employment | The Three Legged Pig

How do I stop charity fundraising phone calls?

Sep 142012

Hello, my name’s Jim and I’m calling on behalf of the …

And so started each day. Again, and again and again. About 30 times an hour, for 8 hours a day I sold raffle tickets for a charity. Or more precisely, I sold tickets for an organisation that raised money for a charity.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Charities have to raise money. But the next time your dinner or TV watching is interrupted by one of those annoying fund raising calls, just think about the poor bastard whose only job it is, is making those calls. It’s a nasty, soul destroying job staring at a computer screen in a Zen like trance waiting for the automated click and the call to connect. (Yes, we didn’t even dial – I was an appendage to the machine.) But when it’s a choice between your bank taking your home away and you prostituting yourself out – it’s not a hard choice.

Click.

That’s the most common response. (Otherwise it was just “No thanks,” or worse.) If you get one of these calls and hang up, well, that’s pretty stupid. Why? Because they will call back. Again, and again and again. They have a massive location based database of numbers scraped from phone books from the last 20 (or more) years. It’s recycled about three to four times a year, and if you don’t answer, then the number just goes back into the pool. Even if you get a fresh new silent number from Telstra, if it was listed 20 years ago – they will have it.

But I’m on the National Do Not Call list

I hear you protest. Tough, it doesn’t apply to charities. Or,

I have a silent number. It’s unlisted.

They don’t care, it wasn’t silent before and now it’s in the database, so you’re going to get called. Once, I had someone who had only got the phone connected that morning – I was their first call as they were moving into their home.

The saddest customer is the old biddy who probably doesn’t have full use of their faculties and still has a credit card. Yes, young man, you sound honest, I’ll hand over $200 for tickets for a prize I could never make use of with money that isn’t really mine. The other type of person who I hated calling was the one who was interrupted doing something (like in the shower) who dashed out to answer the phone. Really? Don’t you people know how to use voice-mail? In fact, why do you have a land-line anyway? Come the next 20 years and there will be fewer and fewer POTS numbers to call.

So, of that $200, 100% went to the charity – literally. When I made a sale by credit card, I put the details straight into a web form for the bank account of the charity. If you wrote a cheque, then it was in the name of the charity. (Quite a few of the younger employees working there had never seen a cheque.) But then the calling organisation would charge back about 40% of the cost of the service. If you think about it, you have to spend money to make money. Even those charities that do all the work themselves: making the call, buying the prizes, etc. still have to spend the same amount of money.

At least the job was honest. We got paid on time, we got our superannuation (eventually) and they looked after employees who managed to keep going for the long run. But it was hard, mentally draining work – and you had to be good to keep your job. And by good, I mean make $30/hour in credit card sales and up to $90 in combined credit card and cheque sales – for every hour you worked, and if you didn’t you’d get the “Please don’t come back.” talk from the supervisor – no matter how long you’d worked there. It basically paid your wage and the overhead of the organisation. If you decided not to turn up for a day unannounced, you lost your job. If you dicked around too much, you lost your job. Seriously. Some days the owner would walk through, see someone using their mobile to surf Facebook or similar and politely say to them “Please don’t come back.” And he could – because we were casual, hourly wage slaves. If you didn’t focus on the job, then you’d be let go. And every Friday about eight or so new bags of fresh blood and bone in human form would turn up, give it a go and maybe come back for more punishment the next day.

So, how do you get them to stop calling you I hear to ask. It’s very simple – when you get a call, repeat after me:

Hello, I appreciate the work you’re doing, and I realise it’s your job but I’d rather not get these calls. Please put me on your Do Not Call list. Also, does your organisation make calls for any other charities? Yes, please put me on those Do Not Call lists as well. Your floor manager has a form you can fill in to remove me from all the databases, and I’m happy to wait on the phone while you do it. Thank you.

Insight Charity Fund Raising Services does fund raising for a few charities, if you want to donate to them (the charity not Insight CFS) I’ve linked to their donate page:

Unemployment blues

The Three Legged Pig No Responses »

Dec 132011

I am an unemployed bum. Again.

When I look at my work history, I can’t think of a time when I’ve had a stable job. And by stable I mean one where I thought I’d be able to continue working, with hope of promotion for a company that was also economically stable. My resume is a train wreck of employment history.

