3 million givers:
necessary drive for reachable goal
NPR applauds 3MG’s listener-giver focus
NPR counts itself among the advocates for DEI’s 3MG initiative. NPR Board members and Dana Davis Rehm, the network’s senior v.p. for strategy and partnerships,will discuss issues mentioned in this article in meetings with station reps during this week’s Public Radio Development & Marketing Conference. Information about the issues is posted on NPR’s member-stations-only site.
The number of givers to public radio stations has been stuck at 2.5 million since 2003. Worse yet, the Station Resource Group reports that net revenue from listener contributions declined from 2005 to 2006.
Do we have to settle for a flat to declining level of audience financial support?
We simply cannot. If we are to improve public service to local communities through increased station journalism and digital capacity, we must find additional, sustainable revenue streams.
Your station may be on firm financial footing, but many are not. CPB’s Annual Financial Report data reveals that many — possibly most — public radio stations are experiencing some level of financial distress. They face an even tougher road ahead unless we can identify and secure substantial additional funding and find smarter ways to use today’s resources.
The consequences are not limited to the struggling broadcasters. If those stations begin to decline, the public radio neighborhood will be at ever-growing risk of decay.
What is the solution?
There are many reasons to keep audience financial support as public radio’s No. 1 source of revenue. Individual contributors hold us accountable for meeting their needs and the needs of their communities in ways other kinds of revenue contributors do not. We rely on listeners’ letters, calls and financial contributions to tell us how well we are fulfilling our mission of public service.
Yet despite the importance of individual givers, today’s listeners are not playing a meaningful role in funding the expansion of public radio’s digital services. Instead, we continue to rely mainly on sponsorship as the principal funding source for this crucial growth. While it’s healthy to have that support for digital services, over-reliance on sponsorship is inconsistent with our long-held values and with listeners’ expectations of our public service. We risk undermining the growth of philanthropic support and perhaps losing our sense of purpose if our multimedia futures are built exclusively — or even primarily — on revenue streams such as corporate sponsorship and e-commerce.
If the audience is the answer, how can we rise above the present plateau of 2.5 million annual givers and put more individuals in a position to influence public radio’s digital decision-making? I propose an integrated, twofold solution.
First, we need to offer members of our audience more choices about when and how they support their listening and the services they rely on and identify with. For 30 years, our on-air fundraising campaigns have asked all prospective givers to jump through a hoop called “membership.” This hoop, as you know, does not appeal to all listeners. It may not even appeal to the majority, given that public radio has 30 million listeners and only 2.5 million listener households contributing annually.
Second, we need to build upon the collaborative fundraising efforts that are already underway. Working together and pooling our resources will balance the playing field between large and small stations, between those that are secure and those that are struggling. Vendors selling donor research, e-billing services and other fundraising tools won’t pay much attention to requests from most individual stations, but they’ll be inclined to offer meaningful discounts to groups of stations. Public radio as a whole represents a very large customer for these vendors, with the volume and influence to exploit opportunities that are not available now to stations or are financially out of reach.
We’ve already seen that pooling resources makes sense—and makes stations successful. The 3MG pilot program proves that stations benefit from collaborating on direct mail. We could also collaborate to share digital tools such as e-bill processing and online payment systems, e-mail and even text-message-based fundraising.
Questions accompany new revenue
For some years now, NPR and stations have agreed in theory that growing the “revenue pie” makes good business sense. This theme was articulated in NPR’s 2004 Strategic Plan following extensive station consultations. It also surfaced repeatedly in the New Realities planning process, is recommended in the Blueprint for Growth approved by the NPR Board in 2006, and was a significant topic at the 2008 Annual Meeting.
But uncertainty about who will capture the revenue — and where and how — as bred disagreement, much of it unspoken, in public radio. Can the field really expand its total revenue, or would it just be slicing the same revenue pie (or a smaller one) into more pieces? If we bring in additional revenue, how will it be allocated, and to whom? What role should NPR play in garnering listener financial support, both on behalf of stations and for NPR?
Answering these questions means confronting both familiar and unspoken concerns about what may result if public radio offers its broadcast and digital audience members more options for giving—opportunities beyond membership in their hometown stations.
For example: What if listeners were offered the option of donating $10 a month anonymously via text messaging or other means — without requiring membership in the station? What if they had the option of splitting a contribution among several favorite stations or even among favorite podcasts or programs?
Would these sorts of new options just rearrange the giving of today’s 2.5 million station members and cause considerable disruption, or would the changes help grow the public radio pie, bringing in new givers and revenue?
Public radio does not have to settle for today’s status quo. I believe that by working together with care we can revitalize and substantially increase financial support from our audience.
Now is the time for open and honest discussion with the NPR membership about the tensions, concerns and opportunities tied to our shared financial future. Now is the time to challenge the anxieties about how to grow giving to public radio. Now is the time to set aside our long-held assumptions, come together and decide how we can grow. Our collective futures depend on it.
A veteran of public radio in Washington state and in Wisconsin, Dana Davis Rehm is now NPR’s senior v.p. of strategy and partnerships, responsible for advancing NPR’s public service mission and leadership role in collaboration with NPR-member radio stations. She oversees NPR functions including station relations, research, policy and federal relations. She previously served five years as v.p. of member and program services. She came from Wisconsin Public Radio, where she was director of radio from 1998 to 2001. For seven years before that she was a senior manager at KUOW/KCMU in Seattle.
Web page posted July 14, 2008
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