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Now that we’ve reviewed the basics of on-air fundraising, let’s consider how on-air fundraising fits into your current broader fundraising strategy. In your post, please share with us how on-air fundraising currently fits into your station fundraising strategy.
- How long has your station conducted on-air fundraising?
- Have you been involved in the planning process?
- What other elements of fundraising do you need to be aware of at your station as you plan your on-air campaign?
After you’ve created your own post, please respond to at least three of your peers.
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Hi, everyone! Here are the details for WFDD from the questions above: 1. I am not entirely sure how many years that WFDD has been holding on-air drives, but I have seen some pics that look very 1980s-ish, so at least since then, but probably before then! We’re in our 76th year as a station! 2. I have been involved in the planning process since I began my current role. 3. Other elements of fundraising include focusing on cultivating and retaining major donors, since GP’s Benchmarks Reports have shown us that it’s where revenue growth lies for us, as membership and underwriting have nearly peaked.
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Hi Kigers! WOW 76 years of the station that is remarkable! Completely agree with keeping in mind of Major Donors during the campaign, we have scripting for it but I do wonder are their other tactics or strategy we can do with retaining and gaining new major donors during our campaign besides just mentioning we offer that level of giving?
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WKAR is celebrating our 100th anniversary this month. SO congratulations to KERA on their longevity.
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We’re also working on the balance between membership and major donor fundraising during on-air drives and how to increase awareness of higher levels of giving without alienating those who feel it’s out of their price range and therefore exclusionary.
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During our radio on-air campaigns, we offer a series of match challenges (one each day) that are anonymously built by donors in our Mid- and Major- level giving clubs. This gives us an opportunity to mention (and thank) those in the higher giving levels while also providing an incentive to give for others.
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I am not sure how long our station has been doing on-air drives. But like Sonsera mentioned in her response it seems like a long time and perhaps started in the 80’s. I’ve been with WFDD for about 9 months so while I have been through our Spring Fund Drive this is the first one I will have any part in planning. I should state that my part is pretty small compared to all the planning that goes in to the drives. We hope to incorporate some more targeted Social Media marketing for this drive and I can’t wait to see its effectiveness. As we plan our fund drives we need to know our potential for growth and analyze what has or hasn’t worked in the past to create a better drive each time.
-Julien-
Hi Julien! It definitely seems like even if you think your role is “small” you have a lot of knowledge and planning attributed to your strategy tactics for your drive! Please keep us up to date on this because I would love to utilize our Social Media cloud more during campaigns more than just stating online we are in a fundraiser! I would love to incorporate more engagement.
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I’d also love to hear your social plan! How do you divide that up between your team and your digital team, if you have one?
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Regarding utilizing social for drives/outreach, I’ve started sharing the member comments I’ve gathered in graphic based posts, and these have been well received. In these, and most posts, I drive traffic to our website to support the station. I’ve also shared general posts such as what’s happening at the station during drives, etc. to try and create a sense of excitement for our followers to be involved virtually. I really want us to start surveying our members on how they found out about that station to give to see how much social has an impact.
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1. How long has your station conducted on-air fundraising?
From my own knowledge I feel like on-air fundraising has occurred at my station for sometime now, HOWEVER I do believe different components for fundraising have been incorporated or taken away. Some may resurface, we shall see!
2. Have you been involved in the planning process?
I have been involved in the planning (fundraising) process under a year as the on-air fundraising associate!3. What other elements of fundraising do you need to be aware of at your station as you plan your on-air campaign?
I definitely agree that we need to be aware and have cohesive messaging on all fundraising aspects such as digital, direct mail, and social! Especially during a campaign we want to make sure our messaging, theme, and work all go together and it differs clearly when we are NOT in a campaign.-
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We’re also developing our drive vs non-drive fundraising strategies, especially for social media. It’s definitely been tricky!
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I’m curious if you did paid ad’s with giving links when you did social media during giving campaigns? We hope to promote our favorite thank you items on social media during this fund drive and include a giving link through a paid advertisement- either by location and other tags or by targeting our followers and their friends. If you want to send me a follow up email in October I may have some data or insight to share on how it worked for us!
