Written for NFCB by Alex Curley, Semipublic LLC + Adopt-a-Station
There’s much to mourn about the continued winding down of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting – a reliable source of funding for some, a steely music rights negotiator for others – but the seismic restructuring of the industry also reveals an incredible opportunity for innovation. Some stations will need to dig deep in order to rediscover their creative spirit, but for many NFCB members, it never left: The same bold innovation that propelled pre-CPB stations like WBFO is the same innovation that the country’s smallest community radio stations broadcast every day.
Recently, I’ve found myself thinking about community broadcasting in the years leading up to the passage of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967. Specifically, the airing of experimental pieces like Maryanne Amacher’s City-Links, a 28-hour composition of different sounds found throughout the city of Buffalo, NY, that played uninterrupted on WBFO in 1967. You could imagine that more than an entire day of experimental sonic art may not have been incredibly successful for listener retention, but the point, as Bill Siemering later recounted, was to demonstrate that radio “could be a creative medium in itself.” These broadcasters didn’t ask for permission to experiment – they simply did.
It’s now clear that innovation, even for stations that were not CPB grantees, cannot only begin and end on the air. It must also extend to fundraising strategy, social media outreach, even something as boring as a balance sheet. And it must be done quickly.
Two months ago, I acted on an impulse. Many years of crafting fundraising messaging for NPR taught me to remove as many obstacles as possible between a potential donor and donating, to move as fast as possible to the fundraising “ask,” and not to focus too much on how much money the station actually needed – all unwritten rules I broke when I created adoptastation.org. We don’t take donations directly on the site, we explicitly show how much stations have lost in total revenue, and there is no real “ask,” just a simple plea to help a public broadcaster in need.
Amazingly, the site blew up soon after launch and has influenced thousands of donations for at-risk stations. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the true innovation of adoptastation.org was to strip away decades of fundraising best practices and traditions – and even what stations themselves thought of the site – to return to an extremely simple question: What are potential donors actually asking for? What do they actually need to become a station member?
Working with Public Media Company, we decided to take the same approach with station finances for their Local News Catalyst project: How can we strip away the complexity of public media finances to provide stations with information that’s instantly useful? What information is actually instantly useful? In the end, we came up with benchmarking tools for revenue and expenses, where stations can compare any common financial category, like Fundraising or Engineering, against all public media stations and get a simple benchmark: Average, above average, or below average. Or, they could compare those categories against like stations using filters for type, medium, and size, such as “Community,” “Radio,” and “Small” for NFCB members.
Ultimately, the innovation for these Local News Catalyst tools became more transmissive than direct: Our goal in showing extremely simplified benchmarks is to help illuminate a path for stations desperately seeking a financial path forward. The cardinal rule we broke along the way is that we’re giving out valuable intelligence for free.
The spirit of experimentation, the whittling of ideas down to their most basic form, the rejection of established norms, has always been a part of community broadcasting – a true advantage in an industry where innovation is now mandatory. But in order to act on that advantage, new and experimental ideas among NFCB members must go beyond on-air programming. Find a brand new source of community revenue, discover ways to share expenses that no one else has discovered before, launch apps and features that break the rules. In the end, you’ll probably find that innovation all leads back to one source: What your community needs.
