Answering the $100 Million Dollar Question No One Thought To Ask

As public media fundraisers, we sometimes tend to think of contributors as “our” donors, as if our relationship with them is wholly unique (hint, it’s not).

The truth of the matter is that the typical American donor supports nearly 5 charitable organizations. And while we know the types of organizations people support can vary greatly based on their interests, values, and an organization’s personal importance to them, one thing we know less about is the giving overlap within public media. In other words, how many public media stations do donors actively support?

As a system, we’ve never really had a sense of what the impact of this type of giving behavior could have on things like unique donor counts, lifetime value, major gifts and planned giving. Likewise, because of that, we haven’t had insight into the fundraising techniques and messaging that influences that type of charitable giving. What’s behind it? What motivates those donors? Geography? Overlap markets? Content consumption? On-air pledge offerings?

In order to begin to answer those questions, CDP’s data analysts, in the first of a series of analytical deep dives around the subject, recently set out to answer the question “what percentage of donors support more than one public media station and what is their value?”

Utilizing the data housed within the National Reference File, the system’s largest repository of public media transactional information, the team went to work looking to answer that question and to begin scoping the revenue impact of these important donors.

Reviewing data from 165 stations totaling 3.8 million donors, our analysts have found that over 8% of donors have supported more than one public media station over the past 18 months.

While those figures are impressive, when you consider the fact that 7% of those 314,000 donors, approximately 22,000 (the equivalent of a mid-market public media station’s member file), have actually supported three stations or more in the past 18 months, the financial impact of these donors could approach a jaw-dropping $100 million.

With numbers like that, and in an era of increasing public media partnerships, collaborations, and mergers, it’s easy to see why understanding this donor overlap and its revenue impact is critically important. 

At CDP, we’ve helped our MSB partner stations successfully navigate these complicated waters by scoping overlaps and developing messaging, solicitation and timing strategies to retain donors and protect revenue as they consider working more closely, or merging, with other public media stations.

Next up, our analysts will be taking a closer look at these donors, looking for patterns across giving levels, licensee types, gift types, fundraising channels, overlap markets and more.

So, stay tuned; we’ll report our findings right here in future posts.