Still learning more about pledge after all these years
Pledge continues to surprise. Sure, on-air fundraising has been around for nearly as long as public broadcasting itself. But concepts usually accepted as common sense are still being disproven:
- Ratings always slide during pledge? PBS says research this year dispels that assumption.
- Viewers won’t pledge during kids programming? Vegas PBS challenged that notion and made $58,000 over three campaigns.
- Don’t bother pledging regular programming? Milwaukee got a great response with Masterpiece.
- The only way to find out if a program will pledge is to produce an entire show? Veteran pledge producer Bob Marty tested five mini-shows, measuring viewer donations to determine which should get full production funding. The experiment yielded what looks to be a pledge hit.
Contrary to the conventional wisdom in public TV, a
new PBS study released to station fundraisers earlier this year indicates that viewers stick around for pledge content. Daily national Nielsen ratings, available to PBS since October 2009, “confirmed what we had always hoped was true: That our loyal viewers don’t turn pledge programs off — they watch and enjoy them,” said Joe Campbell, the network’s v.p. of fundraising programming.
National numbers from March 2010 and March 2011 verify that ratings aren’t that different between pledge and non-pledge times, Campbell said. The median age of viewers stays steady. Cume is about the same before and after the campaigns. And additional viewers continue to show up every day during pledge drives.
“That has great implications for how stations can schedule their drives,” Campbell said. “They can really think about the entire drive, rather than betting on the things they think will be winners [by scheduling them] just in the first weekend.”
Fundraisers are having success with a number of pledge techniques developed in the Next Generation Pledge projects funded by PBS and undertaken by producers and stations.
Pledgers are inspiring the stations’ pledge pitches, for instance, in TRAC Media Services’ project Viewer Based Virtual Scripting.
onors are asked to explain what prompts them to pledge, and their responses feed into the script for later pledge drives. Craig Reed, TRAC’s director of audience analysis, said that pledge breaks using those scripts are reaping 10 percent more pledged dollars per minute. “So many members are so eloquent,” Reed said. “They can explain the case for public TV. And members want to hear from other people like them.”
“TRAC’s work is getting into the heads of Baby Boomers, and the motivating factor has really been enlightening,” Campbell said. “The conventional wisdom has been, boomers only want premiums. But they’ve found the opposite to be true. Those viewers are much more concerned about supporting public TV, and they respond to appeals that are mission-based.”
Forthright talk about costs
Another Next-Gen experiment that has station fundraisers talking is the Do Your Part campaign at Vegas PBS. For its December 2010 drive, pledge talent told viewers how much the station pays for national shows per viewing household. For Antiques Roadshow, for instance, the Las Vegas station pays $40 a year for each viewing household. In the tryout, Vegas PBS didn’t push premiums. Viewers interested in those were told to see the station website.
Vegas PBS wanted to increase the number of donors, boost net revenue and increase audience size by keeping favorite series in the schedule during the pledge period. “Member numbers went up, but not quite as much as we were hoping,” said Cyndy Robbins, programming director. “Gross [revenue] was down but net was up because we took out most of the cost of the thank-you gifts.” Robbins added that pubTV stations have “trained some people to want a thank-you gift. But the Do Your Part campaign was pure mission — do it because it’s the right thing to do.”
atings also got a nice boost — for the month, an average of 9,235 viewers in primetime, up from 5,980 in December 2009.
“What really shocked us,” Robbins said, was that Do Your Part was so effective during kids’ programming. “We’d tried doing traditional pledge during those shows, and the response was almost zero,” she said. But Do Your Part began working in December 2010, when 140 members donated $12,224. In March, 232 pledgers gave $39,357. Including the third drive in June, Vegas PBS raised nearly $58,000 during children’s shows.
Do Your Part also is running this week, Aug. 6–14. Every five minutes during regular and pledge shows, a circle stating the show’s cost per viewing household appears on the corner of the screen where the Vegas PBS logo generally resides.
“People appreciate honesty,” Robbins said. “They just want to know, how can we help?”
Fixed goals: incentive to give
They learned that lesson in Milwaukee, too.
“If somebody had told me six months prior that I’d be trying to pledge Masterpiece, I’d say, ‘You’re out of your ever-loving mind,’” said Rick Lore, executive director of MPTV Friends. But Milwaukee Public Television did just that, and now the station gets renewal letters with “MASTERPIECE!” boldly written across the reply forms.
