Today's blog post deals with on-air fundraising with the new clocks. Thanks to Greater Public for making this post available to PRPD.
by Jay Clayton
On November 17th NPR will begin using new clocks for Morning Edition, Weekend Edition and All Things Considered,
including Weekend All Things Considered.
The new clocks will not affect the fundamental strategy behind your on-air
fundraising approach. They will require
you to rethink where your station decides to run pitch breaks during your
drives.
Before I offer specific
recommendations about how to get your fundraising breaks into the new clocks,
let’s revisit some fundamentals of on-air fundraising that are important
considerations when mapping out your breaks.
Converting listeners to donors
(and therefore to revenue) through on-air fundraising requires that your
listeners hear your message, have time to absorb it and respond to it in large
enough numbers to allow your station to achieve its full fundraising potential.
In other words, the number and length of your fundraising breaks in any given
hour are critical to your station’s fundraising success.
The optimal amount of pitch time is 20 – 22 minutes per hour,
broken into four breaks distributed as evenly as possible throughout the hour.
This recommendation is based on findings from the Morning Edition Air
Check Project conducted by NPR and Greater Public.
Why this amount?
Consider the average weekly
time spent listening to Morning Edition and All Things Considered.
Morning
Edition:
|
2
hours 11 minutes*
|
All
Things Considered:
|
1
hour 25 minutes*
|
Weekend
All Things Considered:
|
37
minutes*
|
The typical listener simply
doesn’t hear many pitch breaks. And time spent listening doesn’t take into
account how much, or how little, a listener pays attention to the breaks. Therefore,
it takes many breaks, implemented consistently over time, to reach enough
listeners and generate enough response to achieve an optimal outcome.
So, how can you get 20 - 22 minutes per hour of pitching into
NPR’s new clocks? When your station is fundraising on-air, NPR relaxes its
requirements around content you are required to broadcast. During an on-air
fundraiser your station may cover anything except funding
credits, which must run within the hour in which they are fed. If your station opts
to run any newscast, it must run live.
Here are the new clocks:
Your strategy around pitch
breaks will not change substantially. Your breaks should preempt part or all of
the A, B, D and E segments depending on each day’s news content and whether or
not NPR includes one or multiple stories in each segment.
Preempt as much of each segment
as you need to, and as frequently as you need to, in order to get 20 - 22
minutes of pitching into each hour. Keep in mind that you may not be able to
pitch as much time as you’d like during each hour, depending on each program’s
rundown. Remember to distribute your pitching as evenly as possible throughout
the hour. Ideally you’d have about 10 minutes of news content followed by about
five minutes of pitching in each quarter hour.
The exception to this approach is Weekend All Things Considered.
Here you’d run breaks in the A and B segments and then run two breaks in the D
segment, one at the start of the segment and one at the end. Between these two
breaks you’d run a story from the D segment or one from earlier in the hour.
While the new clocks may take a bit of getting used to, the
fundamentals of on-air fundraising remain the same. Join me for my upcoming webinar on this topic, and
if you have specific questions please contact
me directly.
I’ll be happy to help.
JAY CLAYTON is an Individual Giving Advisor for Greater Public.
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