Thriving in a Challenging Landscape: PMDMC24 Ideas Worth Sharing
Each year, the Public Media Development and Marketing Conference (PMDMC) is an opportunity to share knowledge with peers and industry experts, collaborate on solutions to complex problems, and gather inspiration from one another. As long-time conference attendees, the discussions that stood out to us from this year’s conference in San Diego were those that tackled the improvement of workplace culture, and ways to succeed in today’s challenging landscape of on-air-fundraising. In particular, there were five ideas we thought were worth sharing from PMDMC24 to support all industry professionals right now.
1. Try Collaborative, Fun Employee In-Service Days
Keynote speaker Smiley Poswolsky gave me my first idea worth sharing. In his presentation about creating a Culture of Belonging, he touched on the notion that a hybrid remote work environment is not about location, it’s about purpose and time. We shouldn’t expect that people will use their time exactly the same way whether they’re working remotely or in the office. People who advocate for in-person work often cite the creative energy and spontaneous exchange of ideas that happen when people are working together. But in today’s hybrid world, people are rarely in the same workspaces at the same time and they often spend their in-office time on video calls with their colleagues who are working remotely.
Here’s an idea! Host a quarterly or monthly in-service day when all employees are required to come to the office. Make it a fun event. Serve breakfast or lunch, hold a series of all-staff information sessions and share important updates with everyone. Allow time for each department to gather and brainstorm, and conduct team-building activities. Approach the hybrid environment with a sense of purpose, respect for people’s time and a little bit of fun and you’ll have a happier staff who feels more invested in organizational success.
– Abby Goldstein
2. Rethink How We Use Our Air to Fundraise
I moderated a session focused on using audience data to make strategic decisions about on-air fundraising. In the session, we looked at a series of data points that explain why public radio is having such a difficult time with on-air drives, a practice we’ve claimed for decades as being most effective at donor acquisition. According to Edison Research’s Share of Ear report, AM/FM radio and our streams made up 52% of all audio consumption a decade ago. Today, that number is 38%, so we know traditional broadcast audiences are shrinking as people have greater access to an abundance of free content that meets their needs. And when many of you look at your own broadcast data, you likely see a decline in cumulative weekly listening over the last few years.
If we were creating the public radio enterprise from whole cloth in today’s media landscape, would we choose extended on-air programming interruptions on a channel whose audience is shrinking as our main way to cultivate new donors?
Here’s an idea! It’s time to rethink how we use our air to fundraise. Look at your broadcast and membership data and use it to determine what your revenue potential is in the audience that is listening today. The broadcast audience will typically drop while you are conducting an on-air drive, so make sure to factor that into your decisions. When you look at the numbers, think about the people they represent. What percentage of your audience is most loyal to you and spends the majority of their time with you? How long do your most loyal listeners spend with your station? How old are they? Not all messaging appeals to the same people, so think about your target audience for on-air drives.
Maine Public, for example, targets the audiences they speak to during their summer drive. Maine Public’s Susan Tran explained that each August her team conducts a short drive that is designed to appeal to the seasonal listeners that come to Maine for the summer. They offer a special thank-you gift only available for that brief drive that reminds people of their time in Maine – a branded Seabag. There is a unique relationship between a local station and a seasonal resident who may only listen for three or four months out of the year. Maine Public has found a way to build that relationship.
Despite a diminishing broadcast audience, we still have membership potential with the people who listen and love our stations but aren’t yet giving. We’ve picked all the low-hanging fruit, and the rest of the fruit is harder to reach so being thoughtful about how we use our air can give us a taller ladder.
– Abby Goldstein
3. Trust Developing Staff
As an industry veteran, I saw a lot of new faces and aspiring staff at PMDMC24, and fewer people I’ve been seeing at public media conferences for decades. There is a noticeable shift in our development and marketing workforce and that is bringing fresh ideas to the surface. I met up-and-coming fundraisers, marketers and engagement specialists at this conference who are testing different tactics and platforms to deepen their relationships with audiences.
For many years, especially at this gathering, when we talked about reaching and serving new audiences, the question was always asked “That’s all fine, but how do we get memberships out of these new audiences?” as if that is our mission. I did not hear that question asked during a single PMDMC session this year. Not once. Today’s workforce knows intrinsically that relationships must be developed before support is earned.
