Next year’s Public Media Development and Marketing Conference, the annual event organized by pubradio’s Development Exchange Inc., will include a new track for pubTV professionals, produced by PBS. The conference runs July 12-14 in Seattle. The track will focus on pledge practices, fundraising and community engagement around children’s programming, and television-specific research. DEI and PBS announced the collaboration in a statement Dec. 6.
How much are simple thank-you calls to donors worth to public television stations nationwide over the course of a year? Potentially, about $4.6 million. That’s one of the bright possibilities emerging from the Contributor Development Partnership, an ambitious effort to identify and disseminate the most effective local fundraising practices. The service, funded by CPB and WGBH (Current, Feb. 7), has been busy all year crunching detailed financial data from 76 participating stations.
Two years after its Makers Quest 2.0 project tapped independent producers to stretch the creative boundaries of public radio, the Association of Independents in Radio is launching Localore, a major CPB-backed initiative designed to jump-start new-media experiments at local public broadcasting stations.
… Management can support responsible behavior, however, by designing compensation systems that reward it. These techniques include offering a livable base salary augmented by commissions … and using a year-end bonus to reward such activities as assisting in philanthropic requests….
Looking to expand the pool of companies that place underwriting spots on public radio stations, Boston’s WBUR unveiled results from its first-ever study demonstrating that sponsorship credits deliver a return on investment for corporate underwriters. Online surveys by Lightspeed Research, conducted in two waves since October, measured substantial gains for both new and continuing sponsors across 12 different product categories — including banks, supermarkets, health care and auto services. WBUR Station Manager Corey Lewis, who initiated the research, said the results demonstrate that public radio underwriting can compete with and even outperform advertising campaigns on three metrics: influencing customers’ purchasing frequency, perceptions of quality and consideration of a company for future purchases. NPR’s influential research on the “halo effect” of public radio sponsorship — identified in 2003 and confirmed by further survey research last fall — showed strong links between listeners’ perceptions of quality and purchase consideration for companies that underwrite public radio programs, according to Lewis and other research and underwriting specialists. To measure the underwriters’ return on investment, the WBUR study added questions about purchasing frequency.
Current’s first Pledge Pipeline previews 36 shows heading to public TV on-air membership drives in December 2011, March 2012 and beyond. Producers and distributors provided this information in response to Current’s questionnaire. December ’11
’60s Pop Rock: My Music
Producing organization: TJL Productions. Distributor: PBS. Length: 75 minutes in four acts (SD 4:3).
As public broadcasting braces for expected cuts from its most predictable revenue source — the annual CPB appropriation — system leaders are talking as much about saving money as raising more of it. Collaboration and consolidation — ideals that pubcasters have long espoused but rarely implemented — were buzzwords at this month’s Public Media Marketing and Development Conference in Pittsburgh. Top fundraisers, station execs and analysts urged their peers to tear down walls that separate local stations and cooperate to preserve and strengthen audience service.
Keynoters Fred and Paul Jacobs, sibling radio consultants from Detroit, delivered the starkest diagnosis and most urgent prescription — formation of a commission to analyze station finances and design a restructured, pared-down system of stations. Pubradio leaders already working in these trenches described a new strategy for preserving service as more universities spin off their stations. In his first major speech since promotion to chief exec of American Public Media/Minnesota Public Radio, Jon McTaggart said pubradio can tackle its funding challenges and competitive threats by relentlessly focusing on audience service.
Having witnessed the damaging one-round knockout of NPR fundraiser Ron Schiller in March, public radio’s development pros are working to adapt the lessons they’ve learned about ethics and prudence into a set of best-practices guidelines for use throughout the field. But they’re already tiptoeing around a clear discrepancy between the major ethical code of professional fundraisers and a common practice in public broadcasting — paid commissions on underwriting sales. DEI, the national agency for pubradio fundraising that convenes its annual Public Media Development and Marketing Conference in Pittsburgh later this week, has assembled a group to draft ethical standards for fundraising in nonprofit public media. DEI is leading the re-evaluation as part of its CPB-backed Leadership for Philanthropy project, which aims to help stations improve their major-gift fundraising. The main starting point for DEI’s advisory council is the Code of Ethical Principles and Standards of the Association of Fundraising Professionals, which prohibits commission-based compensation for nonprofit fundraisers.
“Blessed Be the Ties that Bind” may be music to churchgoers, but many station leaders find it discordant. No matter how much CEOs welcome the blessings of major gifts, they tend to start doubting if they find strings attached. Increasingly, big donors do attach conditions. Not all want to see their name on a building or a room, but they do want to see their gifts used for purposes that matter to them, even when giving to the operating fund. Donors give for their own reasons; the fact that a station needs “to pay the power bill,” as one CEO put it, tends to be less compelling than content about topics that matter to them.
The traditional pledge-drive mantra brags about a piece of public television’s ancestral DNA: “PBS — your home for quality, uninterrupted programming.”
