This trend has everything to do with programming. The reasons for the sad decline in programming can be attributed to the splintering of the marketplace but, public radio is feeling the same pressures. Public TV has done, at least in part, this to itself.
Those of us who have been around the system for a while remember the research put out by Audience Research Analysis called the Stairway to Given.
ARA called it the Stairway to Given
1. Aware of the services/a user of the service.
2. The user relies on the service.
3. The content or service must be personally important.
Personal importance and sense of community. This is the idea that the content and the services are the ties that bind together people with certain shared values.
4. Funding Beliefs – Users must believe their support is crucial. They must understand that funding from other sources is only a piece of the fiscal puzzle. Individual support is the most reliable source of income.
5. Household income is a contributing factor in whether someone will give, but that it is not nearly as significant as the other steps of The Stairway to Given. People give because they rely on the service, find it personally important and believe their contributions are truly needed.
It starts with the content. There's a direct correlation between the loyalty of the audience and its willingness to contribute. PTV seems to have lost that along the way. Each time I stumble across another showing of Celtic Woman or another broadcast of the Moody Blues, I've wondered if others have found this to be as far off mission as I do. Do these fundraisers really appeal to the core audience? And, if PTV can't fundraise around core programming, what does that say? The answer always seems to be more fundraising!
There's a really good graphic published in Current.Org that shows this trend. The statistics are provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
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