By RODNEY HO/ rho@ajc.com, originally filed Friday, December 11, 2015
90.1/WABE-FM, in its second fundraising drive since dropping classical music during the day, reached its internal fundraising goals this fall.
Since so much of their individual funding is now through "sustainers" who provide automatic monthly donations, the drives now focus on newcomers and people who still prefer to just give one lump sum a year. The number of sustainers is more than 21,000 and provides about half of all total individual giving, which is relatively high for NPR stations nationwide.
The internal goal for the fall drive was $675,000 to $725,000. The final count ended up $804,000, up from $779,756 in the spring.
"We're pretty excited about the results of the fall drive," said Wonya Lucas, president and CEO, who joined the station in the spring. "I think the team did a few things differently. We added a few different types of offers and challenges. Our audience responded well."
Before the station began offering the monthly payment program in the spring of 2013, these fundraisers would often exceed $1 million. But that is no longer an apples-to-apples comparison.
Sustainers are truly loyal, giving more than $2.6 million a year to WABE. Retention every year is about 95 percent. According to the Greater Public’s 2014 Benchmarks for Public Radio Fundraising, seven out of 10 new donors who sign on as sustainers keep on giving the second year. So WABE's 95 percent retention rate is nothing short of extraordinary. "I credit my team and the WABE brand," Lucas said.
Those dollars come in every month and are not included in the pledge drive count.
Pledge drives, which used to 12 days, are now eight days and weekends are excluded.
So far, after almost 18 months battling a new NPR station at 88.5/WRAS-FM courtesy of Georgia Public Broadcasting, WABE has not been obviously impacted. Neither has fundraising been hurt by the switch to news/talk during the day from classical music, Lucas said.
Lucas thinks WRAS is simply drawing a new audience and not really poaching from WABE.
WABE has set aside extra money from a special fund to pay for more staff to cover the news/talk programming, which is more expensive than playing music but says it expects to raise enough money to close the gap by 2017. Lucas calls this "the investment phase."
Underwriting, which was soft last year, has made a comeback this year. Lucas said it's up eight percent year over year.
Lucas said the industry is still studying how to monetize podcasting, which has become all the rage, especially for non-news weekly programs. She said they have launched separate podcasts for "City Lights" with Lois Reitzes and "A Closer Look" with Jim Burress and Rose Scott.
The station's website has doubled traffic this year as well, thanks to a more concerted effort to add content there. "Local stories are driving traffic," Lucas said.
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