It's Not There!!!

A Listener's Rant

I went to tune-in to  my local public radio station to listen to a daily news and interview program, but it wasn't there. Because I wasn't able to tune in at the start of the hour...there seemed to be no explanation as to what happened. Not tuning in at the beginning or end of an hour is pretty typical of listeners.

So...I'm left to wonder.

When to comes listener loyalty...that's a bad idea. Loyalty is based on habitual listening habits. When a listener wants Morning Edition, it should be there. When a listener wants to find All Things Considered...it should be where it always is. The same goes for local programming.

Consistency

Consistency leads to listener loyalty. Loyalty is important when it comes to AQH and Share...and membership dollars. Keep messing with the listener and your giving him or her an opportunity to tune away.

The special in it's place was pretty good, but I didn't hear any promos for the program. They're easy to miss. To reach half the audience in a week...optimum effective scheduling is needed. That could be as many as 64 spots in a week. If the special is important enough to bump regular programming, perhaps effective promotion might be in order. At the very least, producers could have created announcements for the breaks with horizontal promotion to the next "Where We Live," or a reassurance that the program would be back.

A daily program that has built an audience should be there well...daily. The best way to build audience and loyalty is by consistently meeting the listener's expectations. It might take a little extra work, but the rewards are worth the effort.

Okay...I'm done.

Working Together in Public Radio: Does it matter?

This blog is not written to imply that radio broadcasting is the end all and be all of public media. There are too many platforms creating opportunities to reach the audience to think that one platform is better than the other. Instead it is meant to demonstrate how best to use the broadcast platform based on personal experience and the collective experiences of others. No matter the platform, best practices for that particular platform will help us reach our full potential to reach and engage the public media audience.

Yeah, it does! 

A few decades back when I was taking courses in Mass Communications and radio programming basics we spent a lot of time talking about increasing time spent listening and reducing barriers to listening. The models we worked on were commercial formats.

The question of stationality came up in a couple of job interviews. How would you change the culture here to make us one station? The question came up in a different way recently when I was asked to examine the weaknesses in a particular station's weekday schedule. Their weekdays are filled with a hodgepodge of programs provided by independent producers primarily concerned with their content rather than appealing consistently to an audience. The end result is long stretches of audience data that barely registered above zero.

Why look for examples of success among commercial broadcasters? The thinking was, the best way to attract and keep an audience was consistency of format and super serving the target audience. We discussed music formats and news formats and using rotations and solid forward promotion strategies to keep listeners listening. We also looked at consistency. Inevitably, people will tune away. Once they tuned back in, the successful station delivered the programming the core audience expected to hear.

Eliminating barriers to listeners is the same thing as eliminating seams. It is not be possible to eliminate them all. Some are easier to eliminate than others and, I am not advocating blandness and the safety of banality. But.. Public Radio is filled with examples of seams and barriers. A few examples include...

• Opening and closing themes.
• Billboards.
• Hellos and long goodbyes.
• Self-encased hour long programs
• Announcers who say "I'll be back," "All of you out there."
• Announcers who think in terms of "my show."
• Checkerboard schedules that promote churn.

The Best of Intentions

At my first public radio station we used to run feature news stories during our music programming. The intent was to highlight news content as a sort of cross promotion during the music programming stream. It didn't work. The music imperatives hated the interruptions and tuned out. The news imperatives never tuned in. We were creating huge seams in our programming suppressing time spent listening and audience loyalty. At my second station something similar was happening. We programmed all sorts of modules during music programming. These things had introductory music and closing themes with goodbyes from the host. There were gardening modules, star gazing modules, ecological modules, business modules and more. Instead of being intriguing bits of informative programming, the audience thought of them as interruptions. They tuned out. We created huge seams because we thought the public radio listener wanted this kind of information. We should have asked first.

Not for Lack of Effort

There have been attempts at creating midday and weekend streams that have a consistent appeal with the public radio tent poles...Morning Edition and All Things Considered.  To date, the attempts have been less than successful. Think about what's happened to Weekend America, Talk of the Nation, Performance Today and Modal Music. Meanwhile, we're looking for the next Car Talk and Wait, Wait! The later two worked because they appealed to the same audience that values All Things Considered and Morning Edition. They also work because listeners can tune-in at any point in the program and understand what is going on...just like ATC and ME.

To find out what's working, look at where the core audience gravitates. Look at which programs draw that audience on a consistent basis. Unfortunately for the stations with poor results, there's even longer stretches of no core audience. Without substantial core appeal, the ability to raise funds from listeners is almost nil.