So the public reacted fairly predictably when PBS announced at this month’s annual meeting in Orlando that it’s considering internal promotional spots as part of its primetime revamp. As one blogger quipped, “Even though it wouldn’t involve actual commercials, I honestly think that Fred Rogers wouldn’t be happy with this idea.”
But some public TV programmers have responded more with curiosity than with outrage. They realize that the PBS schedule loses hundreds of thousands of viewers between shows and has for years. And by clustering compatible programs, as PBS plans to do for the fall, stations can retain more viewers through the station break. The audience isn’t keen on sitting through the present hodgepodge of video snippets between shows: some eight minutes of national and local underwriting spots, promos, program credits, network and station branding and teases.
Don’t tell the county fire marshal, but the president of PBS keeps working while her staff evacuates the building in deference to a fire alarm. Kerger travels, meets future donors, smiles dazzlingly at galas, and works some more with the determination of a distance runner, which she is.Here she tells readers:
PBS will propose hot-switching station breaks to help build audience flow, though the new practice would make it hard for stations to slide programs around the schedule,
The network needs to raise immediately spendable money, though she wants it to start accumulating an endowment,
Why PBS didn’t promise Bill Moyers a slot on Friday night in particular. Kerger spoke with Current editors in her conference room at PBS headquarters in Arlington, Va. The transcript is edited. Current: The proposed PBS budget for next year makes a point of concentrating attention on primetime.
This year, St. Patrick’s Day was the deadline for pubcasters to ask Uncle Sam for help replacing their ancient, failing transmitters, or for a broadcast starter-set to put a new station on the air. It was also one of those days when Congress lurched toward its budget compromise — and took back the offer. Gone is the 49-year-old Public Telecommunications Facilities Program, a $20-million line item in the Department of Commerce, which had been saved year after year by supporters in Congress. This time they were too busy saving PTFP’s younger and bigger sibling, CPB.
Neither Ron Schiller nor Betsy Liley had eaten before at Café Milano, the upscale see-and-be-seen restaurant in Georgetown, before Feb. 22, when they stepped into an elaborate trap that had been set for them there….
Neither Ron Schiller nor Betsy Liley had eaten before at Café Milano, the upscale see-and-be-seen restaurant in Georgetown, before Feb. 22, when they stepped into an elaborate trap that had been set for them there. The two NPR fundraisers didn’t get the $5 million donation that was discussed by their lunch partners, and the president of NPR didn’t pose for a photo accepting a phony check, but those were the better results of the lunch meeting. They couldn’t have expected that a hidden-camera recording of their talk with two prospective donors would cost Schiller his next job, put Liley on administrative leave, trigger the ouster of NPR’s president and severely undercut support for federal aid to public broadcasting. Two weeks later, March 8, the consequences began tumbling into sight as right-wing activist James O’Keefe’s video of their lunch meeting spread virally on the Web.
Last time, in 2005, the emissary to Congress was Clifford the Big Red Dog. This time, it’s an aardvark named Arthur. Last time, lawmakers showed off boxes of 1 million petitions with signatures; now, the million signatures are digital. Back then, when the Republican-led House Appropriations Committee tried for a 25 percent cut in the CPB appropriation, public support moved the House to save it by a 2-to-1 vote. This year, no such luck.
The author is president of Western Reserve Public Media (WNEO/ WEAO), which serves Akron, Youngstown and Kent in northeast Ohio. Right after I finished reading Barbara Cochran’s paper for the Knight Commission, “Rethinking Public Media: More Local, More Inclusive, More Interactive,” the phone rang. The 1990s called, and they want their White Paper back. Public television has been local, inclusive and interactive since its inception. No doubt there is always room to be “more,” but getting there by building up staff and tinkering with governance structure is a repeat of the past and will lead to more reliance on taxpayer support from state and federal sources that cannot or will not provide it.
In June 2007, when conservative publisher Rupert Murdoch purchased the venerable Wall Street Journal, actor and philanthropist Paul Newman was upset. Wary of Murdoch’s reputation for buying up and sensationalizing news outlets, Newman sensed trouble ahead for American newspapers. Soon after, Newman called his local PBS member station, Connecticut Public Television. He had a positive relationship with CPTV: President Jerry Franklin says the station once received a donation check written on Newman’s personal account for $300,000. But this time, Newman had a programming idea — and with it, a stunning offer.
WPBT sells to entrepreneur with history of legal disputes: Mykalai Kontilai, whose NBR Worldwide this month purchased Nightly Business Report, a staple of public TV carried five nights a week on 250 stations, talks about how his years as an instructional television distributor gave him a strong sense of public broadcasting values. ¶ He talks about how he’ll use that background to develop an educational outreach using the show to teach real-world financial responsibility. He talks of his plans to bring NBR to international audiences. ¶ What he doesn’t want to discuss are more than 20 lawsuits from 1999 through 2010 filed in San Diego County Superior Court against him or his companies — including five alleging breach of contract.
