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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!
JayHi everyone! Thank you for being in this course and sharing a little about yourselves and your pain points around on air fundraising and what you hope to get out of the course.
I’ll share a solution for one of the recurring themes — what to do when your drive is going slowly. It happens even at the biggest stations out there!
My suggestion is to avoid playing into how slowly it’s going by instead talking about how thousands of listeners over many decades have supported your station and public radio voluntarily, and that support made possible the program you’re listening to now. We are the station we are thanks to this voluntary support and we wouldn’t sound the way we do or have the values we do with any other funding model. This is why it’s important for you to join these listeners with your monthly gift.
When we get together we will talk about how you can structure your incentives to help you through slow periods too, but it’s important to have a narrative you can lean into when you need it. It’s a good point to make when it’s not going slowly, too!
I hope this helps!
All my best,
Jay