Finding programming that fits well together is only a part of the programming game. So is forward promotion. A focused promotional effort on what to expect in the next ten to 20 minutes promotes time spent listening and can help bridge the natural gaps between programs. Forward promotion, vertical and horizontal promotion are a station's most effective on-air promotional tools. Promotions can also give stations a sense of unity and purpose.

There's loads of research on effective programming strategies for public radio. Some good places to start include the Radio Research Consortium, Public Radio Program Directors Association, Walrus Research, Audience Research Analysis and Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

I've been asked and, at times, castigated, "Why do research? This is public broadcasting. We can do anything...and they will come." Those days are long gone. With new platforms drawing away audience, the stakes are too high not to be paying attention to what your audience wants. If you want to do your own thing, start a podcast. If you want an audience, just be sure you know what you're doing, and how to listen then engage.

Think Audience

NPR's Older Appeal

Recent research released by NPR suggest they have two audiences. There is the stalwart over 54 crowd...loyal to the programming. Then there's the less loyal under 54 crowd more enamored with social media. According to an article in Current,

"The gap between older and younger listeners of NPR stations is widening. Stations are losing listeners 12–44 years of age. NPR projects that by 2020, its stations’ audience of 44-year-olds and younger will be around 30 percent, half that demographic’s audience share in 1985." 

The 44 year old audience in 1985 would be 64 now which explains, in part, the bulge in the NPR audience among the boomers. The research seems to suggest the younger audience is spending a lot less time with public radio. Does anybody really think we can change the way they use media? I hope not.

Where are they?

Probably on their mobile devices. If they're like my millennial sons, they're connected to three devices at once. They are toggling their brains between content. It's whatever catches their attention for the moment and then they move on. Time spent listening is divided. attention spans are short. They are not interested in gathering news in the way our traditional audience does. They think it's boring! As the article in Current points out, the frustration is, this kind of listening (and watching) can't be reliably measured yet.

Because this group listens less to radio doesn't mean we stop making great radio. As Jeff Hanson said in the Current article, “The radio audience is still funding most of what we do.”  And the audience is still much larger than any single podcast or groups of podcasts.

Since most of our funding still comes from the much larger radio audience, the most effective way to fund new initiatives, digital or radio, is through the practice of great radio. If, as the article suggests, Public Radio is under performing in its medium, we need to examine what we're doing, and correct it fast.

Eric Nuzum challenged public radio's program directors to think audience not formats.

It depends on the platform. Radio is all about consistency of appeal and programs that have a high affinity. Digital media? It all depends on what the individual is looking for. The individual is formatting their own listening and viewing preferences. The sweet spot for public radio lies in ability to offer content that appeals to the younger cohort on the platforms they prefer.
I'm probably one of those old-timers Eric Nuzum talked about at the PRPD conference. We were cohorts when we both served on the board of the Public Radio Program Directors Association, He might have rolled his eyes every time I started talking about programming at conferences. I worked with some of the first generation of public radio researchers. I learned from people like Bailey, Church and Giovannoni. I was able to apply findings from Audience 88 and participated in Audience 98. To those producers and programmers who think public radio is all about doing anything they want and find reinforcement in their decisions based on phone response I was part of the unwashed...the philistines. We were about content and programs that are put together in a cohesive manner to be appealing to a targeted audience.

And yet, we grew a loyal audience and a large membership base. Support from corporations and foundations followed. With success came more talented people providing more content our listeners cared about.

What If Nobody Listens?

My motivations came from some early failures. I worked in public radio for over 30 years (this is where you start rolling your eyes). Early on I had dreams about, "What if nobody is listening" which is kind of like my other dream, "What if nobody pledges."  During my career there were instances where nobody listened, and there were instances where nobody pledged. If nobody is listening and nobody pledges...there's usually a reason. If you do not have a handle on your audience preferences you will have no clue as to what is working and what is not.

Everything Matters

Ask yourself this, "How can your content be a community service is nobody is listening?" Who exactly are you serving? It is best to take a look at the effectiveness of your entire schedule by taking a step back. In your research data look at the entire day and look at longer periods of time. Audience averages that reflects listening over six months or a year. That way you'll be able to limit statistical bounce.

The View From 30,000 Feet

I recently worked with a station that's struggling. In their research analysis they were focusing on growth in individual hours while overall their audience was slowly eroding. They failed to see the big picture of how their midday, evening and weekend programming fit with their program tents poles. There were broad expanses of programming with poor appeal to their core audience. There was no way Morning Edition or All Things Considered could overcome poor programming choices. Everything you do...all of your content matters from the listener's perspective.

