If your station is like a lot of other stations, you’re sending out listener (or donor) surveys. Maybe it’s once a year. Maybe it’s once every other year. Maybe less often than that. Either way, these surveys probably aren’t serving your station well. But they could.
With the disappearance of Federal funding, listeners and donors are stepping up to help close the funding gap. (One station we work with raised – no joke – nearly 10 times their daily average last week compared to their spring drive, which was also a record breaker.)
We can only count on this sort of enthusiasm from listeners and donors for so long. Eventually, the giving will slow down. Maybe after the fall. Maybe in December. But at some point in the next six months or so, the fundraising wave will crest.
And so that gets us back to the humble listener survey…
Given the fundraising opportunity and challenges facing community stations, listener or donor surveys designed with purpose can make a big difference in your fundraising. Specifically, surveys designed to help understand how listeners see the world and the role they see your station plays (or could play) to make the world a better place.
Headcount versus Headspace:
In my experience, listener surveys serve one of two goals: knowledge or action. Sometimes they try to serve both goals. But the bottom line is that they should be designed with the outcome in mind. And that’s a lot easier to do than you might think.
Most station surveys I see focus on the Knowledge side of the equation. These are useless for fundraising purposes. What ZIP Code do they live in? How old are they? What gender do they identify with? These are all nice things to know about your listeners and donors and nice for them to know you’re trying to be inclusive, but these kinds of questions in a survey are just not actionable.
For example, just because you know from a survey that I am a 56 year-old living in San Diego who identifies as male won’t tell you anything about how I might respond to your next fundraising appeal. Does it matter if I live in a different ZIP code than you or that I’m 47 instead of 56 or if I identify as gender-fluid instead of male? Probably not.
The second category of listener and donor survey, focused on the Action side of the equation, is designed around trying to understand what makes your audience tick using psychographics. If you understand that I am not just a 56 year-old male who lives in San Diego and ALSO that I’m rather impulsive when it comes to donating and prefer organizations focused on “what could be” vs. what their fundraising goals are, that’s big. Now you can shape your fundraising appeals to what actually motivates me and have a much greater chance of getting me to donate. (There are other kinds of approaches to designing “Action-oriented” surveys, with psychographics being just one example.)
In June at the NFCB Community Media Conference, my colleagues and I presented findings of a listener survey we did with several NFCB member stations. (Get a copy of the presentation here.) We included the MindTime question framework to understand the headspace of listeners who took the survey. We used the MindTime framework because it is a scientifically validated approach. There are other good question frameworks to include in a listener survey, many of them free.
In short, the MindTime framework allowed us to understand how people see the world and how they approach decision-making. The MindTime framework tells us there are three main “thinking styles”: Past, Present, and Future. Each of us are a blend of all 3 thinking styles.
Listeners in the NFCB survey were divided roughly evenly between the three thinking styles:
- The Past mindset gravitates towards certainty, proof and evidence to make a decision. In terms of a fundraising message, the Past mindset is more likely to be interested in legacy, reliability and what has worked.
- The Present mindset is focused on practical needs, stability and immediate value. A fundraising message that would appeal to the Present mindset would be focused on practical needs, stability and immediate value.
- The Future mindset (that’s me) is focused on possibility and innovation. Fundraising messages that emphasize long-term impact and help the listener imagine what community radio could do, if only it had the resources (just don’t get bogged down explaining the costs to do this; Future thinkers like me aren’t interested).
When we presented the findings at the NFCB conference in June, we also included a worksheet so that attendees could rewrite a fundraising message to appeal to a specific thinking style.
How to use these Thinking Style insights to prepare for your Fall fundraising:
Download the worksheets here. Try your hand at re-writing the “generic” fundraising message to align with each of the three MIndTime thinking styles. I think you’ll be surprised at how easy it is.
Listener Persona Groups:
Another piece of the analysis we presented at NFCB’s 2025 Community Media Conference were Persona groups. We used AI to analyze open-text responses to this question: “What qualities do you look for in the nonprofits you support?”
The analysis of 640 listeners revealed 4 Persona groups, each one focused around a specific set of interests:
Values-First Givers. These listeners are motivated by mission and integrity. They support organizations that live their values, are transparent, stay true to their purpose and are aligned with social equity and justice. This was the largest of the 4 Persona groups, with more than half (58%) of listeners in this group.
Community Anchors. These listeners value strong local ties, authentic community partnerships, and a commitment to addressing neighborhood issues. 21% of participants fall into this group.
Mission Defenders. These listeners are focused on impact and accountability. They prioritize their giving to nonprofits that are strategic, efficient and results-oriented. 11% of participants fall into this group.
Cultural Enthusiasts. The smallest of the 4 Persona groups, these listeners are driven by creativity and nonconformity. They seek nonprofits that elevate diverse voices and offer rich cultural experiences and viewpoints from outside the mainstream. 7% of participants fall into this group.
How to use these Persona group insights to prepare for your Fall fundraising:
If you don’t have the time or experience using AI for open text analysis, that’s fine. For now, review the fundraising appeals you’re considering for the fall and organize them into one of the 4 Persona group interest areas (values/mission, local ties, impact/accountability and creativity/nonconformity). If the mix isn’t comparable to the Persona group mix (58%/21%/11% and 7%), adjust accordingly. (I’ve found that having a ton of case messaging for a fundraising season isn’t necessary, maybe 40-50 individual case messages that Hosts and pitch teams can riff on…but the mix is super important).
I wish I had a better understanding about psychographics when I was at a station back in the day. Back then, I was in charge of the on air drives. Back then, messaging was mostly based around what the station needed (i.e. expenses = goals), any audience research I could find from NPR, and a fair degree of well-intentioned winging it. Not much to go on, but it was all we had. Even today I still hear drives that sound a lot like that: well-intentioned and earnest but generic, predictable and focused on their own interests not the listener’s interests.
With all of the access we have today to psychographic question modeling and tools to analyze text in survey responses, stations that apply these tools to help shape fundraising appeals (for example, in a short listener survey sent in weeks leading up to an on-air drive) will almost certainly outperform the stations that don’t. The question is, Which station do you want to be?
Mike Wallace is a 56-year old Future Thinking fundraising consultant based in San Diego who identifies as male . He is Senior Manager of Consulting and Strategy at CARS where he co-manages Giving Agency. Mike has deep roots in public media where he pioneered the use of digital thank you gifts in 2004. He’s helped dozens of stations of all sizes and formats grow membership and sustainable revenues. Reach out to him anytime for a free brainstorm/listening session/restorative cry at mike@givingagency.org.
