Current (https://current.org/category/development/page/12/)
NPR CEO Jarl Mohn said his “spark initiative” to boost Morning Edition’s audience through repeated promotional messaging is already starting to show signs of success one month into its six month run.
Nearly every public radio station now executes a sustaining membership program, but the latest analyses of fundraising performance reveal that very few of them could be described as effective or successful.
The Association of Public Television Stations has restructured its staff to align with recently adopted strategic goals, including efforts to promote best practices, increase state and federal funding and support advocacy for the system at large. Two key staffers are stepping up to manage the expanding workload. Kate Riley, director of government relations, has been promoted to v.p., government and public affairs; she will focus on advocacy and state and federal funding. Emil Mara, v.p. for finance and administration, will direct member services. The reorganization follows through on a strategic plan adopted by the APTS board of trustees in November, according to Pat Butler, president.
The new series will cover disadvantaged and marginalized residents in Los Angeles.
The two-minute spots on the joint newscast on Honolulu’s KHNL and KGMB are valued at a total of $30,000.
Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever, the famous 1983 special on which Michael Jackson debuted his signature moonwalk and Smokey Robinson reunited with the Miracles, is coming to public television via pledge producer and doo-wop showman TJ Lubinsky. The two-hour program has not aired since its initial broadcast on NBC due to complex rights issues, Lubinsky said. He negotiated a two-year exclusive contract for public television stations to run the entire show. The list of performers is a who’s who from Motown, the famous Detroit-based record label: Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross, the Supremes, the Jackson 5, the Temptations, the Four Tops and more. Hosting is comedian Richard Pryor, then at the height of his career.
Four specialized charities cultivating big donations to benefit some of PBS’s most popular programs are gaining traction in the crowded and competitive world of public TV fundraising.
Hawaii Public Radio overcame a brief panic about whether it could reach the goal for its fall pledge drive and exceeded it by about $7,000, wrapping up the campaign Oct. 16. The station had set a goal of $1.03 million, to be reached after a 10-day drive ending Oct. 10. But when that date arrived, HPR was still about $200,000 short of the mark.
A new service from DMW Direct Fundraising aims to help pubmedia stations reach members and donors through cellphones and tablets, using software for creating mobile-friendly pledge forms.
According to DMW, the new service will be more effective than the text-to-give format many stations have experimented with because it doesn’t rely on cellphone carriers to collect money and allows for larger donations. It also offers more opportunities for individualized communications. Mobile giving can be an important revenue stream, but stations should view it as more than just dollars and cents, said DMW President Debbie Merlino. “It’s really important to not just think of this as another channel for revenue only,” she said. “It really needs to be about engagement.
A mobile tipping point came earlier this year. For the first time, mobile devices accounted for 55 percent of Internet usage, according to January data from comScore, while laptops and desktops accounted for 45 percent of usage. The proportion of Americans who read email on their mobile devices has also crossed the halfway point, with a 2013 Pew Research Center survey finding that 52 percent of cellphone owners used their devices to send or receive email. For development professionals planning email appeals for year-end fundraising campaigns, these technology shifts will support or undercut the effectiveness of your efforts. Most donors who open your messages will read them on smartphones and tablets.
The president of Greater Public responds to a commentary.
Greater Public, the organization providing fundraising resources and support to public media stations, has opted not to renew the contract of Jeannie Ericson, executive director of its digital division. Ericson formerly worked directly with stations as executive director of the Integrated Media Association, which merged with Greater Public in August 2013. Under a yearlong contract that expired Aug. 29, she helped Greater Public evaluate how to integrate iMA’s digital services for stations into its existing portfolio of development-focused activities. Ericson had not expected that Greater Public would decline to renew her contract, she said.
A supplier of pledge-drive premiums to public broadcasters is offering an upgrade to traditional CD giveaways, providing a new program of monthly music downloads delivered via email. The program from Forest Incentives, Forest Music Express, has blanket agreements with several record labels, including all three majors, allowing stations to send virtually any album to their donors. Forest Music Express is billed as an update to the concept of the “CD of the Month” club, allowing stations to curate gifts to donors while avoiding the logistics of mailing physical recordings. The distribution system integrates with membership databases at stations to deliver download links to donors. “The beauty behind this is that the stations can do their own work, and we can distribute the albums in really short order,” said John Vernile, who created Forest Music Express.
DENVER — A public radio station’s foray into native advertising, which seamlessly integrates paid content into a website’s editorial fare, stirred strong opinions at a July 10 session at the annual Public Media Development & Marketing Conference. Attendees packed the room to hear about plans for native advertising on the site of Southern California Public Radio in Pasadena, Calif. The broadcaster received a $33,000 grant in April from the Investigative News Network and the Knight Foundation to experiment with native advertising, also known as sponsored content. Over the six-month pilot stage, which ends in December, SCPR will develop a native-advertising framework for online and mobile platforms. “SCPR believes that the framework emerging from this grant will map out the common ground between the interests of its audience, underwriters, and journalistic principles,” INN said in a statement about the grant when it was announced. “At its conclusion, the organization will be much closer to determining whether sponsored content is a viable revenue stream for mission-driven, nonprofit content producers.”
