While MSU’s heartbreaking demise to Michigan last Saturday caused MSU fans to endure a wave of pestilent mockery and unchecked hubris statewide, one group of on-campus workers felt the loss in terms of dollars and cents.
The MSU Telemarketing employees, trained to entice alumni into donating to the university, sustained a 6 percent drop in pledges this Sunday when juxtaposed with a comparable Sunday shift.
But the relatively small divot in donations after Saturday’s loss isn’t what statistical production manager Jon Barth said bothers him — it’s the alumni perceiving MSU as a football team rather than an educational institution.
“A lot of alumni can be fickle and lose sight about what MSU is,” Barth said.
But the telemarketers are out on the front lines anyway, taking the brunt of alumni woes about the football program.
Rotating from left to right in his swivel chair, Larry Kemp, a psychology senior and telemarketer, sits poised at his desk as he tries to bring in a pledge from a Lyman Briggs College alumnus. In descending order, he asks for a gift between $1,000 and $500 then $50 and finally $25 — no deal.
Stoic in his persistence to earn a pledge, Kemp describes his strategy for coming away with a donation despite the football team’s weekend loss.
“If they bring it up you’ve got to talk about it — say it’s disappointing. I always bring up the fact they’re a young team, this is Dantonio’s first year,” Kemp said.
“You always try to maintain a positive beat. Tell them next week could be different,” Kemp said.
Dealing with alumni agitated about MSU’s football performance is no new obstacle for the university’s telemarketers.
Last year’s 4-8 season under former football head coach John L. Smith resulted in a barrage of disenchanted alumni who said, in effect, “Call me back after you fire John L.”
“We just had a numerous (amount), tons and tons of people who’d say, ‘I’m going to give you money when John L. is gone. Fire that guy, get him out of here,’” said Robb Haagsman, a production manager.
Meticulously recording each such response in the event that the athletics director actually did fire the coach, the subsequent November 2006 firing of Smith turned an embarrassing personnel change into lucrative earnings for MSU Telemarketing.
A handful of supervisors and telemarketers now look back on their plan of calling the alumni back and holding them to their word as a helpful contributor to the telemarketers’ $3.9 million in generated earnings from the last fiscal year — a figure that surpassed their goal of a 10 percent increase from the previous fiscal year.
“They attribute the sports program to whether or not they want to give to academics,” Kemp said.
“We try to stress to them, this is a whole different deal … We’re not raising money for the football team, we’re raising money for the college.”
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