The arrival of a new competitor at 88.5/WRAS-FM over the summer didn’t appear to hurt 90.1/WABE’s fall fundraising campaign.
WABE, which concluded its campaign late last month, 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 has been encouraging donors to give monthly on a “sustainer” basis instead of once a year. Those existing donors, who gave $2.2 million over the past year, are not included in the fall tally.
General Manager John Weatherford said he expected new pledges to drop off, so the 9,600 new donors was deemed a success. Of those, 2,761 signed on to provide money monthly through a credit card or bank account. Sustainer programs reduce attrition, he said, and ultimately garner more money per donor.
Currently, WABE — which is owned by Public Broadcasting Atlanta — has nearly 20,000 “sustainers,” representing half of all active donors, Weatherford said.
Individual donors now represent nearly half of the station’s $13 million budget, which also includes TV station PBA 30. Corporate underwriting, which covers 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.
He said it’s too early to gauge the impact of Georgia Public Broadcasting’s WRAS broadcasting. This is GPB’s first entry into the Atlanta market on the FM airwaves, giving WABE its first direct rival. In late June, GPB took over Georgia State University’s 88.5 FM airwaves from 5 a.m. to 7 p.m. weekdays, providing daytime public radio talk programming that WABE does not provide since it airs classical music middays.
“This looks like an incredible drive,” Weatherford said. “Now how you relate that to WRAS, I don’t know.”
Ratings for the new WRAS remain modest, pulling in a 0.3 or 0.4 share since the new programming debuted. In comparison, WABE has been generating a 3.5 share. In other words, WABE currently has about 10 times the listenership of WRAS.
GPB ran its fall pledge drive on its radio stations statewide except for WRAS.
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