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How long has your station conducted on-air fundraising?
We just started back doing on-air fundraising within the past couple of years. They had been promoting silent drives. We’re finding that on-air is more profitable.Have you been involved in the planning process?
I am involved in all aspects (messaging, on-air pitching, promotions/incentives, etc.).What other elements of fundraising do you need to be aware of at your station as you plan your on-air campaign?
That each staff member is informed of the messaging, theme and the goal of the drive (revenue goal, new member goal or sustainer goal). -
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WKAR has been doing on-air pledge drives for decades (we celebrate our 100th Anniversary this month).
Since I’ve come in, I’ve helped with most elements of the on-air pledge drive, including messaging, pitching, promotions, incentives, and more.
As I plan for pledge drives, I need to know our theme, our target goals and how we are addressing people online to give.
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WBHM has been doing on-air drives for decades – we started as a classical music station had have been a News and Info station for the past 10 years or so. I’ve been in charge of planning and executing drives since I joined WBHM in 2018. As we plan our drives, we take into account any special coverage we know about in advance, and try to plan around our local school and community calendars.
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How long has your station conducted on-air fundraising? I believe for a very long time, at least since the 80s!
Have you been involved in the planning process? Yes, for a couple years now.
What other elements of fundraising do you need to be aware of at your station as you plan your on-air campaign? I oversee the whole fundraising campaign so am well aware of the other elements (email, digital, social, direct mail, etc) but I think one of the bigger challenges is ensuring everyone else is comfortable with the messaging and understand the priorities. -
How long has your station conducted on-air fundraising?
Have you been involved in the planning process?
What other elements of fundraising do you need to be aware of at your station as you plan your on-air campaign?We’ve been on the air for 26 years, and I’d imagine there’s been some level of on-air fundraising that entire time. I first started volunteering for the two major annual fund drives (spring and fall) 11 or 12 years ago.
I’ve been in my current position since the end of December, so this is the first year that I’ve been really involved in the planning process for all of our drives!
As we begin planning for our fall drive, I think we need to have an updated map of how far our signals reach so we can make sure every potential donor is reached. We also need to make sure everyone is on the same page as far as hourly goals and talking points.
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1. How long has your station conducted on-air fundraising?
The station is 61 years old, so I imagine we’ve been doing this since the 80s I’ve been listening to the pledge drives since I moved to DC in 2000.2. Have you been involved in the planning process?
Yes, there is an amazingly (obsessively!) detailed spreadsheet created by my predecessor that lists out every last thing that needs to be done for the campaign. You plug in the dates and it back dates everything from the campaign. It’s been very helpful, especially given 5 weeks of my summer have been taken up by grand jury duty (2 weeks to go). Don’t do crimes!3. What other elements of fundraising do you need to be aware of at your station as you plan your on-air campaign?
I’ve been working with our Assistant Director of Online Strategy and Program Director about scheduling spots to support pre-drive email and direct mail campaigns. Trying to get the thank you gifts in place now to avoid pesky supply chain issues. Need to meet with some of news leadership to discuss impact and plans for the upcoming midterms, to create talking points around the importance of local news during the campaign.-
I’m interested to hear more about your pre-drive email campaign. For the past few years, we’ve been on-air fundraising in an UnDrive format, each drive lasting several weeks. So all of our email appeals were contained within the dates of the drive. As we transition back to a more traditional on-air drive, I’d love to discuss what email cadence has been working for WAMU.
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How long has your station conducted on-air fundraising? For a few decades now.
Have you been involved in the planning process? I’ve been involved in the planning process for the last two or three years.
What other elements of fundraising do you need to be aware of at your station as you plan your on-air campaign? I am involved in most aspects in drive production, particularly messaging (email, direct mail, and on-air). Outside of fundraising, I am always trying to be aware of other station initiatives that will overlap with an on-air campaign — programming, events, etc.-
After reading through this module’s material, I definitely understand the importance of being aware of all the surrounding “puzzle pieces” at your station such as programming, events, and other fundraising tactics. So it’s great that you always try to be aware of what’s going on at your station that will overlap with your on-air campaigns.
