| VOLUME 28, NUMBER 19 | WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 4, 1998 | ISSN 1199-5246 |
WHO'S CALLING: Every weekday evening, some of the 70 members of York's Tele/Mail team are on the job.
Veeta Jain is beaming. It's a weekday evening in January, in an office on the second floor of York Lanes, and the 18-year-old telephone canvasser of five months has just gotten a $900 gift from a York alumnus who has never donated funds to the University before.
When Dawn Minott, manager of the Tele/Mail program, congratulates her, Jain tries to hide her pride. "I didn't do anything special," she says.
Her 70 student colleagues would beg to differ. As they know full well, Jain has indeed done something special. Getting a generous pledge to The National Campaign for York University from a previous non-donor requires fundraising and communication skills of the highest order.
Without such success stories, the Tele/Mail program, a segment of The National Campaign for York University that targets alumni and parents for support, would not have raised $3-million towards the $100-million campaign goal since September 1996.
All pledges of funds automatically go towards student financial aid (scholarships, bursaries and awards), unless directed to a particular project or program by the donor. Pledges towards endowed student financial aid that are paid by March 31, 1999 are matched by the provincial government through its Ontario Student Opportunity Trust Fund (OSOTF).
Tele/Mail depends for its success on a unique blend of positive attitude, perseverance, adaptability and interpersonal skills on the part of each of its 70 telephone representatives And patience lots of it.
New phone canvassers participate in intensive, two-day training sessions. There they practice their approach, learn strategies for communicating effectively with people over the phone and, most importantly, come to understand "how to make each phone call a positive interaction," says Minott. After all, she says, the callers are, first and foremost, public relations agents for the University.
Tele/Mail's success is also due to an effective, three-step fundraising technique. Its components are a pre-approach letter to introduce The National Campaign, the telephone call to ask for a gift, and a follow-up letter thanking the donor and detailing the payment amount and payment procedure.
The first call
The first call is always the most difficult, says second-year psychology student Shivani Dhir, 20. "I was pathetic at first. I didn't know what to say."
Part of the Tele/Mail training manual is "the script," a step-by-step guide from "Hello" to "Thank you. Goodbye," and everything in between.
Comments Gina Escoe-Messam, a music student and a caller for two years, "At first, I was very tied to the script that we have to help us. But as time goes by, you develop your own style."
Once callers have identified themselves and why they are calling, they try to "bond" with the prospect. To establish a rapport, they ask about the individual's interests, and invite comments and questions about York. Usually, they have a few basic facts about the prospect's connection to York (graduating year, college, faculty and department). Knowing something about the person they are calling makes it easier to carry on a conversation.
Sometimes callers connect with prospects who are very friendly and willing to talk about their experiences at York. "I met the love of my life my wife at York," one alumnus told Santo Verscio, a caller for over one year and a supervisor since September 1997.
Student canvassers are often enroled in the faculty from which their respondent graduated. Sometimes alumni offer practical advice about career and employment opportunities relating to a caller's area of study. "It gives me a better idea of what's out there and what I should be focussing on. It's nice to get a little insight," comments one-month team member Gina Racioppo.
And sometimes the respondent simply hangs up on the caller. That's not an easy experience to go through.
The most challenging respondents are those who have never donated to the University before. "We have to change their mind-set," Minott says. "This is where our communication and negotiating skills really come in."
The general perception among the student callers is that, though younger graduates are more sympathetic, it is older, more settled alumni who tend to pledge more.
Unreceptive respondents
Escoe-Messam identifies having to deal with unreceptive respondents as the most challenging aspect of the job. "Sometimes you don't feel like talking to people and you have to be nice," she says.
The canvassers find it easy to vent to Minott when they are having a-less-than-perfect day. She knows how it is. She has been there.
Minott began as a telephone canvasser with the Alumni Annual Fund in 1992. Since then, she has moved up to supervisory positions and, finally, in September 1996, became manager of the Tele/Mail program.
"I grew up in the program," states Minott, who is currently defending her master's thesis in political science and, off campus, is very much involved in her church, Toronto Perth Seventh-Day-Adventist, as the communications director and newsletter editor.
Why has she stayed on the job at York so long? "It's my need to give back to the University in a tangible way," Minott says. "I liked studying here and I like working here."
