Triangulating On The Effects
Of On-Air Drives

A Technical Report

We have three points of reference regarding people’s behavior and attitudes about on-air fund drives:

1.  In focus groups listeners are openly hostile.  Many claim to tune away during drives.  Yet they admit that they can’t stay away for long; the programming is simply too unique and too important.

2.  Half of our listeners tell AUDIENCE 98^® that they listen less or tune out during their station’s on-air fund drives.  The question, as posed in the Public Radio Recontact Survey, probably measures listeners’ attitudes toward drives better than their actual behavior.  But negative attitudes clearly abound.

3.  Arbitron diaries offer an independent means of verifying these negative responses – especially when it comes to actual listening behavior during drives.  But with their 15-minute granularity, are diaries sensitive enough to report changes in listening?

To help us find out, nearly 50 licensees operating more than 80 stations offered information about their on-air drives during the 1997 calendar year.  Over 24,000 Arbitron diaries from the spring and fall sweeps are included in this analysis.

Audience Research Analysis (ARA) merged these two sets of data into a single database that had the "person-day" as its unit of measurement.  In other words, the data reports how much each diary keeper in a station’s weekly cume listened to the radio each of seven days; whether or not s/he listened to public radio that day; how much; and so forth.

This inquiry is designed to determine the effects of drives on the average day’s listening.  Unfortunately, this analysis of the Arbitron diaries – in fact, Arbitron’s methodology itself – cannot rule out that people leave the cume for whole weeks at a time (although it is highly unlikely that they do).

We imposed rigorous statistical controls on the day of the week to eliminate any effects of systematic day-to-day bias in the diaries themselves.  And while we found weak evidence that people are less likely to listen (and more likely to listen less) when stations are conducting their on-air drives, we also found that

the Arbitron diaries are not sensitive enough to show significant listening effects caused by on-air drives.

How do we square this finding with the other two points in our triangle?

• Because it’s a 15 minute measurement, the Arbitron diaries may simply be too coarse to capture five or 10 minute flights away from a station in a drive.  If people are indeed leaving for short periods – for example, the length of a pitch break – and then returning for the regularly scheduled programming, Arbitron’s methodology does not capture and report it.

• Listeners may be likely to report using a station in their diaries even while being fund-driven to other stations or to "off".  After all, how often do they get to "vote" for their public radio station in the context of an important ratings survey?  They may be masking their own behavior for the "greater good" of their public station.

• The attitudes that drives engender among people may not affect their listening substantially.

The key finding is that

large scale or extended shifts in listener behavior do not seem to accompany the resentment caused by on-air drives.

We cannot directly observe the effects of five or 10 minute flights away from the station in a drive, but that doesn't mean they aren't happening.

By triangulating on the question from several techniques, we are confident that listeners are telling us, in very strong terms, that our drives are extracting a significant hidden toll in terms of public service, public image, and opportunity loss.

Many thanks to the stations responding with information about their on-air pledge drives in calendar 1997.  These Arbitron subscribers and their repeaters had sufficient diaries to include in the analysis: KBAQ-FM, KCFR-FM, KJZZ-FM, KLCC-FM, KNAU-FM, KPBS-FM, KPFA-FM, KPLU-FM, KQED-FM, KUCV-FM, KUNR-FM, KUOP-FM, KUOW-FM, KUT-FM, KVNO-FM, WAMU-FM, WBUR-FM, WDET-FM, WEKU-FM, WFCR-FM, WGUC-FM, WHYY-FM, WJHU-FM, WKSU-FM, WLRN-FM, WMEA-FM, WMEH-FM, WMEW-FM, WMRA-FM, WMUB-FM, WNIJ-FM, WNIU-FM, WNKU-FM, WNYC-AM, WNYC-FM, WOI-AM, WOI-FM, WOSU-FM, WPKT-FM, WRVO-FM, WSHU-FM, WUNC-FM, WUOT-FM, WUWF-FM, WUWM-FM, WVPE-FM, WVPR-FM, WVPS-FM, WVTF-FM, WWNO-FM, WXPN-FM, and WYEP-FM.

– David Giovannoni
AUDIENCE 98 Core Team

 

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