Today Contributor Development Partnership (CDP) launches a new service and useful tool for the public media system. At the end of this blog post, you’ll find a link that will direct you to The State of Fundraising Report for Public Media. Starting today, CDP will be publishing this report at the end of every calendar year and the end of most station’s fiscal years.

This report focuses on high-level fundraising trends with deeper insight into selected areas of interest revealed through data analysis. The source of the data is CDP’s National Reference File (NRF). Launched in 2011 with 16 charter stations, the NRF was envisioned as an initiative to analyze, discover and track important trends within public media-aimed philanthropy. More than a decade later, the NRF now benefits from the participation of 206 stations. Each station regularly and securely uploads their data into the NRF, creating a sizable repository of public media fundraising data from nearly 5 million active donors that account for nearly 1 billion dollars in revenue. This is the largest storehouse of this kind of data, ripe for powerful analytic protocols, available within the public media enterprise

CDP’s team of analysts and fundraising experts with decades of experience use this data to make timely and accurate observations on current fundraising trends, successes and opportunities.

And then, with public media organizations as our partners, we go beyond the conclusions to identify current techniques that may benefit from adjustment, or research new approaches for implementation and testing in the arena of public media philanthropy.

We hope you find The State of Fundraising Report for Public Media informative and helpful in setting strategic goals for your station. While 2023 was a difficult year for donor acquisition, finding the areas where opportunities do exist, identifying strengths built on years of your hard (and smart!) work and even reasons to celebrate has been a meaningful experience for our team and partner public media organizations.

Examples of some top-level takeaways from the current iteration of The State of Fundraising Report for Public Media:

• In 2023, 35% of new donors came into giving to their public media organizations as sustainers, this represents the greatest share of sustainer-based new contributors in the past five years.
  

• Signs of revenue retention volatility has sparked a lot of conversations about donor engagement and how public media organizations can best leverage their “localness,” new technologies and on-demand content (Passport and podcasting) to strengthen relationships with donors.
  

• One reason contributing to difficulties with donor acquisition might be a lack of diversity of acquisition methods with a heavy reliance on Passport for TV and on-air drives for radio.

 CDP remains deeply committed to the present and future success of local public media organizations. We are grateful to have earned the trust of more than 200 public media organizations with their most precious fundraising asset: their donors’ data. CDP is thankful and happy to provide the free Revenue Opportunities and Actions Report (ROAR) and accompanying one-on-one report reviews to those contributors.

Please download the current version of The State of Fundraising Report for Public Media here.

If you are an NRF participant, we thank you. And if you are not yet, we would love to welcome you. Contact us here for more information.