Tele/Mail callers earn a fixed, hourly wage. To keep them motivated, Minott has built incentives into the program. Each evening, a goal is set and achievements are rewarded with Tele/Mail dollars. These dollars can be accumulated and exchanged for a variety of prizes, ranging from nail polish to an introductory flying lesson or an overnight stay in a hotel.
Although incentives and the pre-calling prep talks are considered motivational by most of the students, they are less enthusiastic about the monitor board. The board, hung on the wall of the calling area, indicates each caller's cumulative pledges, the average pledge amount, the number of successful calls, and the number of credit-card pledges. Minott explains that it is a motivating instrument to help students track their performance over time and to strive for improvement.
Dhir, Jain and Escoe-Messam all agree that the best thing about the job is the people they work with. "We're all students, so we can relate to each other. It's very relaxed here and everyone's considerate," says Dhir.
Immediately, Jain adds that her experience with Tele/Mail has taught her to be considerate of people who call her at home on behalf of a marketing survey or to solicit her business. "I've learned to be patient with them," she says. "I try to treat them as individuals."
Teresa Duck, a fourth-year student in York's combined honours Physics and Applied Math program, has been awarded the Alumni Silver Jubilee Scholarship.
An excellent student with a grade-point average of 8.6, the King City resident has a keen interest in academics, athletics, music, travel and community involvement. Her academic awards include the Women in Engineering Science Award, Canada Science Scholarship and (for three consecutive years) York Continuing Scholarship.
She is an avid sports enthusiast and has competed at the CIAU level for varsity sport in both track and field and cross-country running. In 1997, against 150 competitors, she was the first York athlete ever to win the University of Western Ontario invitational cross-country race. For the past three years, she also has played intramural football, basketball and volleyball.
Duck is an accomplished musician, who plays the piano, flute and trumpet. The Royal Conservatory of Music has awarded her honours in grade eight piano, grade two theory and grade four flute.
She still finds time to do volunteer work in her home town, where she has helped to organize the Terry Fox run for the past 10 years.
Upon graduation, Duck intends to do graduate studies in science and human physiology. Her research interests include orthopaedic engineering and the study of human mobility. She would like to help make it possible for people with disabilities "to enjoy physical activities we often take for granted," she says.
She also hopes to pursue research in injury prevention.
Glendon Social activist takes Wilson A. Head Scholarship
Third year Glendon student Nicole Lavigne has been awarded the Wilson A. Head Scholarship. The scholarship is for an undergraduate student who has demonstrated interest in anti-racism, human rights and peace.
Lavigne founded the Vegetarian Association at Glendon and is secretary of Glendon's Action Committee. The committee, the only one of its kind in Canada, strives to eliminate all aspects of discrimination including racism, sexism and ableism in residence, and to help students suffering from a variety of problems, such as eating disorders or homophobia.
Lavigne also volunteers at Glendon's Women's Centre.
While in high school, Lavigne travelled to the Dominican Republic to learn first-hand about the racism, human injustices, and living and working conditions of its poorest citizens by staying in their homes and visiting their sweatshops, hospitals and fields. Determined that one day she would expose these injustices to the world, she embarked on becoming fluent in Spanish.
Last summer, Lavigne devoted her summer holidays to working without pay in a remote part of Mexico.
"Her desire to communicate with and understand as many people and cultures as possible has led her to study American Sign Language, in addition to being fluent in English, French and Spanish. To Nicole, it is a 'moral obligation' to learn as many languages as possible," Professor Varpu Lindström wrote in support of Lavigne's application.
"It is hard to imagine a person more worthy of the Dr. Wilson A. Head Scholarship than Nicole Lavigne, a gentle but committed activist, and a wonderful, intelligent person with a great sense of humour."
by Thelma McCormack
In 1992, Charles Taylor, an eminent professor of philosophy at McGill University, wrote a small but influential volume called Multiculturalism. The title may be misleading, for it is not about the cultures of immigrant populations, past and present, who came to North America fleeing poverty and persecution, nor about the many ethnic minorities or religious groups who have been here for several generations and who together make up the Canadian mosaic. The subtitle of the book was The Politics of Recognition. Taylor assumes we all understand that Canadians use the term 'multiculturalism' to distinguish our approach from the American model of 'the melting pot' with the latter's emphasis on assimilation. In his view, the price of assimilation is too high; it is, he says, "the cardinal sin against the ideal of authenticity."
