Podcast: Experiments with Mariya Yurukova at York University

York University in Toronto knows how to engage students in philanthropy. You might have seen their program where phonathon callers have moved on to meeting directly with donors in the most recent issue of CASE Currents. I had an opportunity to meet Mariya Yurukova, Manager of the Call Center at York during last year’s Canadian Annual Giving Congress and we started talking about experiments.

It can be difficult to get annual giving professionals to engage in experiments–they have to be done correctly to produce real results and there is always a fear that if you try something new you’ll risk failure. But Mariya (and it seems, other people at York, an institution committed to changing lives) are sort of fearless.

LISTEN

Check out this interview with Mariya, who outlines an experiment about two different phonathon scripts, emphasizing “personal interest” and “greater good” messaging, based on this Stanford University study that suggested men and women might respond to different types of charitable messaging.

Spoiler: It turns out that if your institution is committed to one type of mission, and you talk about it a lot, you probably want to keep talking about that mission with your donors.

Check out the feature article by Mikhael Bornstein and Mariya Yurukova about York’s innovative Student Philanthropy Officer program that graduates students from caller to face to face meetings with donors in the October 2015 issue of CASE Currents. CASE members can login to read the online edition at CASE.org or find the paper edition in your office.

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RNL Fundraising Voices brings you hot topics and industry voices to help improve your fundraising. Here are some recent episodes:

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