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.
Representatives from Hawaii’s public broadcasting networks, as well as the national public broadcasting community, recalled Inouye’s years of commitment to the mission of public media.
DEI gives its Benchmarks Award each year to a consistently top-performing station in terms of net revenue per hour of listening. While the median station raises .95 cents in underwriting revenue per listener-hour, HPR last year sold 2.25 cents per listener-hour — all handled by HPR’s single underwriting salesperson. In presenting the award, Robin Turnau, president and c.e.o. of Vermont Public Radio and DEI treasurer, cited HPR’s peculiar challenges. “Their location is one of the top vacation destinations in the world. They deal daily with the challenges of serving a transient population, while raising funds from a permanent listenership where the local median income is only modest, while the cost of living is extraordinarily high,” said Turnau, noting that HPR’s net-revenue-per-listener-hour stat put it in the top 10 percent of DEI surveys for both membership and mid-level giving.