverRaise’s Engagement platform, for example, connects voice, voicemail, SMS, email, transfers, and follow-up within the same campaign path.

That lets the call become the start of the next step instead of another isolated activity your staff has to reconcile later.

7. Measure the Outcome, Not Just the Dials

Call volume matters operationally.

It is not the goal.

Depending on the campaign, measure:

• Valid contacts

• Answer rate

• Live conversations

• Completed conversations

• Pledges

• Completed gifts

• Donor upgrades

• Reactivated donors

• Event registrations

• SMS or email response

• Requests for staff follow-up

• Staff time saved

The right metric depends on why you launched the campaign.

Don't evaluate a thank-you campaign the same way you evaluate a pledge campaign.

A reactivation campaign shouldn't be evaluated the same way as an event invitation.

Start with the goal and measure from there.

What Does Modern Telefundraising Look Like?

Telefundraising used to require a room full of phones or a professional agency.

Those options still exist.

They are no longer the only options.

A modern telefundraising campaign might look like this:

You identify 1,000 lapsed donors.

You validate the numbers.

You create a short conversation designed to learn whether they still want to stay connected.

An AI voice agent handles the initial outreach.

People who do not answer receive an approved voicemail.

Interested donors receive a follow-up text or email.

People who want to speak with the organization are routed to staff.

The campaign records what happened so your team knows who needs attention next.

That is still telefundraising.

It simply uses a different operating model.

That's why I think telefundraising remains a modern, valid fundraising option.

The channel has not disappeared.

It has become more flexible.

Over to You

Fundraising still depends on relationships.

And relationships often move forward through conversation.

Telefundraising gives nonprofits, universities, associations, faith-based organizations, and other relationship-driven teams another way to create those conversations at scale.

The best place to start is simple:

Define the purpose.

Choose the right people.

Use good data.

Have a useful conversation.

Make the next step easy.

Then choose the model that gives your team enough capacity to follow through.

The phone is not a replacement for relationships.

Used well, it is one way to keep more of them moving.