MPTV split last year’s traditional August drive into two weekends in August and two in September. On Aug. 22, they took a chance on pledging Masterpiece Mystery. Previous airings during pledge had yielded just 20 calls for $1,500. But they had a new plan.
They simply told viewers that once they hit the target 50 pledge calls or online donations, “We’re done.” No more interruptions in that show. As a bonus, the station promised an uninterrupted Masterpiece, chosen by viewers, on the drive’s last Sunday in September.
Milwaukee pitchers told viewers that this pledge offer hadn’t worked in the past, but asked to be proved wrong. Within five minutes, they had 56 pledges for $3,265.
At the second pledge break, they told viewers, “We’ve hit the goal. Thanks and good night,” and returned to the show uninterrupted. Another nine pledges came in. Total: in 12 minutes, 65 pledges for $3,945.
Then on Sept. 26, MPTV ran the fan-selected show as promised and gave viewers more straight talk: Although it’s popular, Masterpiece usually doesn’t bring in pledge dollars. Prove that wrong, Lore told them. Meet the goal of 150 calls or clicks and you’ll get to pick three episodes to run uninterrupted during the winter pledge drive. He dared fans to “turn conventional wisdom on its ear.” The result: 151 pledges totaling $9,200. And only 25 percent of callers asked for the premium — a totebag.
In December, using only opening and closing breaks on the three uninterrupted Masterpiece presentations, MPTV captured 197 pledges for $12,126.
So with Masterpiece, the pubcaster made $25,271 in 60 on-air minutes from 413 pledges.
“Callers were saying, ‘Thank you for respecting my intelligence,’ ‘Thank you for trusting us,’” Lore said.
Did the Milwaukee station miss out on gifts that would have come in over a longer pledge period? Lore doesn’t think so. Going by averages, a traditional 30-minute pledge break on Sunday night in Milwaukee takes in 33 pledges worth $3,887. Compare that with the Masterpiece experiment: In a 12-minute period, MPTV received 83 pledges adding up to $5,054.
Masterpiece also inspired an upcoming pledge show, The History of Costume Drama. “We’re always on the lookout for subjects in the regular schedule that are built for pledge,” Campbell said. “The purpose is to build a pledge show and at the same time remind viewers of all the other great shows,” with clips from various costume-drama favorites. PBS is watching The History of Costume Drama results with interest, and mulling similar pledge shows for science and history.
Pilot tests for pledge specials
“We always say when we’re pitching on-air, ‘Your phone call is a vote for programs like this,’” said producer Bob Marty. “I thought, could we formalize that? If we could use all those eyeballs, and put shows before them to find out if they’d work, wouldn’t that be great?”
Marty has a knack for pledge. He made pledge stars out of wacky pianist Victor Borge, alternative physician Andrew Weil and financial guru Ed Slott. So PBS supported his hunch and paid for five 30-minute pilots. Shooting a 30-minute pilot costs only 10 percent as much as a full show, he said.
Six stations — PBS SoCal, KQED in San Francisco, WPBT in Miami, WPBA in Atlanta, WMHT in Albany/Schenectady, N.Y., and WNED in Buffalo — have run the pilots so far.
One pilot, Three Steps to Incredible Health! with Dr. Joel Fuhrman, was a standout, Marty said. He produced a 90-minute version, which premiered in June and has done well so far. Several stations have moved it to primetime, an achievement in that genre.
The Fuhrman program “seems to have that trajectory that we don’t see very often,” Marty said. “I don’t want to jinx anything, but we’re all looking for someone to hold the torch up for Boomer health issues the way Suze Orman does for finance. We’ll have to get through a drive or two more to see if this has longevity.”
Two other shows got a green light for full production: Financial Fitness Over 50! with Paul Merriman, which debuts in December, and Eat and Cook Healthy! with Dr. John Lapuma, which premiered in March.
Marty envisions using pilots to examine each aspect of pledge: How about test-drive on-air talent, or premiums? And for specials in music and other genres.
“This is just the first out of the box,” he said. “We’re planning lots more.”
Comments, questions, tips?
Copyright 2011 American University