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We schedule pre-recorded testimonials with members for airing during the drives and use volunteers for answering the phones, but all on air pitching is done by our staff.
Everyone at our station is involved in drives and knows and does their job well, but there’s a lot of collective experience. All of the hosts are involved in pitching with some additional staff brought in during busier times or challenges.
Our drives are all live and only staff are involved, but we do record testimonials from our members that are then played during fund drives, which provides our listeners/members’ enthusiastic perspective and become powerful tools for encouraging joining the station.I imagine the technical issues provide for some anxiety but it sounds like everyone is engaged and you’ve got loyal listeners. Good luck on your next drive!
As a music based station, we have the opportunity to engage with a variety of listeners no matter their interest or points of view. It’s an opportunity that news based stations don’t have but it could be a bit broad or unfocused in the sense of target marketing, but I think our station does a good job in overcoming this by matching thank you gifts to our specific programming. Our listeners/donors love supporting their favorite shows or DJs.
Liz, this is a good breakdown of our members/donors. Music has the ability to connect with any age or demographic and our programming connects with just about anyone, whether they’re a hip 20-something or 70 year old hippie. I think that provides a lot of opportunities.
During challenges/matches, it seems most sensible if there isn’t a tie to a specific audience as listeners don’t know these internal details and the additional messaging will just be confusing.
This is an interesting perspective as our stations are all locally based but have the potential for extensive reach with online service/broadcast, where “local” takes on less of an importance.
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.
HI! I’m Christina Newton, Member Services Manager at WNRN, a AAA radio format station broadcasting across Central Virginia (and the world on WNRN.org 😉
I’m new to public radio, having joined the station at the start of the year but I hope to bring my decades of experience in the nonprofit and association sector to work to help grow the station. It’s fascinating to learn about the backgrounds and experiences of everyone here. There’s so much to learn, and I appreciate everyone sharing!I think our frustrations or questions are similar to others in handling those down times during drives, for example, and reaching new members. We have two, weeklong drives and then a few one-day drives centered around our popular programming, and I think the station has done a fantastic job in designing these. I’ve worked through one weeklong and one 24-hour drive which were big learning experiences and hope to feel more acclimated during our next.
