Friday, February 24, 2006
Grassroots, Democratic Fundraising
So if you've tuned in to the station anytime in the past six days, you've likely heard phrases like, "pledge your support..." and myriad entreaties to convince you why your financial support of WORT is important at this time. You've probably heard the phone number 256-2001 about seventy billion times. We're approaching the halfway point of our Winter 2006 "World Wide WORT" pledge drive.
Before I go on, let me put in a plug here - we do need your financial support to keep this station running. So go ahead and call us at 256-2001 or donate online.
Why do we ask for money so much during these 14-day pledge drives? The answer is quite simple. Listeners account for some 63% of our annual budget. That's nearly two-thirds. So we truly do rely on listeners - like you - to keep us running. To pay the phone bill and heating bill. To pay for satellite programming like Democracy Now and BBC News. To pay for improvements to our studio, or to cover the cost of computer equipment. To pay my salary - so that the station news operations run more smoothly and cover the communities within our community as best we can.
The rest of the money comes from a variety of sources. Underwriting accounts for 12% or so. An annual grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) is another 16%. Events, record sales, and miscellanous other income trickles account for the rest. So in other words, all of our funding except for the CPB comes from local sources and WORT listeners. The business underwriters are also listeners, and we only take underwriting from local companies. That means that 84% of our money comes straight from the local community we serve.
So we do pledge drives. We go on the air to ask for your donations, and we fund our annual operating budget one donation at a time. We don't ask everyone to contribute a crazy amount of money... just $40 will get you our newsletter for a year and a lovely thank-you gift. Our average pledge is just $57. Many other stations push the really big donations, asking for hundreds of dollars. We encourage those, too, if you can afford it, but we recognize that in a community like ours, not everyone is doing so well financially. So we ask for *lots* of smaller donations.
This approach - many, many smaller donations - is labor intensive. It takes a lot of effort to pull of a pledge drive. Frankly, sometimes it makes me a little bit stir-crazy. But it's our way of doing grassroots fundraising. I've often fantasized about someone laying about ten million bucks on us, so that we could live off the interest and not have to do pledge drives. Or perhaps we could just do pledge drives for our capital projects. But that would seperate us from our base of listeners. It would seperate us from our roots in the community, our direct connections to people in the community, and that would be a great loss. Our fundraising is just another one of the ways that we stay connected and rooted with the people like you that we serve. It's also one of the few quantifiable ways that we stay tied in.
That said, if you or someone you know is a WORT-lover and has ten million to send our way, we'll put it to good use. : )
Before I go on, let me put in a plug here - we do need your financial support to keep this station running. So go ahead and call us at 256-2001 or donate online
Why do we ask for money so much during these 14-day pledge drives? The answer is quite simple. Listeners account for some 63% of our annual budget. That's nearly two-thirds. So we truly do rely on listeners - like you - to keep us running. To pay the phone bill and heating bill. To pay for satellite programming like Democracy Now and BBC News. To pay for improvements to our studio, or to cover the cost of computer equipment. To pay my salary - so that the station news operations run more smoothly and cover the communities within our community as best we can.
The rest of the money comes from a variety of sources. Underwriting accounts for 12% or so. An annual grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) is another 16%. Events, record sales, and miscellanous other income trickles account for the rest. So in other words, all of our funding except for the CPB comes from local sources and WORT listeners. The business underwriters are also listeners, and we only take underwriting from local companies. That means that 84% of our money comes straight from the local community we serve.
So we do pledge drives. We go on the air to ask for your donations, and we fund our annual operating budget one donation at a time. We don't ask everyone to contribute a crazy amount of money... just $40 will get you our newsletter for a year and a lovely thank-you gift. Our average pledge is just $57. Many other stations push the really big donations, asking for hundreds of dollars. We encourage those, too, if you can afford it, but we recognize that in a community like ours, not everyone is doing so well financially. So we ask for *lots* of smaller donations.
This approach - many, many smaller donations - is labor intensive. It takes a lot of effort to pull of a pledge drive. Frankly, sometimes it makes me a little bit stir-crazy. But it's our way of doing grassroots fundraising. I've often fantasized about someone laying about ten million bucks on us, so that we could live off the interest and not have to do pledge drives. Or perhaps we could just do pledge drives for our capital projects. But that would seperate us from our base of listeners. It would seperate us from our roots in the community, our direct connections to people in the community, and that would be a great loss. Our fundraising is just another one of the ways that we stay connected and rooted with the people like you that we serve. It's also one of the few quantifiable ways that we stay tied in.
That said, if you or someone you know is a WORT-lover and has ten million to send our way, we'll put it to good use. : )