According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, native advertising encompasses “paid ads that are so cohesive with the page content, assimilated into the design, and consistent with the platform behavior that the viewer simply feels that they belong.”
In experimenting with native advertising, SCPR joins nonprofits Voice of San Diego and the Texas Tribune, which began placing native ads on their websites this year.
In the first and potentially only government-backed grant program supporting arts coverage by California’s public media stations, KQED, PBS SoCaL and Radio Bilingüe each received one-time funding from the California Arts Council. The Council created its Arts on the Air program as one of several initiatives funded by a special $2 million allocation from the California state legislature. The state aid was split between two arts education initiatives and three grant programs; the council created Arts on the Air specifically to support public, nonprofit media outlets and directed $200,000 to be distributed through a competitive grants process. “It’s a modest program, but the council really wanted to find organizations that would really impact public feeling about the arts, that would build public will and understanding about the value of the arts in our communities,” said Caitlin Fitzwater, spokesperson for the Arts Council. In San Francisco, KQED’s $75,000 grant will help fund an expansion of Spark, a weekly television show and educational outreach program that profiles local artists and art organizations.
Georgia Public Broadcasting will fund its new daytime public radio news service on Atlanta’s WRAS through private revenues, not state subsidies, according to Michael H. McDougald, a broadcaster who chairs the state network’s governing commission. GPB “has no intention of using taxpayers’ money to support this new initiative,” McDougald said in an open letter responding to criticism from Public Broadcasting Atlanta, which broadcasts a hybrid format news and music service to the state capitol on WABE-FM. McDougald said the state-owned pubcasting network expects earned revenues to fully support its news and talk programming on WRAS. GPB took over daytime programming of Georgia State University’s 100,000-watt FM station on June 29 through a channel-sharing agreement with the university. The deal drew criticism from GSU students who previously controlled all programming on the station, supporters of their music service and Public Broadcasting Atlanta, a community licensed public radio and TV service.
DENVER — An increase in sustaining memberships has provided a welcome source of stable income for some public radio stations, but it has also prompted some to rethink their strategies for on-air fund drives. Under a sustaining membership, a donor sets up automatic monthly contributions to a station instead of giving on an annual basis. That reduces the pressure during on-air fund drives to convince listeners to renew their memberships, and stations are responding by redoubling efforts to enlist new members during pledge campaigns. Executives from two stations described their approaches in a July 10 panel discussion here at the Public Media Development & Marketing Conference. “Our drives are no longer a renewal machine,” said Jacquie Fuller, on-air fundraising manager for Minnesota Public Radio.
DENVER — The Public Media Platform is moving into the next phase of its CPB grant, shifting its focus to developing a sustainable business plan and more ways for public media stations to access the content. PMP Executive Director Kristin Calhoun announced the project’s next phase July 9 during the “Digital Day” conference leading up to the Public Media Development and Marketing Conference in Denver. CPB’s five-year, $8 million grant to PMP provided $6 million for the nearly completed build-out and $2 million for the “operational phase,” which winds down on an incremental basis through 2016, according to Michael Levy, CPB executive v.p. of public affairs. The PMP is an application programming interface (API) that provides easy access to both public radio and public television digital content. Public media’s top distributors — NPR, PBS, Public Radio International, American Public Media and Public Radio Exchange — have guided its build-out phase as project partners; they will continue their support, Calhoun said.
With analysis from Richard McPherson
Individual contributions to local public broadcasting stations are the single largest revenue stream coming into public broadcasting. According to CPB’s latest report on system finances, gifts from members and major donors provided $871 million in gross revenues to public radio and television stations in 2013. That pool of money was nearly evenly divided between radio and television. Public television’s share, $439 million, was flat from 2012 revenues; radio’s $432 million was 5 percent higher than 2012. This river of financial support from individual donors is far larger than the $497 million in federal monies that CPB channeled to local stations in 2013.
DENVER — Three public media projects aimed at developing new audiences, revenue and content will each receive $250,000 from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The grants to the investigative series Frontline, Boston’s WBUR and the Public Media Co. were announced Thursday morning at a Knight breakfast that’s kicking off a CEO symposium sponsored by the Contributor Development Partnership. The event is running concurrent with the Public Media Development & Marketing Conference. “In this day and age we’re competing with Game of Thrones, Candy Crush and Reddit,” said John Bracken, director of journalism and media innovation for Knight, in announcing the support.