Where Do We Go From Here?
One Program Director’s View
About Drives and Damage

Half of our listeners say they listen less during fund drives.  Whether they do or not, their resentment of on-air drives is not good news, and it supports what we've heard anecdotally and suspected for years.

We would do well to accept this finding as a ringing wake up call, and respond as we did a few years ago when Congress threatened to eliminate funding for public broadcasting.  That crisis unleashed enormous creative energy throughout the public radio system.  This new information from AUDIENCE 98^® can do the same.

Can we expect to eliminate fund drives?  Not likely.  But as we look at more off air strategies, we also need to improve profoundly what we do on the air.

Because on-air fundraising is programming, the principle responsibility for improving its quality lies with the program director.  When listeners tune to our stations they expect great radio, consistent in appeal to the programming they've come to value any other time of the year.

When we disappoint them, they get resentful.  When we please them, they get generous.

AUDIENCE 98’s best news about on-air fundraising encourages us to focus on higher quality content and better production values during drives.

Listeners who think that fund drives are getting easier to listen to are far more likely than others to keep listening.

If we make on-air campaigns more listenable, we can offset some of the damage that on-air drives are certainly causing.

How do we do that?  Let’s consider the obvious.

• Make your drives sound more like your regular programming by using your station’s on-air personalities for pitches.  As NPR’s First-Time Givers Study confirms, listeners respond best to familiar voices.

• Aircheck regularly during the drive and give feedback to everyone.  Use the same quality standards for drives as any other programming.

• Keep the audience tuned through a pitch through effective forward promotion of regularly scheduled programming.

• Make your pitch breaks entertaining.

• Keep the pace and overall sound of your station as consistent as possible during a drive.  Watch for that audio whiplash!

• Use all the tools available to you.  There is much to learn about listeners and their motivation for giving in AUDIENCE 98 and other free research.  Read, re-read and internalize it.   Use VALS^TM 2 to create the language of your messages, geared to the listeners in your audience.

• Coordinate more effectively with your development department.  Support your development staff’s efforts to raise more money off air.

• Be open to new ideas and prepared to jettison old ones.

• Watch for what's working at other stations and adopt it.  People are already doing dramatic things with short drives. That may be one answer; there may also be others.

Most of all, take AUDIENCE 98’s news about fund drives seriously and start planning to take action today.

– Steve Martin
Program Director, WAMU
AUDIENCE 98 Associate

Audience Research Analysis
Copyright © ARA and CPB.  All rights reserved.
Revised: September 01, 2000 12:38 PM.