Here’s an idea! Give your teams the space to experiment and embrace new thinking and new ideas. Also, give more learning opportunities to your developing staff. Jackie Winfree, Director of Membership at WYSO, is experimenting with using text messaging to engage with audiences and drive interest in their content and events. Some stations’ newsletters are driving their donor acquisition strategy and some stations’ events are driving growth in corporate support. Great ideas can come from anyone with any level of experience, if we embrace them.
– Abby Goldstein
4. Work Hard and Be Creative to Acquire New Donors
In the session The Uphill Battle for Donor Acquisition: Strategies for Success, fundraising leaders from Minnesota Public Radio, South Carolina Public Radio. The Summit, Vermont Public and WYSO showed us how they applied their creativity to the toughest task in fundraising: acquiring new donors.
Here are some of the many ideas stations – large and small, music and news – are applying to acquire new donors:
- Fundraising with a twist of audience engagement
- New donor days
- Push notifications and pop-ups
- A cross-departmental new-member acquisition squad
- Giving member benefits to vehicle donors
- Inbound and outbound texting
- Shorter, more urgent, and focused on-air drives
- Using digital channels strategically
- Boosting engagement with premiums.
Minnesota Public Radio raised donor response in part by spending more on premiums instead of less, proving that sometimes the answer lies in reversing our conventional thinking.
In the session Integrating Digital Fundraising into Your Membership Funnel, our colleagues at M+R shared their most recent data to demonstrate what stations can strive for in their digital fundraising efforts. In 2023, public media showed 3% growth in online revenue, which was among the highest increases of the nonprofits surveyed. While public media raised less revenue through direct mail in 2023 compared with the year before, we increased email revenue as an industry, while other nonprofits surveyed saw that revenue source decline.
Our friends at WETA explained that after observing their members engaging on multiple channels, they implemented a multi-channel formula in their fundraising campaigns. These campaigns don’t shy away from using a fun or irreverent tone. They use email as the primary source of income; they emphasize local with WETA-branded items to drive brand awareness/donor loyalty; they often incorporate a donor goal/match/deadline; they saturate messaging for a few days with spots/web; then conclude with deadline-driven emails.
Virginia Public Radio is a small, joint community licensee that has had great success investing in digital fundraising experts. They maintain strong communication between departments to deliver consistent messaging in their campaigns, maintain brand consistency, and to coordinate marketing campaigns with on-air fundraising campaigns. They invite content producers to make exclusive campaign content like year-in-review and behind-the-scenes videos. The VPM membership team also works closely with their colleagues on the digital content / social media team to make sure there’s space in the social media posting schedule for membership-related content, and then they lean on the digital/social team to schedule and write posts.
– Jay Clayton
5. Air Check. No, Really. Air Check.
In my experience supporting stations with on-air fundraising, very few take the time to air-check their on-air drives, or listen back for the ways to make pitch breaks sound and perform better. In the session Air Checking Your On-Air Fundraisers, our colleagues at Cassical California and KUTX showed us how to move beyond awkward, if not confrontational, pitch break critique conversations. Some suggestions that stood out:
- First, do no harm. Feedback given insensitively, confusingly, reactively, or in a bad moment can do much more harm than good. Hosts have long memories.
- But, also, don’t be afraid of on-air talent. Talented people are still just people, and you have the right to do your job.
- Always aircheck with audio. That way you and your talent can be hearing the same thing at the same time, forming some common ground. Play examples you like, and ones you think could be better.
- Don’t just show up at pledge time. Building trust comes with regular interactions. Have regular, formal and informal conversations with on-air talent year-round, not just at pledge-drive time.
- Explain how to think; don’t tell pitchers what to do. Teach your pitchers how to fish instead of throwing fish at them. It takes more investment and patience, but will pay dividends when your pitchers start thinking like producers.
- Some people aren’t coachable. In those cases, redirect the time you’d use on them to other things that might prop up their appearances (incentives, scripts, the other host, etc).
– Jay Clayton
As we reflect on PMDMC24, it’s clear that the future of public media is bright, but it requires a commitment to innovation, collaboration, and a focus on building strong relationships with our audiences. By incorporating these ideas into our daily work, we can create a more engaging, sustainable, and impactful public media ecosystem for years to come. Let’s continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible and strive to make a positive difference in our communities.