Assimilation, however, may be the push-pull in a society where linguistic, ethnic, and minority groups do not have the full benefits of the society, where prejudice and discrimination divide us. This may, then, be an appropriate time to review our literature and examine how it has evolved, and, in addition, to think of the next century.
Historically, the first phase of research was simply to learn what the facts were. Most of our social science research on racism comes from the U.S. and focuses on African-Americans who were brought to the West Indies and the U.S. as slaves. They were, as one writer said, Africans when they arrived; America made them 'blacks.'
In retrospect, the early research was intended to humanize the image of men and women who had no history or individual identity. Who were they? And what was the impact on them of slavery and, in the ante-bellum years, of discrimination, segregation, and intimidation through violence? How did they view themselves? And how did they adjust their aspirations to the realities of 'Jim Crow' segregation in the North and lynching parties in the South? The evidence of pain was everywhere, but nowhere was it more vivid than in the studies done by Kenneth Clarke, which showed that when black and white children had a choice of black and white dolls, black children preferred the white dolls. There is still a flourishing ethnographic research program on the black family, arts, linguistic patterns, religion, occupational histories, and emigration paths. But the major shift in research was to the other side of the equation, to the social psychology of prejudice.
The common sense understanding of racism was that it was the result of racists, of people who held attitudes that regarded black persons as inferior, and justified their exclusion from full participation in public life, including, in some instances, voting rights. Prejudice was seen in malicious, misinformed attitudes and behaviours that were learned early and passed on from one generation to the next through socialization and reinforced by the community. None of us were entirely free of it. Hence, the necessity to change ourselves, to develop an open mind, a social conscience, and to give others the opportunity to confront their own irrational biases. Educators and community workers developed educational curricula that would eliminate the negative sterotypes, and ways of encouraging students to think critically; arranged opportunities for more face-to-face interaction; and, finally, recognized that none of this would be easy. Yet, there was optimism, for the underlying assumption was that ignorance was the major obstacle to overcoming prejudice, and ignorance was not intractable.
But in this same period, and influenced largely by the Nazi movement in Germany, there was a scepticism about "learning to know the other better," indeed of reason itself. New teams of researchers, many of whom were themselves refugees from Europe, drew on psychoanalytic theory and developed a psychological profile of the bigot.
The publication in 1950 of The Authoritarian Personality shaped the direction for many years of all forms of research on prejudice, for the book argued that prejudice was a manifestation of a deeper, more unconscious configuration of attitudes a blind faith in authority, a belief in the power of the supernatural, a distrust of strangers, a fear of change, a tendency toward dogma, and stereotypic thinking. The problem, then, was not black/white relationships, but a generalized bigotry, and not likely to disappear with measures to help people become better informed about the others. Close contact might, indeed, intensify it. Morevoer, it was not just minority groups who were endangered; it was democracy itself.
The research on attitudes and on motivation was not rejected by scholars, but the first was regarded as too benign, and the second, too pessimistic. What changed this was the rise of the Civil Rights movement. First, the black population was discovering its 'authenticity,' its African roots. Children who had preferred white dolls to black were being taught that "Black is Beautiful," students in black studies courses learned that black civilization preceded the Greeks and influenced the latter. Second, the Civil Rights movement went from non-violence to violence as riots broke out in Watts and other inner-city neighbourhoods. In this context, a new and more political kind of research was emerging and it was being carried out by a new generation of black scholars.
If, as we thought in the 1950s, racism was the result of racists, could it be the other way around? The new hypothesis was that racism created racists. There was a growing conviction, then, that racism as a structural and systemic part of our social system had to be confronted through social action, that the state itself must mandate and enforce equal rights. Beyond that, affirmative action.
Research turned increasingly to the politics of backlash as middle-class students, for example, felt angry and threatened by minority students, who wanted, not just space on campus, but empowerment. New coalitions were being formed of feminists, anti-racists, and gay and lesbian rights activists, thus watering-down cultural distinctiveness, but also leading to a different research agenda based on discourse analysis.
The new racist phenomenon of the '90s is focused on texts 'hate speech,' on the one hand and, on the other, a new 'politically correct,' curriculum. The hate speech cases of Ernst Zundel, Jim Keegstra, Malcolm Ross and, more recently, Douglas Collins have been about Holocaust denial. The courts' decisions have sent a shock through Holocaust survivors and human right activists. What these cases reveal, however, is a profoundly divisive discourse, for the courts have defined these cases in terms of Charter rights (freedom of expression), while victims (Holocaust survivors) define them as survival. In a more abstract way this impasse may frame our research in the new century.
