Cooperation
Stations, NPR seek pact on ultra-major donations
Executives from NPR and its biggest member stations are exploring whether they can work together to raise money from an elite pool of philanthropists — those capable of donating $1 million or more — backing the field’s aspirations to build a strong multiplatform news service for local and national audiences.
In a Feb. 1-2 [2010] meeting in Chicago, network and station leaders agreed to begin planning the proposed megagift campaign. NPR Foundation President Ron Schiller has since commissioned research to identify public radio’s best prospects for what he calls “principal gifts.” Stations will help vet the list of prospects and work with NPR in drafting a joint case statement to justify such large donations.
The agreement to collaborate is tentative. Station execs participating in the planning “will be held harmless by their colleagues” if they opt out of the campaign, said Terry Clifford, co-executive director of the Station Resource Group, the Maryland-based research and station representation group that facilitated the Chicago meeting at NPR’s request. Clifford briefed the NPR Board’s development committee Feb. 18.
About 20 station fundraising execs will convene March 16 at MPR headquarters in St. Paul, Minn., to discuss the fundraising collaboration in more detail. They’ll talk through “real and perceived obstacles” to joint fundraising and “come back with a proposal over how we could move forward together,” Ron Schiller said.
“This is very much a work in progress,” said Dave Edwards, NPR Board vice chair and g.m. of Milwaukee Public Radio, during the NPR Board’s Feb. 19 meeting. “It’s really about building trust and seeing how we can work together with those who are willing to work with NPR.”
“It will be judged on the amounts we’re able to bring in, the partnerships that form, and the services we’re able to provide with the money that’s raised,” Edwards said.
Members of NPR’s Major Station Advisory Group, which meets about twice a year to discuss strategic topics, and the SRG Board, whose membership almost completely overlaps with the MSRG, attended the Chicago meeting, according to Clifford and Dana Davis Rehm, NPR senior v.p. and chief spokeswoman.
Station execs included Steve Bass of Oregon Public Broadcasting; Bill Davis, KPCC in Pasadena, Calif.; Paul La Camera, WBUR in Boston; Roger LaMay, WXPN in Philadelpia; Caryn Mathes, WAMU in Washington, D.C.; Torey Malatia, Chicago Public Radio; Jon McTaggart, Minnesota Public Radio; Wayne Roth, KUOW, Seattle; Marita Rivero, WGBH in Boston; Laura Walker, WNYC in New York; Jo Anne Wallace, KQED in San Francisco; and Max Wycisk of Colorado Public Radio. NPR brought in several members of its top brass: President Vivian Schiller, Senior Veeps Ron Schiller, Ellen Weiss and Kinsey Wilson, and Joyce MacDonald, v.p. for member and program services.
“Having been to these meetings over three years, this was the most forward-looking one that I’ve been to,” said OPB’s Bass, a member rep on the NPR Board.
“It was a full and frank discussion without being automatically adversarial,” said Rivero, also an NPR Board member.
LaMay, board chair of Development Exchange Inc. and SRG Board member, attended the meeting though his station, WXPN, isn’t in the news game. “I’ve been leading a crusade over the last few months . . . to make sure that music, arts and culture are part of the public radio case statement,” he told Current. “The argument about news is stronger than ever before, but it’s still important for the music and news stations and NPR to make sure they’re stressing the important contribution public radio is making” to the nation’s cultural life.
Big ambitions, big donors
The late philanthropist Joan Kroc’s bequests to NPR and to her hometown station, San Diego’s KPBS, demonstrated how effective a joint local-national approach to fundraising could be. Kroc left $5 million to KPBS and $200 million to NPR upon her death in 2003. Interest on NPR’s gift brought its proceeds to $225 million once her estate was settled. The network spent endowment proceeds to give stations some dues relief and dramatically expand news operations.
But through all these years, NPR’s effort to court major donors with a small group of pilot stations has had limited success, largely because NPR was soliciting five-figure gifts too close in size to what stations themselves expect to raise, said Doug Eichten, president of DEI.
Now, as NPR and its top stations look to aggressively expand their news operations, pubradio leaders are reconsidering the possibilities of a joint campaign.
“There’s a sense of urgency among NPR stations with aspirations for their news services,” Clifford told the NPR development committee. To mount the substantial local news efforts called for by journalism advocates last fall, public radio will need an additional $100 million annually, she said.
Clifford and others credited NPR’s two Schillers — chief exec Vivian Schiller and Foundation President Ron Schiller — for setting the right tone and listening as they reopened talks about the delicate subject of joint fundraising.
“We have people who I think can pull this off in the form of Ron and Vivian,” Rehm said. “They are assets we did not have before and great strategies are emerging . . . . There’s clarity of purpose about what our stations want to accomplish, particularly in journalism.”
NPR’s proposed megagifts campaign would be unprecedented in size for public radio, Eichten said. “Generally speaking, other than a capital campaign, it is rare for a station alone to interest a donor in that level of giving; but, more and more, stations are working on that. NPR, in their effort to collaborate with the stations, is starting in very much the right place to my thinking.”
The latest NPR member survey offers strong evidence that station leaders now see more opportunity than risk by bringing NPR into conversations with big donors. Large majorities of respondents agreed that NPR and stations are “leaving substantial dollars on the table in high-end major gifts” (79 percent) and that “a collaboratively developed story of our collective impact on society could benefit our individual fundraising efforts” (80 percent), according to a summary of survey results.
The spirit of collaboration extends to KCRW in Santa Monica, the news and contemporary music station that fiercely resisted NPR encroachment under longtime manager Ruth Seymour, who is retiring.
Jennifer Ferro, Seymour’s associate g.m. who last month was appointed to succeed her, told Current she wants KCRW to be part of the fundraising collaborative. NPR’s plan to make “a big ask for the system” by pursuing multimillion-dollar gifts, rather than those in the $20,000-$30,000 range, appeals to her. “If I can in any way assist in NPR getting a $10 million gift, and I can get 10 percent of that, I think that’s just spectacular,” she said with a laugh.
Ferro appreciates the approach of NPR and stations working together in a legitimate way, “crafting the message from the very beginning. . . . I think that’s the only way we can go forward.”
Two more projects to increase public radio’s major-gift fundraising are gearing up alongside NPR’s proposed principal gift campaign:
- DEI and SRG are collaborating on a six-month project to develop and evaluate case statements for stations with ambitions to strengthen local newsgathering and web operations. “To do that right is quite expensive, but there are a good number of donors who are ready to support that in a big way because it boils down to preserving democracy and saving journalism,” Eichten said. Although the cases will be tailored to individual stations’ news expansion plans, the message points and tactics used will provide models for other outlets. “We are working on ways of giving everybody a head start.”
- DEI’s Leadership for Philanthropy project will help some 40 stations establish major-giving programs this year, Eichten said. The project, which CPB renewed for a second year of funding, helps stations cultivate donors capable of giving at least $10,000 a year. A launch meeting for the latest group of participants, expected to double from last year, is set for March 11 in Dallas.
Comments, tips, questions? karen@current.org
Mike Janssen contributed to this story.
Web page posted March 2, 2010
Copyright 2010 by Current LLC
