When Joan Kroc decided to give $200 million to NPR and $5 million to San Diego’s KPBS, she probably didn’t do it because she was impressed with their latest audience numbers or financial reports.
More likely, something else stirred her soul. She had made a connection as a listener, valuing public radio’s content and style, its personalities and programs—the significant institutions that KPBS and NPR had become through decades of public service.
As stations assess their value to the communities they serve, they should recognize the powerful connections their programming makes each day with their listeners. Stations routinely measure audience size and track donations, but they don’t always know how to give appropriate weight to their programs’ more intangible kinds of impact. If stations measured that impact, too, they would have a more complete evaluation of program performance.
The Station Resource Group’s Program Ledger is designed to bring together all the relevant data — including the hard to measure — to give stations a framework for measuring the value of their service. Over the past several months SRG — with input and feedback from program directors and managers — has presented, reshaped and refined an integrated set of measures with which to assess our programming efforts.
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SRG's Program Ledger |
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Investments Financial: direct and allocated costs Opportunity costs: airtime, management time, quality control |
Returns Listening: cume, share, loyalty and average quarter-hour Revenue: listener-sensitive revenue, major gifts and foundation grants, underwriting |
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Community significance Significance Niche Licensee relations Talent magnet Core values |
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The ledger embodies several important concepts:
Community significance is the payback a station receives when its programs help to:
Community significance is clearly affected by the amount of listening — stations can’t have impact without reaching significant audiences. But the measure seeks to capture impact that audience numbers alone cannot. Assessing a program’s community significance is not a return to a fuzzy past when stations didn’t value audience numbers as the powerful tools they are; it’s an effort to include every factor in making the best judgments possible about our programs.
You can get a sense of a program’s contributions to community significance through conversations with people in your community or board members, through comments received when you’re pitching a major gift donation or through the wealth of phone calls, e-mails and letters you receive each month. Track it through awards won, media mentions (especially unsolicited) and unexpected grants. Each station can define its own measures — how many times they’re asked to host a political debate or sponsor a community concert, for instance. In addition to weighing anecdotal information, stations with the resources to do so can conduct focus groups or other research to better understand what the public thinks of them.
One simple way to track the components of community significance is on a scale from -5 to +5. Let’s take licensee relations as an example. If a station’s local public affairs program resulted in negative media coverage, especially with a line like “One would expect the university to set a higher standard,” you could probably score that a -5. If a station’s special holiday concert, staged and broadcast from the college chapel, turned out a huge crowd and a glowing review in the next day’s paper, you could score that a +5. Station leaders can ask themselves, their staffs, board members, licensees, and people in the community how their stations are doing on the components of community significance.
Granted, assigning numbers to this feedback may require more intuition than number-crunching, but by tracking changes over time, stations can get a sense of whether they are headed in a positive or negative direction.
The other pieces of the SRG Program Ledger rely on more familiar data, such as costs. Direct costs (primarily from the programming budget) include salaries and benefits for the program staff, contract employees, services and travel. Indirect costs (assigned from other departments) could include tech, web and marketing support. It can take some digging to figure out these costs. For example, how many hours does a marketing staffer spend promoting a particular program? Opportunity costs reflect the amount of time spent on a program. If an underperforming program takes up significant portions of a manager’s time, what else could the manager have accomplished in those hours?
On the returns side are listening and revenue. Powerful tools such as Arbitron, Audigraphics and RRC reports measure and analyze listening. Membership and underwriting revenue are also relatively easy to track, although stations will have to decide how they want to assign membership revenue on a per-program basis.
An interesting aspect of community significance is that its components can show up on either the costs or returns side of the Program Ledger, depending on how programs perform. For example, if its programming is so poor that the station can’t attract new talent, this deficiency would register as a cost. The station needs to spend more time and/or money to make it a place where the best people want to work. If they do, this success becomes a return.
What makes the Program Ledger a useful tool is that it puts data sets side by side, creating a more complete picture of how a program performs. By reminding ourselves of this array of costs and returns, we can resist the temptation to give too much weight to the next 1-point blip in a one-dimensional metric, no matter how new and cool the number-crunching.
For example: Midday Now
Let’s take a hypothetical program and see how it might measure up on the Program Ledger. Station WXXX has a news/talk format with morning and afternoon drive anchored by NPR newsmagazines. The station produces a local hourlong talk program, Midday Now, each weekday at noon. This show got a slow start three years ago but its audience has grown in the past year. Its cume still drops below the previous hour’s, however.
In revenue, the program outperforms other midday shows but brings in a fraction of the revenue generated in drivetime.
In calculating costs for the program, we see that it is one of the most
expensive shows on the air at WXXX. For the most part, costs are driven by
Midday Now staff salaries.
Then we measure the program’s community significance. Midday Now
brings local leaders to the WXXX studios each week, which helps them know
the station better.
E-mails to the station say that listeners appreciate that the show tackles controversial topics other stations don’t cover. The show has just attracted a bright new producer, who is improving its quality and embracing public radio’s core values. There are some complaints from the licensee — a university — that the station doesn’t invite enough faculty members to appear as guests, but university administrators have applauded the show for awards it won.
In this hypothetical scenario, we could rate community significance this way: significance +3, core values +2, niche +2, talent magnet +3 and licensee relations +1. The average is +2.2—the highest of any local content programming on WXXX and comparable to scores for other programs.
All of the information taken together, especially if tracked over time, gives an interesting picture of Midday Now. If the audience numbers were the only measure for evaluating the program, it wouldn’t look as successful as other programs. The program had some revenue successes on the returns side, but they easily could be outweighed by its high costs.
It’s having a positive effect in community significance, helping the station make its mark. Given this review, the station may decide the program is valuable, while recognizing it must find ways to increase its audience.
Assembling the data, calculating the costs and seeking the input necessary to build a Program Ledger takes time and effort, but it’s an important piece of due diligence for program decision-makers. Stations need to go outside the station to gather input on community significance. Using only in-house assessments could inflate the program’s score.
Measurements of listening are always the most significant return for a program, usually followed by its ability to carry its weight financially. But no single set of numbers fully defines a program’s performance. By evaluating contributions to community significance, we begin to shape a more holistic view.
We need to know how our programming today contributes to our ability to deliver on our mission in the future. We need to take into consideration the goodwill that our programming generates and the lasting impression it makes on ordinary listeners, the larger institutions of which many of us are a part, members of Congress and state legislatures, and even billionaires who might include stations in their wills.
Kathy Merritt is director, public media strategies, for
Station Resource Group, Takoma Park, Md. She was previously station manager,
acting g.m., news director and Metro Connection host at WAMU-FM in
Washington. Between 1983 and 1996, Merritt was news director at WFAE-FM, Charlotte,
N.C.
Web page posted May 4, 2004
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