Research may also become more historical than it has been in the past. A new study of German anti-Semitism, for example, has raised serious problems about the persistence of anti-Semitism among Germans of all classes who were, as the author said, "willing executioners of Hitler."1 The debates over this by historians may become more complex as they are joined by sociologists, political scientists, and social psychologists.
1Goldhagen, Daniel Johan. (1997). Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. New York: Vintage/Random House.
Reproduced from the Newsletter of the Institute for Social Research, Winter 1998; by permission. Thelma McCormack is a research associate at the Institute.
Cast members (left to right) Daniel Cipilinski, Mike Nahrgang, Kristen Horner, Terri Kuhl (front), Jordan Kanner and Cameron Gourley
performed Neil Simon's Barefoot in the Park, Jan. 14-17 and 21-24, in the Vanier College Studio Theatre. The classic comedy was directed by Fine Arts student Mellissa Taddeo for Vanier College Productions.
On any given Sunday to Thursday evening between 5 and 9 p.m., a dozen or so members of the University's Tele/Mail Program team students and a few alumni are on the telephone. They are seated at a row of workstations in the second-storey, York Lanes premises of the External Affairs department, and they are calling York alumni and parents of York students, in pursuit of pledges of funding support for the University.
Before the evening is out, each canvasser will have talked to several friends of the University. If all goes well, many of the respondents will have decided to contribute to The National Campaign for York University.
The Tele/Mail technique, which is widely used for fundraising by non-profit organizations, is essentially a three-step process. Initially, a pre-approach letter is sent on behalf of a specific faculty. It is used to introduce the campaign and the upcoming telephone call, which will follow approximately one week later. The letter also asks for a gift in the form of a pledge.
The second step in the process is the phone call. The final step is a follow-up letter, thanking the donor and detailing the agreed-upon support amount.
There is no need to "sell" York, team leader Dawn Minott says. "Our Tele/Mail callers are not telemarketers. They're telephone communicators, ambassadors of York."
But to the outside observer, "telecommunicating" is not as easy as it seems. Callers have to be aware in detail about who the prospect is right down to correct pronunciation of his or her name. They need to make sure they request a pledge without being too pushy, and they can't make the mistake of not being assertive enough.
Sometimes they are faced with objections from prospects who are upset at the University for one reason or another. And they must come to terms with the feelings of defeat and failure that can accompany poor results.
Indeed, the Tele/Mail program is not for the weak at heart (or ego). However, team members generally maintain a positive attitude and make it through the bumps by supporting each other and relying on Minott's advice and encouragement.
One of the new floor works by sculptor Alison Wilding to be on display, Feb. 2-April 5, at The Art Gallery of York University.
The Art Gallery of York University will present Territories, an exhibition by noted British sculptor Alison Wilding from Feb. 2 to April 5.
Wilding came to prominence in the early 1980s as part of the diverse group of artists labelled New British Sculptors. Her work has been widely exhibited internationally, including in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Tate Gallery, London; and the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh.
The Territories exhibition, organized in collaboration with the Edmonton Art Gallery, marks Wilding's first solo presentation in Canada. It is guest-curated by Montreal independent curator Renée Baert and features new floor works, wall sculptures and drawings produced between 1995 and 1997.
The Art Gallery of York University will host a reception for the artist on Thursday, Feb. 12, from 6 to 8 p.m. During the reception, Wilding and Baert will briefly discuss the exhibition in an informal dialogue, beginning at 7 p.m.
Admission to the gallery is free. For more information, please contact the gallery at 736-5169.
Applications are now being accepted for the position of Academic Advisor of Stong College. Candidates must be associated with York and have an interest in and knowledge of undergraduate education. The Academic Advisor acts as chief assistant and advisor to the Master of the College, organizes co-curricular support for the Foundations courses, organizes the College's first year academic orientation, and serves on various committees. The role of the Academic Advisor continues to change with the introduction of the Foundations courses in the Faculty of Arts, but advising students will remain the core of the work.
The appointment is for a three year term, renewable annually, beginning July 1, 1998. A letter of application, including three references, should be addressed to Chair of the Search Committee for Academic Advisor, 315 Stong College, 736-5132.
THE DEADLINE FOR APPLICATIONS IS FEBRUARY 18, 1998
