How’s that for a headline? Last year, a friend of mine gave me a coffee mug with that quote emblazoned on the side. We had a good laugh over it, but if you know anything about me, you know the sentiment hits close to home as I’ve spent my professional career analyzing numbers and being driven by data.  

And today? Well, today I came across a piece of data that stood out so much it couldn’t wait for the next industry conference or CDP webinar for it to be shared.

So here we are. Why?

Because trouble is brewing for public radio station fundraising programs.

Each quarter, like clockwork, my colleagues and I dive into the National Reference File (NRF) and crunch numbers in the largest fundraising data set in public media. We aim to uncover system trends and find timely insights to help stations fundraise better. We also use our findings to help identify how CDP can best serve stations with tools and services that support their vital public service missions.

One key metric we’ve been tracking with interest and growing concern over several quarters involves the new donor counts at public radio stations. As we look at the number of new donors for each tracking period, we’ve noticed declines for both television and radio stations, but the radio declines are particularly sharp and it’s time to sound the alarm.

Here is the data in question: the year-over-year change in new donors for public radio from June 2021 to June 2022.

If you’re not used to looking at reports like this, here’s a breakdown: Each bar in the graph represents a public radio station. Each value denotes the change in new donors at that station file year-over-year. The chart attempts to answer a simple question: Did stations gain or lose first-time donors when comparing 12-month period ending in June 2022 to June 2021?

If you look at the first graph bar on the left, you’ll see that only one station added more donors to their file than they did the previous year. One. Station. Every other station saw decreases during the same period, with many seeing declines of 30%, 40% or more.

Not only that, but when I asked our data team to confirm this finding, they put an even finer point on the situation: Radio-only stations have seen negative growth in new donors from on-air pledge specifically for the past 28 consecutive months. In a world where the majority of public radio stations still rely on pledge as the primary driver of new donors, to say this is a troubling trend would be an understatement.

Keep in mind that this data set represents about half of all public radio giving. This is not just a single underperforming station or a couple of outliers having a rough time acquiring new donors. In this set, we limit the dataset to radio-only stations, and there is no doubt the same trend is impacting joint-license stations as well. This is a data-driven finding based on first-hand transactional data, and while the causes and solutions can be debated, the issue is clear, and it is real:

The system needs more new donors in public radio, and it needs them now.

Why is this so important? Many stations may be living with a false sense of security since these declines are coming at a time when the percentage of sustainers is increasing at stations. With that comes their strong retention rates, and those retention rates could be masking what lurks beneath the top-line membership numbers…for now.

Even the best sustainer programs deal with natural attrition, and as that occurs in the months ahead, the lack of new donors today will make themselves apparent as those missing donors create a hole in fundraising programs that will chase stations through time, manifesting themselves as missing additional gifts, lower renewal counts, shrinking file counts and lower revenue. Think of it as the ripple effect of dropping a pebble in a pond. The opportunity cost of those missing donors is calculable and is a worthwhile exercise to gain an understanding of the 5-year revenue impact of the donors you didn’t acquire last year. The results will be eye-opening.

Now, getting back to the one station in the chart that actually increased their new donor counts. I have a theory as to why they have been able to find success with new donors during such a challenging time for other stations.

The station in that chart is WERN (aka Wisconsin Public Radio). Like many stations, they are fortunate to have a very talented fundraising team, so shifting focus to practices instead, I can identify one thing WPR does that no other public radio station is doing – CANVASSING.

Canvassing is currently active in 14 markets, all of which are either TV-only or Joint Licensees. Like other stations, WPR engages in the traditional acquisition practices including pledge, direct mail and digital. However, they are the only public radio station that has found a way to launch a canvassing program.

So how did they do it? Instead of competing with their public television counterparts (PBS Wisconsin) for donors, they worked with CDP (and PBS Wisconsin) to create a collaborative canvassing program. They shared the risk, expenses and learnings, and their collaboration in developing this innovative solution has allowed both stations to realize the benefits canvassing can make to fundraising programs.  

At CDP, this type of collaboration is in our DNA:  It’s the reason stations created CDP in the first place. Seeing stations taking bold (and calculated) risks and pushing the fundraising boundary forward is something we fully support and is at the heart of our values.