If regular telemarketing sounds like torture, most people would blanch at the thought of working for the Alumni Telefunds Office.
Employees spend their shifts making endless calls to Boston University alumni. It’s telemarketing, but with a different twist the callers ask alumni to open their pocketbooks and give donations, sometimes in the thousands and millions of dollars, to university projects and programs.
But for College of Communication junior Jessica Korn, the job isn’t really that bad. Most alumni, if she can reach them, are cordial, making the tasks far from the tedium that usually marks telemarketing jobs, she says.
Most alumni are polite to the callers, once they hear that they are representing BU, she said.
‘People are usually nice, even if they don’t plan to make any donations,’ Korn said. ‘Most alums are interested in what my major is, what I’m studying. I get only a very small percentage of hang-ups.’
The friendly attitude of the alumni is a relief to the student workers at the Alumni Telefunds Office, Korn said.
‘It makes my job a lot easier when the people are nice,’ she said. ‘I don’t feel like a regular telemarketer.’
And, she said, it also implies that most alumni still feel a connection to the university, even long after they have graduated.
The Alumni Telefunds Office employs students to contact alumni and ask for donations on behalf of the disparate colleges within the university from which that particular alumnus graduated. The donations received are then used for the scholarships, building funds and the miscellaneous expenses of each particular college.
Alumni Telefunds employees such as Korn contact one alumnus after another as the names are pulled up by computer, and recite the same computerized script to every alumnus.
‘The computerized system makes the process much faster and more efficient.’ Korn said.
Korn and her colleagues are given pools of alumni to call from computerized lists which pull up the alumni’s name, phone number, year, school and major. The pools themselves are determined by the years in which alumni graduated and whether they have made financial contributions in the past.
‘Former students who graduated in the 1980s will all be grouped together in a pool, as will people who have donated previously,’ Korn said.
The number of people willing to give varies from group to group, Korn said, but not in any specific pattern.
‘Some pools are better than others,’ Korn said. ‘It really all depends on the group that you are calling.
‘It is a commonly held misconception that the alumni in one school or another donate much more money,’ Korn added. ‘Many seem to believe that School of Management alumni donate much more than alumni of the other colleges. For my part, I haven’t seen much of a difference in the amount that alumni of SMG, the College of Arts and Sciences, the College of Communication or any of the others have been willing to contribute.’
However, according to Korn, alumni of extant schools and colleges are decidedly less willing to donate.
‘For example, when we call former students from the Nursing archives, there is not as positive of a response as when we call alumni from the colleges that are still around,’ she said.
There is also no discernible pattern among the alumni which she is able to get through to and those she cannot reach, she said.
‘A good percentage of my daily calls are picked up by answering machines,’ Korn said. ‘I haven’t noticed any way of avoiding this. I just take it as it comes.’
Korn said despite recent controversy over remarks made and actions taken by BU Chancellor John Silber, she has not noticed a drop in donations. After two years on the job, she says alumni are still willing to donate to the school.
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