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To my knowledge, VPM (formerly the Community Idea Stations/WCVE) has conducted on-air fundraising campaigns for 50+ years.
I have only been part of the planning process since stepping into the Director of Membership position in July 2020. I did not overlap with the previous director so have limited knowledge of her planning process, although I did live-pitch during campaigns under her leadership. Presently, I work closely with our FM programming director and our digital fundraising specialist to develop the complimentary components of the drive. Together, we work to ensure cohesion of theme, messaging, matching challenge promotion etc. Additionally, I work with our staff to craft messaging for pre-recorded spots.
Other elements to consider – Monthly print and e-renewals, major gift fundraising, pending capital campaign, lapsed/add-gift solicitation mailings, community engagement events and highlighting local programming.
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Hi everybody,
Thank you very much for everything you’re sharing and all the great questions you’re asking.
A few thoughts on some of them:
Appealing to major donors in your drives —
Major gifts are solicited one on one, but drives can help you identify prospects within your community of listeners and viewers. You can identify some prospective major donors based on how much they give and comments they share during your drives. Asking for bigger gifts – $100 a month, $500, $1,000 – is the same as asking for smaller amounts. The common thread is you’re asking people to give what they can. It’s important to remember that while many people can give $100 a month or a one time gift of $1,000, this is beyond what most listeners will give. So, ask for bigger amounts routinely but sparingly relative to smaller amounts that work for more donors.
Shorter drives —
Everyone loves them but they’re not the best choice for every station. There’s a correlation between how much fundraising stations do and whether they achieve and maintain their full potential of donors. Uf your station has a way to go to reach its potential of donors, shorter drives will make it harder if not impossible to get all the donors you could have.
Your station’s potential for donors and revenue —
Greater Public’s Benchmarks for Public Radio Fundraising measure stations’ fundraising relative to their listening. Listening defines a station’s fundraising potential. Over time, as listening goes up or down, fundraising potential goes up or down. These Benchmarks show you your station’s fundraising potential and how well your station’s fundraising is performing relative to its gull potential. When you know your station’s potential and how your fundraising is performing in relation to your potential you can make more informed fundraising decisions. Benchmarks is offered to all Greater Public member stations with no additional cost beyond your membership dues. Please reach out to me directly if you’re interested in participating or if you already participate and you’d like to review your reports to get a better sense of your station’s potential and how you can achieve and sustain it. We will collect data for FY22 benchmarks this fall. The deadline to provide your data is Monday, October 31st.
We can talk more about any of these topics and other questions you have when we get together on August 18th. Please reach out to me directly if you have questions between now and then.
Thank you!
Jay -
We have been doing on-air fundraising for decades, way before I started at WFSU. I have been involved in the planning process for all nine years I’ve been here. Our membership department plans the drives then works with our radio production engineers to execute them.
It really resonated with me when Jay said to remember that the way you get members is the way you retain members. I have tried to dial back the expensive and hard to get incentives. I have been on a mission to train our listeners that giving is its own reward! But we do still offer t-shirts and totes, etc. Just try to limit the options to keep our costs down, and to keep our on-air messaging focused on the mission, not some random product that needs a bunch of explanation.
We are a small department, so I manage all our fundraising elements from individuals. We time our direct mail campaigns to support our drives, and we do use emails for pre-drive, and during the drive. Social media has never been productive for us so we have largely stopped doing fundraising on social. We do post, but try to make the posts evergreen since the algorithms can mean that your followers may see your post after the drive has ended. We use volunteers for most of our live pitching, so they also post on their social channels to help- but it works better when they send emails to their network!
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Re: retaining members by way of acquiring them is a really helpful thought. We are trying to reduce the number of thank-you gifts we offer, but we will continue to offer them along with other incentives because they do work and are what listeners are expecting, but we are also working on making our messaging really clear and efficient, and that’s something I am looking forward to learning more about on this course.
