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We call those slow days, our “beating the drum” days. It may be the only sound, but at least you keep the beat going! Your listeners have to hear the message, what is it, 7 or 11 times before they take action? Something like that. So maybe that day they didn’t do anything but they heard the message. And the next time they hear it, they will donate!
I have been in fundraising a while and at a previous job, one of our major donors (who also did fundraising for our capital campaign) told me, never apologize for asking people to be part of something great. Public media is one of the greatest things we have in a democracy, so fundraising is always appropriate. You just have to fundraise in the right way, with the right messaging.
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!
My name is Sarah Cassidy Hipsher and I am the Membership Manager at WFSU Public Media in Tallahassee, FL. We are a dual-licensee and a university affiliate news station. I have been producing pledge drives at WFSU for 9 years now and I don’t necessarily have a lot of pain points. We have the normal issues of slow periods and revenue slumps, but I don’t look at those as pain points, just normal hurdles to overcome.
One thing that is unique about WFSU- we use volunteers for about 90% of our live pitching during pledge drives. Tallahassee is a small town in a lot of ways, and that is the way it’s always been! It’s worked for us, so we’ve kept it that way. Usually we have a team of two volunteers for a two hour shift. Staff sits right next to them (without a mic) to help them and make sure they don’t get too far off course. Yes, they need a lot of coaching, but we do make our goals! We have a good team of dedicated people, some have been pitching once a year for decades.
I have used Greater Public as a resource for all my years at WFSU and take workshops and review webinars whenever I can. It’s been such a valuable resource. We have a new staff member, so from this course, I’m hoping she and I can work together to help make our drives even better.
