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How Can I Succeed in Contacting Referrals?
How Can I Succeed in Contacting Referrals?
Below are some tips on how to make contacting referrals a success:
- Choose Phone Over Email
- When it comes to contacting potential volunteers, phone calls are essential. Text messaging also tends to work really well, especially for younger demographics. Never relay any study information via email.
- Put the Volunteer’s Schedule First
- Rather than calling a volunteer based on your specific schedule and guidelines and hoping they’re available, have the volunteer pick a time when they know they will be able to answer.
- Limit the Contact Window
- Allow volunteers to select a time to be contacted for the near future only (e.g. up to 3 days in the future). If volunteers make an appointment that is a week away, the appointment and your study will not be fresh in their minds.
- Send Reminders
- People are much less likely to accept phone calls from numbers they don’t recognise. However, when volunteers receive a reminder notification telling them you’ll be calling in 10 minutes, they’re not caught off guard by the unknown number when you actually do call at that time.
- Call at the Expected Time
- Keep in mind that asking people when they want to be contacted and not calling at that time significantly hurts your credibility. Since contacting the volunteer is the first one-on-one interaction they will have with anyone involved in the study, not calling at the promised time shows disrespect and significantly hurts the volunteer-researcher relationship.
- Personalize Your Messages
- People are more likely to accept calls from individuals than from an organization or a company; therefore, it’s essential to put emphasis on the person contacting the volunteer.
- Be Diligent
- People are busy and life gets in the way. While you don’t want to be hounding and bothering people, the reality is people give up trying to contact someone far too early. It’s important to be persistent and keep calling them until they answer. Remember: they’ve shown interest in your trial, so you’re following up on their interest. Don’t assume people aren’t interested in your trial just because they’re not picking up.
If you want to read more about these guidelines, we have a more elaborate article on this published on our website.