The arrival of a new competitor in 88.5/WRAS-FM over the summer didn't appear to hurt 90.1/WABE's fall fundraising campaign.
WABE, which concluded its campaign last week, pulled in about $1.1 million in new pledges, comparable to the spring campaign.
That's down from $1.47 million a year ago. On the surface, that would seem like a big fail. But that isn't the case.
Since the spring of 2013, the station began pushing donors to give monthly on a "sustainer" basis instead of once a year. Those existing donors are not included in the fall tally.
General Manager John Weatherford said he expected new pledges to drop off since 16,822 existing donors prior to the campaign chose to give monthly and don't have to "re up" every year. That money is already coming into the bank month in and month out. Therefore, he deemed 9,600 new donors this fall a success, with 2,761 signing on as sustainers. (Last year, the fall campaign drew 12,656 new donors but again, comparisons are not really fair given the changes.)
Total sustainers now are up to 19,583, or about half the donor base. In the past year, sustainers provided $2.2 million in contributions, nearly one-fifth of PBA's entire budget.
In total, WABE is now pulling in more money from individual donors than ever, representing nearly half Public Broadcasting Atlanta's budget. (Corporate underwriting, which represents about one-third of the budget, had been in recovery but has seen softer-than-expected results in recent months, Weatherford said.)
The influx of donors, he said, enabled the station to cut down its pledge drive to about nine days instead of 11 or 12 days. WABE took the weekend off and parts of early afternoons, relieving listeners from quite the volume of incessant on-air begging.
Weatherford said the upside to the sustainer program is far greater than the downside.
Once someone starts giving, say, $10 a month, they seldom drop out. It's cheaper and easier than having to bug them every year to give. Studies have shown organizations that use sustainer programs make more money and spend less money trying to chase them down for more money. One-time donors only give again 60 percent of the time the next year. Attrition for "sustainers"? Less than 10 percent year over year.
There is a major downside that cannot be ignored: with credit card companies under attack by hackers, people are changing credit card numbers all the time. And whenever someone changes bank accounts or credit card numbers and forgets to inform WABE, the station receives a rejection and has to track that person down to see if they want to keep "sustaining." Weatherford said. As a result, "we get $18,000 to $20,000 a month in declined credit card charges," he said.
He said it's too early to gauge the impact of Georgia Public Broadcasting's WRAS broadcasting, which has only been around since late June. "This looks like an incredible drive," Weatherford said ."Now how you relate that to WRAS, I don't know."
Ratings for the new WRAS (which now has a split personality with daytime talk programming run by GPB and music at night run by the students) remain modest, pulling in a 0.3 or 0.4 share since the new programming began. In comparison, WABE pulls in around a 3.5 share. In other words, WABE currently has about 10 times the listenership of WRAS.
GPB, by the way, ran its fall pledge drive on its radio stations statewide but not on WRAS.
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