Media companies have spent years looking for ways to make money off the Internet, and last week the folks at WBEZ-FM found one: They just asked for it.
Over a three-day period, the Chicago public radio station ditched its regular and perpetually annoying on-air fundraising drive and asked listeners to pledge online. The goal was fairly modest: $100,000, and the on-air reminders to listeners were brief–anywhere from 15 seconds to 1 minute, totaling 55 minutes over three days.
The station collected $135,000.
In the context of WBEZ’s annual $4.1 million budget–$1.7 million of which it receives directly from listeners–that’s not a lot of money. But it’s enough to convince station executives and others in the public broadcasting arena that the Internet not only can play an important fundraising role, but also can reduce the amount of time stations spend asking for money on the air.
“This was the first time we replaced an entire drive with an Internet drive,” said Torey Malatia, WBEZ’s president and general manager.
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“Fundraising on public radio and TV is a paradox,” Malatia said. “You say you are this oasis for quality, thoughtful programming, and in order to raise money you have to put a flame-thrower to all that programming and you end up sounding like the Home Shopping Network.”
In August, the station solicited online funds for the first time and collected $100,000 over a month, and online soliciting is gaining momentum among public broadcasters elsewhere. KCRW-FM in Santa Monica, Calif., has been using the Internet to augment its fundraising. Last week, the station created an online sweepstakes to attract pledges, offering the prize of an Apple PowerBook laptop computer. Online pledges jumped to as many as 44 in a day, from three to four, said KCRW-FM publicist Sarah Spitz.
WAMU-FM in Washington is credited as the leader of the online fundraising phenomenon.
“There are a lot of stations grappling with the fundamentals of how to do this and how to prepare their listeners for it,” said Mike Janssen, associate editor of Current, a biweekly newspaper that follows developments in public broadcasting. “If the success of this is any indication, maybe its most useful application will be shortening on-air pledge drives and being a supplement to fundraising.”
WBEZ’s Malatia said the Internet has its limitations. Even though 69 percent of the station’s listeners have access to the Internet on a daily basis, most of the dollars collected during last week’s winter fundraising drive came from listeners renewing their pledges. “The Internet does restrict the audience that is pledging,” Malatia said.
And the station’s spring and fall on-air pledge drives, each of which has fundraising goals of $800,000, will not go away, he said. “The Internet reduces the annoyance to a minimum, but you can’t cut the on-air drives down to zero.”
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