Shiny Object Syndrome

At one of the stations I worked for, upper management decided it would be a good idea to program opera year 'round. Their decision was based on a successful European tour featuring several operas. The tour served about 25 major donors. After cost, we cleared a few thousand dollars. It was a classic case of Shiny Object Syndrome. The decision was based on making some quick bucks. The decision ignored the listening choices of the station's audience. Opera was already driving away audience by the boatload. Adding more opera only made it worse. Average audience numbers during that time slot dropped. Total loyalty crashed to below 10%. Core loyalty was almost non-existent.

It could be argued I was focused too narrowly on the hours dedicated to the opera. Surely, a few hours wouldn't matter. After 18 months time spent listening to the station dropped by about an hour. Among the core audience TSL dropped by almost two hours a week. Total core loyalty dropped about five points. Even more distressing, the number of core listeners was dropping. Changes to this situation were made only after being able to demonstrate the adverse effects an ill-advised programming decision was having on listener sensitive income. We were falling tens of thousand of dollars behind our membership goals. To be sure, there were other issues with our programming choices. Those were addressed at the same time.

Where to Start? 

I used to look at the loyalty charts provided by Audigraphics...first. They give a quick look at what is working and what is not throughout the week. Then figure out what can be fixed and what cannot. Listen to the station. Run airchecks.  Sit down with your talent to assess their performance. Understand that everybody needs an editor. Everybody needs to be on-board with the idea that this service is for the audience, not the content producers and providers. No matter the platform, the content has to have a strong appeal for the audience. Need more? Go back to Deb Blakeley's and Israel Smith's report "Thinking Audience." Become brilliant on the basics. The art of good radio and great content requires your attention.

I agree with Eric Nuzum. You have plenty of room to try things. It is likely there are programs...even program streams....within your schedule that are not resonating with your audience. Those resources can be better used elsewhere. As program director, the tools are there to fix the programming on your radio station. By doing that you can create opportunities to create content no matter the generational cohort or the platform.

There's plenty of experience in the system. Ask!

Think Audience!

At Wits End

All Things Millennial?

I don't have much to say about the cancelling of Wits. It was touted as A Prairie Home Companion for a younger crowd.

I listened...sometimes. It was on Saturday night. That's not exactly prime listening time for radio. Even in its heyday, A Prairie Home Companion lost over half its audience in the last half hour on the stations where I worked.

Wits had its moments, but not enough to draw me in every week. I only listened if I happened to be in the car.


Wits was an attempt to find a new hit to replace Public Radio's aging stars like Wait, Wait, Car Talk and APHC. Those programs were anomalies. Most attempts to create the new shining star have failed, especially one hour programs. It is hard for a program to gain audience...unlike programming. Listeners have trouble finding a single program. Landing on, and listening to, a program stream with a consistent appeal is much more conducive to habitual listening. Being able to listen to programming that consistently meets a listeners expectations on a regular basis can lead to greater loyalty and a large enough audiences to support the programming.

There's a difference

Morning Edition, All Things Considered, Weekend Edition and Marketplace are programs that work well together and resemble programming. Wait, Wait, Car Talk and APHC appeal to the same core audience. It just seemed like Wits, with it's out of the way scheduling, was trying to change the way people listen to radio. That's an uphill battle. We had a music director at one of the stations I worked for who vowed he was going to change the way people used radio. All he managed to do was drive the audience away.

I was at a PRPD retreat in 2002 when a network exec stopped by to give us an update on the status of public radio programming. He told us there were a handful of programs that were breaking even or better. There were over 350 programs being offered at the time. The odds of success weren't good...even when times were good.

Location Matters

All of the public radio hits mentioned above air when people use radio...except for APHC. The programs are all well produced and appeal to the lifestyle and values of the public radio audience. They also air during times when listening to radio reaches its peak. They air during morning and afternoon drive, or during the midday bulge on the weekend. A Prairie Home Companion is the exception. We aired APHC twice on WNPR. We carried the live broadcast on Saturday evening. We repeated the program Sunday at noon. It was not long before the Sunday broadcast outperformed the Saturday broadcast. The reason...The potential for an audience was greater on Sunday at noon because more people use radio at that time.

There is no shame or blame. The effort to create something new and vital should be encouraged. We should endeavor to create new audiences and, more importantly, reengage the audience we already have with new ideas and perspectives.

It's All Local

I heard a public radio fundraiser talk about their investment in local programming and how most stations don't usually invest that much in resources. My thought...It only matters if the content matters.

