Refugee Action, the independent national charity that works with refugees to build new lives in the UK, recently received a training day from The Phone Room and has been delighted by the effects of the training.  

Refugee Action were keen to discover how they could use the telephone to talk directly to their supporters themselves. They. worked with The Phone Room’s Satellite Business Manager Geoff Savage to design a training day specifically tailored to address their training needs.

Alison Gregory, Head of Fundraising at Refugee Action gave the following evaluation of the day:

“8 apprehensive supporter development workers (none of whom have done fundraising before), 3 slightly scared fundraising staff who haven’t spoken directly to supporters for months and 1 trainer: Geoff ‘get inspired right now’ Savage.

The plethora of light hearted fundraising anecdotes, the way he mixed structured tried and tested fundraising techniques with how to be creative during calls, and then without warning threw in that emotionally wrenching line about how we’re doing this for our clients was the perfect formula. And it was all executed with professionalism and enthusiasm. Meeting the group the day after, we were all different. We’d come together, we knew what we wanted and we’re now going out and getting it.

To summarise: If you don’t come out of this training feeling like you’re about to change the world you’re either unconscious or in the wrong job.”

Running training events such as this is just part of the specialist telephone fundraising service that The Phone Room provides – either by calling supporters on their Charity, Education or Arts clients’ behalf, working with organisations to help them call their own supporters, or training clients and their staff on how to run their own successful telephone fundraising campaigns.