Durham University has created a campaign called “Creating the Future: 2013-2017”, the primary purpose being to establish Durham University as a World Top 50 University to add to its Top 5 UK status.
Substantial philanthropic donations through the DARO team formed part of that plan.
We were engaged to support the DARO (Development and Alumni Relations Office) with their team of 100+ student callers to support this programme. We developed a series of interactive behaviour-based training sessions aimed at New Callers. We also trained their Supervisors and Lead Callers to support the calling team to achieve their donation targets. As part of this work we also provided side-by-side coaching and coaching to the group, this helped both those who were performing well and those falling behind targets or expected performance.
Further to this we supported two of the DARO team on an individual basis. The first was trained in the fundamentals of coaching to support him in his role of supervising the calling team. The second was with one-to-one coaching to help raise performance and achieve his potential.
Feedback from Linda Morrison (Annual Giving Manager DARO)
Over the last two years, New Results Training, in the guise of Nevil Tynemouth and Mike Lever, have done several strands of training for us in the Development Office at Durham University.
The main reason we called on them in the first place is to help us train our student callers, who call alumni asking for their financial and non-financial support. We usually cover this training ourselves but were having difficulty converting admittedly highly-intelligent but business-naïve students into successful fundraisers. Over the last two years we have, together with Nevil and Mike, crafted a very successful training phase. It’s not lengthy nor intrusive, but highly effective.
On the strength of their performance with our Student Callers and Supervisors, we called on Nevil and Mike to help with some training needs for specific members of staff: one fundraiser who needed extra support, and another member of staff who needed training in coaching. The first was 1:1, the second was through one of New Results’ open courses. Again, both approaches were highly-appreciated and produced the desired result.
Being a trainer myself and perhaps therefore hyper-critical, I am particularly impressed by Nevil and Mike’s level of preparation. As far as possible everything is tailored to the audience and nothing is left to chance. They are very professional and engaging and learning is active and fun. I always enjoy the sessions very much myself! They are also careful to scrutinise feedback and change things to make it better next time. The client (myself) is kept informed and given honest reviews and suggestions. In my experience, it is not always the case that training companies give this level of service.
I am very pleased we discovered New Results Training.