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1. WMHT has conducted on-air fundraising for over 40 years.
2. Because I am a recently new hire, I have not been involved in the planning process. I am hoping that completing this course will give me the knowledge and experience needed to contribute to our next planning session.
3. Firstly, we need to be aware of the audience that we are targeting during on-air fundraising events. We also need compelling incentives to donate such as premiums and matching. We also need to keep in mind the overall amount of on-air fundraising we do each year and how long each drive is. Any expenses also need to be weighed against the revenue brought in from these events. Lastly, we need to keep in mind all of the other ways that we fundraise, such as direct mail and online giving. -
How long has your station conducted on-air fundraising? – I believe 15 to 20 years
Have you been involved in the planning process? – I have been involved for 4 years
What other elements of fundraising do you need to be aware of at your station as you plan your on-air campaign? – Our station does a lot of acquisition, lapsed, renewal campaigns through digital and mail. We need to be mindful of those different audiences especially for emails we send during the drive, so not to over solicit them year round. -
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How long has your station conducted on-air fundraising? Two of our stations at Iowa Public Radio, WOI and WSUI are celebrating 100 years of broadcasting this year. I’m not sure how long we’ve been conducting on-air fundraising, but I’m sure it’s been going on for awhile!
Have you been involved in the planning process? Since I was hired in Jan., we had our membership manager (who did the bulk of fundraising planning) leave the organization for another opportunity. My job since then has changed from when I was hired, so I am now more involved in the planning than I was in my first drive in the spring. I work with my team to decide premiums, sweepstake items, schedules, communications plan, pitch and producing schedule, etc.
What other elements of fundraising do you need to be aware of at your station as you plan your on-air campaign? Like many others, we do a lot of acquisition, lapsed and renewal campaigns through direct mail. I believe we do a good job at planning those around our on-air fundraising drives so listeners/members don’t get overwhelmed with asks.
-Alanna, Membership Communications Coordinator at IPR. -
How long has your station conducted on-air fundraising? Since forever. Like some of you, our station is celebrating a milestone anniversary this year (75 years for KWGS), and I know we’ve been on-air fundraising for at LEAST 40 of those years.
Have you been involved in the planning process? Yes, and as my job is formatted, I am the primary fund drive planner.
What other elements of fundraising do you need to be aware of at your station as you plan your on-air campaign? Goal-setting (increasingly challenging, as our economy wobbles), social media and email strategy, direct mail strategy, and our on-air focus. Having listened to Jay’s webinars for several years now, and being a big fan of Anne Ibach/OPB, we try to focus our pitching on sustainers and new members, remembering that the ultimate pledge is from a new sustaining member pledging by EFT.
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OMG, WAMU, I also would love to see the obsessively-detailed spreadsheet! I have several spreadsheets that I use to track several different elements of our drives, but have never been able to put together a big, overarching one that allows me to see everything in one place, and that auto-dates based on drive dates.
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VPM, I’d be interested to hear more about how to structure your challenges/matches from your major and mid-level donors, and how you solicit them. And for everyone: How do you word your challenges, when the money is either already in-hand or is guaranteed? I’m also curious about how other mid-market stations like ours use challenge money. For example, we typically use our challenges in two-hour blocks (7-9am or 4-6pm weekdays), and only sometimes as all-day challenges. We used to do some challenges for sustainers only or new members only, but found that overall giving was suppressed, so this drive, we are focusing ALL our pitching on new/sustaining, and not limiting our challenges. And finally, our challenge goals are nearly always for a certain # of pledges, rather than a dollar goal. Anyone else? What works for you???
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We tend to schedule our challenges in smaller blocks like 1-2 hours, because we often have smaller challenges and we also need to recognize a number of our donors by name over the air, so we keep them separate from other challenges. I would like to know how other stations create longer challenge periods, and do you find these work better?