A Personal Medium

More than once I've heard that radio is a personal medium. It's true. I choose to listen because the content matches my lifestyle and values.  The closer the content comes to this match, the more engaged I become. By extension, everything that comes out of speakers and headphones is local. And, this includes content on new platforms including social media.

Local or National?

It does not matter. As a listener the content and how the content is presented matters. So, when the person fundraising tells me that his or her NPR station invests a lot of time and resources on local content, I really don't care. He or she might care because he or she works there and has a lot invested in the success of the content. It's an inside argument that does not relate to my experience as a listener.

My Choice

As a listener, I decide what is important. It is my core values that are being served. And, if the content provided matches those values on a consistent basis, I am more likely to support the provider. It could be Morning Edition, On-Point, Colin McEnroe or Wait, Wait, it's all local to me.

Radio Drives in Storms

Maybe it's me. Maybe it's the public radio audience. Whenever I fundraise during a storm, the response is very light.

In December we tried to raise money during an ice storm. This week we tried to raise money during a snowstorm. In both cases, response was light for Morning Edition. Morning Edition is usually a lucrative daypart, because the audience is at its peak.

What are the reasons?

I was a common denominators in both cases. Maybe it was me.

More likely (at least to me) the audience was elsewhere. We were on the air trying to raise funds around the measles outbreak, the fighting in Ukraine, and conversation about transportation woes in Connecticut. It could be a lifestyle or listener behavior issue. Listeners may have been:

• Watching TV coverage
• Figuring out what to do with their kids (schools were closed)
• Concentrating on driving (roads were treacherous)
• Clearing snow
• Chatting with friends on social media
• Sleeping in

It would be interesting to see what happens to the public radio audience on snow days. And, what happens to that audience as the day wears on. I've noticed response to pledge appeals increase later in the day. Morning drive seems to suffer the most.

KGPR's Small Market Challenge

Community Support Coming Up Short

KGPR (Great Falls Public Radio) is in jeopardy of losing $97 thousand of its funding...all at once. KGPR does not generate enough non-federal support to qualify for CPB's Community Service Grant. According to CPB guidelines, Great Fall Public Radio should be generating $100,000 in community support. They're currently $30,000 short of that threshold.

A Numbers Crunch

Is the Great Falls Market large enough to support a Public Radio Station? According to Census data about 59 thousand people live there. If 10% of the population listened to the station, they would have a weekly cume of 6,000. Of that number maybe 20% would be part of the core audience, or 1200 listeners. KGPR reported to The Great Falls Tribune that they have 450 contributors. That means an estimated 38% of the core audience is contributing. Given the market size, there isn't much headroom. This is a numbers crunch many small market stations face.

ROI for NPR Programming

Great Falls Public Radio pays Montana Public Radio $34,000 to carry NPR and APM programming. I'm not sure of the arrangement between Great Falls and Montana Public Radio, but under an LMA agreement with NPR, Great Falls must carry Montana Public Radio's entire feed. My understanding of these agreements is that Great Falls would not be allowed to cutaway from the feed to carry their own announcements or to fundraise during the feed.  One solution might be to return a portion of the fundraising dollars to Great Falls Public Radio based on the zip codes of the contributors.   That might not alleviate the entire funding issue, but it would contribute to the solution by having contributors to Morning Edition, All Things Considered and A Prairie Home Companion in Great Falls go to support their station.

                                                                                                                        

Station management is holding a series of meetings to get input from listeners about what they should do. 40 showed up at the first meeting on Saturday.

Why We Give: Generosity and Public Radio

It's Not About the Mug

I sat in at my local public radio station this week asking for contributions. By public radio standards it was a huge success. During Morning Edition we went over goal by 25%. We didn't have a drawing. We didn't have a challenge grant. We had thank you gifts, and for many, that can become the main focus of their pitch. But that wasn't ours. We took it in a different direction.

Pledge Drift

There was a risk in doing it this way. Response has been good to the request for funds based on pledging tied to thank you gifts. At least the focus of the pledge is on something the listener might want. Selling logo'd items can generate a response. Selling books that are the subject of an interview can generate response too. I have several public radio mugs in my collection.  Still, thank you gifts don't get to the reason why people listen or give. Giving is tied to listening and loyalty. Once you've got them listening several times a week, you have a better chance the listener will become a supporter. 

 

Feeling Good

I applied articles I've been researching  on what works. Some of the answers can be found in previous blogs,Why We Give and Why We Give - It Makes us Feel Good.  People responded best when the request is taken to a personal level. When we shared experiences and stories from listeners, we got response. We told their stories.