I’ve found recently that the quality of my work, my experience and my education has little to do with my salary level – if anything at all. I can be educated up to my eyeballs (and I am) and still find it hard to find meaningful (or any) work at a minimum salary range that I need to sustain life.

There’s a correlation between wages and inflation that I think most people seem to miss, perhaps because most people aren’t educated beyond high school. (And that’s something I think a lot of well educated people seem to forget.) Such that, when wages go up, people tend to have greater purchasing power and they exercise that power by buying lots of useless stuff they don’t need and that in turn makes prices go up. We’re constantly bombarded with advertisements telling us how we aren’t happy because we don’t have the latest whizbang thingy, so we need to go out and spend, spend, spend. But how do the employers expect us to buy all the yummy things they lay out for us, if they don’t pay us enough to purchase their rotten items?

This then comes back to my thoughts on salary and experience. We’re not paid on how much we know, or how much we’ve done.

When I go and sell my home, I don’t tell the real estate agent how much I want to sell the place for, and I don’t inform purchasers how much they have to pay to get my place. The market decides. A smart seller will research what similar abodes in the local area go for and aim for that as a selling price (or, just above, or well above.) If there are more properties available than buyers, prices go down because buyers have the upper hand in negotiations as they can shop around. If interest rates are too high, or the money market has gone balls up and there’s a credit crunch then that also affects prices. But generally, it’s about demand, and demand drives prices.

If there are more jobs available than workers, wages go up. Now, I’m not saying you can get by with no education or experience, but when the market is tight (or loose, never sure which is which) – that is fewer unemployed bums than jobs, the talent have a better pick of the jobs available and the wages go up.

Sure, the role and the person have to fit. Much like a family looking for a 4 bedroom house isn’t going to consider a 1 bedroom flat. It’s still the square peg for the square hole, but the same pattern still applies. The market drives salaries and prices.

At the moment, there are lots of jobs for child care workers. Now, I just can’t rock up to a child care centre and get a job. I have to be qualified. (And, I’d probably have to lose the extra fashion item.) But that doesn’t mean I can earn $9.5 million a year as a child care worker. For a start, that’d be about $500K per child – I don’t think may parents can afford that. And think of what the other workers would do when they find out the wage gap between me and them. (Although, I’d probably only need to work for about a month and I could retire.)

So, I know what my minimum salary needs to be to meet my basic needs. And I’m concerned that I won’t be able to get a job that makes that level of salary. I might have a bunch of nice documents hanging on the wall and a lorry load of experience in different industries but if I’m stuck in a market that has a lot more unemployed layabouts than jobs, there’s (almost) nothing I can do to improve my lot.

So, that’s that then.

Crucial Conversations – Tools for talking when stakes are high by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillian and Al Switzler

Book Reviews No Responses »

Jun 212011

I was given this book by my boss because he felt that my communication style was too abrupt and that I needed to improve my listening and empathy skills. Well, that’s what I think he was trying to tell me – I wasn’t really paying attention because I tend to filter out a lot of information that I consider waffle.

This is not just a business book, and not just about business conversations. You can use the material to help you with personal relationships as well. It is full of examples and practical things you can do in lots of situations. It starts by building up a few examples of what crucial conversations are, and the history leading up to the authors developing their theory. The book has so much information that you won’t be able to absorb all of it if you read it just once, so I have found it good to have at hand just to flick through every now and then when I have the chance.

The book deals a lot with the emotional side of conversations, in that words do really hurt regardless of the situation. Each party in a conversation may believe they have been slighted, and that the other is at fault. This book helps you understand how to take a calm step back and re-assess the situation, before trying to continue, or not continue if the situation is too volatile.

The book concludes with three chapters about putting it all together, when it’s too hard to have a conversation and moving forward. I found the yes, but chapter quite good as there were quite a few examples there.

And as always, I guess I have to mention the things I didn’t like about the book. I found it lacking a bit of depth in the theory side. It was more like a series of techniques that worked, but no real explanation of why they work. If I want to understand how to have a crucial conversation, I want to be able to base it on some bedrock. That said, the theory may well be there and the authors might have that grounding themselves, but I didn’t feel it when reading the book.

Maybe I just read it too fast. Then again, I tend to filter out more than I should if I think it’s too much waffle.