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Hi! For our challenges, it really varies by how the Drive is pacing, and how much challenge money we have available. We have found the most inspiring challenges to be a dollar-for-dollar match. We never ask our major donors (who provie the funds for challenges) for their gift until the the challenge is met–just their comittment–so that we are honest with them about it truly being a challenge. A couple of times, we didn’t meet the terms of the challenge (not a matching challenge–we always meet those), and we let the donors know. The major donors were kind enough to complete their pledges anyhow, and apprecaited our integrity and honesty with them about it. We pre-plan what we would like to do with our challenges during our Drives, but always remain flexible enough to change it up if we see that things are slow, or pacing behind. Also, we do try to front-load out Drives with challemges a bit early on.
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We moved away from challenges tied to specific programming a couple years ago. Now we focus on larger themed match challenges. For a two-week radio drive, we offer 5 on-air match challenges – VPM News ($10K goal), VPM Music ($5K goal), VPM Internships ($5k goal), VPM Sustainers ($5K goal – welcome 100 new sustainers) and the Procrastinator Challenge ($25K goal). Each day of the week we focus on a different challenge. All challenges are offered on both our all news and all music FM stations.
1st Monday – VPM News | 2nd Monday – VPM Music
1st Tuesday – VPM Music | 2nd Tuesday – VPM Internships
1st Wednesday – Sustainers | 2nd Wednesday – VPM News
1st Thursday – VPM Internships | 2nd Thursday – Sustainers
1st Friday – no specific challenge promotion, allow time for FM director to forward promote | 2nd Friday – Procrastinator ChallengeAll of our match challenges are fulfilled by our Mid- and Major-level donors. Our gift officers work with their donors to solicit gifts (via email, mail, or phone) prior to the drive and request that gifts be designated to support a match challenge. This serves as a good touch point for our gift officers and our larger donors love to support the challenges. So far this has been pretty effective, but we are reevaluating how we define mid- and major gifts so we may need to reimagine this approach in the next year or so. We always report back on the success of the challenges. Even when a match challenge isn’t met (which is rare), the donors have always let us keep the funds they’d offered up for the match.
For our TV drives, we just offer one $15,000 match challenge to support news and public affairs programming on VPM. We only do a one-week drive. Match challenge funds are solicited in the same way.
Lately, almost 70% of the funding we receive during our on-drive comes in response to the complimentary email campaign, typically within the last 48 hours of the drive. Our Procrastinator Challenge is always popular.
Would love feedback on this approach. Again, as a reminder, all of our on-air pitching is prerecorded.
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WUIS has been doing on-air fundraising for years; I’m not sure the exact number. The station was started in 1975 so I imagine most of that time has included on-air drives. We used to do live pitching but for the past few years, it’s been primarily pre-recorded.
I’ve been involved in the planning process since I started this role in June. The next drive is Sept. 10-16 and everyone is helping me pull this one together; the year-end drive will be mine to lead.
Other elements I need to be aware of are how to set a realistic goal, choosing a theme that resonates with our audience and how to find incentives that entice donations but don’t break the bank. We set our schedule of email/direct mail solicitations in January with the university’s advancement team so I feel we are good in that area.
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How long has your station conducted on-air fundraising? For about 40 years I believe.
Have you been involved in the planning process? I started a few weeks before FYE 2022. This will be my first real pledge drive that I am in charge of planning. Previously I helped pitch on a air and in my corporate support role I did solicit company matches to drive up donor participation.
What other elements of fundraising do you need to be aware of at your station as you plan your on-air campaign? We are really operating in silos at the moment and as a staff are going through a great deal of transition. I need to get a handle on how to access previous membership data, to be revamp and provide consistency in message to our emails and social platforms. I need to understand what is happening with content and so much more. -
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How long has your station conducted on-air fundraising?
Since the beginning! 1996Have you been involved in the planning process?
YesWhat other elements of fundraising do you need to be aware of at your station as you plan your on-air campaign?
Need to be aware of staff bandwidth, and of creating a cohesive narrative that everyone can follow -
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