 

Coming up with the stories was easy. I simply asked the listeners to give me a reason why they find WNPR to be so valuable. Why are they listening? Are there programs they find important? Is there a memorable moment they want to share to inspire others to give?  Most of the comments were a line or two. All of the stories were something the listener could relate to.

 

I still included the facts and figures and the thank you gifts, but the compelling stuff was in the listeners' responses. The focus was on the listener, not on WNPR’s needs. It was a success. We exceeded our goals that morning by 25%.

Caution - Contents are Hot

The key to this approach is the loyalty and the size of the P1 audience has towards the content. If a programming segment has high listener loyalty, the approach is likely to work. If the loyalty is lower, other factors like gifts need to be employed. When I worked in Milwaukee, we could not generate many calls of support during classical music unless there was a premium tied to the pitch. Perhaps the content was not all that compelling. Compelling and well-crafted content always makes the job of the fundraiser easier.

Fundraising Cases

I spent a couple of hours this morning fundraising with Jack Callahan on WNPR.
We had a few incentives going.

• There was an iPad drawing for today only. 
• We also had some challenge dollars between 7a and 8a.  
• There were a couple of hot membership items. We had Mother's Day Flowers (for a limited time only) and a double walled porcelain travel mug that is very popular. It's a mug with the I Heart Public Radio logo (Also in a limited quantity). 

These things helped drive listeners to the phone.

There is still a need to keep the content fresh to keep the momentum going. Finding fresh case messages can be problematic...at least for me. Closing, on the other hand, is easier.

One way to keep fresh is to relate pitches to the content. As a theme I talked today about how Morning Edition gives content context and background to stories that are often only covered on the surface. I selected stories that I thought might best illustrate the point. I chose one story per pitch to keep it simple.
And, I limited the number of stories chosen. That was because I didn't always have time to talk about the content given the incentives, premiums and closes I had to cover.

The stories I used as examples were...
Working Mom's Challenges
This added much more depth to the heat surrounding the campaign rhetoric about stay at home moms.
(50% of mothers with young children work)
Money and Politics
It's an election year and the amount of money changing hands has a wow factor.
(The rules are clear: Lobbyists use money from their political action committees to get access to lawmakers.)
StoryCorps
A few years back, WNPR brought StoryCorps to Connecticut. I talked about how it helped the station engage with its audience.


Other stories could have worked but, these were the stories I could relate to listeners.


What do you use to create fresh case arguments while fundraising? I think it matters but, perhaps your experience is different. What works for you?

Healthcare Debate on Public Radio

Living in a state that leads the country in the cost of healthcare insurance costs has peaked my interest. This year rates for those in healthcare plans will go up about 13%, and rates for those who get health insurance individually will go up more than 20% in Connecticut. There is rational discussion about the debate. I found it on public radio.

• The Takeaway offered some fact checking on the statements made by our leaders at the Summit.
• The GOP is saying they were set up by the Healthcare Summitt. That is, they were set up to lose more than the filibuster. The issue of a reconciliation bill came up. There's a lot more about that from On The Media.
• On Morning Edition, Steve Inskeep interviewed Cokie Roberts this morning about next steps for reform minded Democrats. The Democratic leadership is pondering a reconciliation bill to get around the issue of a filibuster.

I found this coverage to be much more informative than the televised summit. The summit was filled with political posturing. The analysis offered by public radio gave me insight.

KSTX Focus On Hunger

This is a great example of how community service programming can have a meaningful impact on the community. Texas Public Radio continues the Town Hall series with a solutions-based conversation on hunger issues affecting the surrounding community.

KSTX is building bridges between itself and the community. Through efforts like this the station is becoming a key player as a cultural institution in San Antonio. KSTX is playing a larger role. It is not afraid to step outside its walls and to reach beyond its website. Check out the KSTX webpage devoted to this subject and the links they provide to inform the conversation around this issue.

NPR's Carl Kasell: Wait wait … I'm semi-retiring

Carl is NPR's rock star. We're all in awe of his abilities. His voice and steadying influence will be missed. When Wait Wait came to Hartford, the loudest and longest cheer was for Carl.
You can find out more in the Chicago Tribune.

New Music Software Predicts The Hits

I found the Morning Edition feature about Music Intelligence Solutions to be both fascinating and scary. Pop music can often be formulaic. Adding another layer, a layer of surefire software induced formulas for success, could make the music unbearably dull.
Will the software sacrifice artistic expression for hook filled production values?
But then it’s easy for me to say. I’ve never had a hit.