Chocolate cheese clock anyone?

Fundraising | Tom Eeles | 3 Mar 2010

What’s your favourite? Chocolate, cheese or clocks? For me it’s chocolate. So in this three part series we’ll save the best for last and start with clocks.

Ahhh Switzerland, the land of the cuckoo clock. Or not. It’s actually a German thing, not that it stops millions being sold in Switzerland every year.

I worked for a charity that had a similar name to a cancer charity, we weren’t a cancer charity but that didn’t stop us from fielding their calls. In hindsight we could have learnt a little from the Swiss and capitalised on our position.

People calling cancer charities are likely to have cancer or know someone with cancer. They might be upset or they might be calling to offer help. If we had taken time to know the other charity’s work we could have redirected them better and they may have avoided that awkward wrong number feeling you get. They would have left with a great impression of our charity too. I’m sure the other charity was fielding our calls and web hits. We could have visited their team, explained what we did, set up reciprocal web links and redirected traffic our way.

Ever had that feeling about your charity? Five minutes of thinking and doing right now might make a big difference to someone seeking out your cause:

Use Google Analytics to see what words people type into search engines to find your site. Type them into Google to see where else your supporters might be going. Then pick up the phone.
Ask all of your team that take calls if they ever get any consistent wrong numbers. Or maybe people visit your office looking for another company on your block?

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