Integrated Media Association 2007

I’m in the session on Pledge applications, thankful that as a show we’re spared the yeoman’s work of getting people to give you money. But it does give me a chance to say something I forgot to mention during the panel on user-generated content: public radio listeners are used to being asked for money. They’re grateful, however, to be asked for their opinions.

Engaging listener communities online looks like a necessary evil. Listeners want to talk online; we are all public service organizations; therefore we owe listeners an online space. Someone from a station just asked me how we handle the volume of comments and emails at Open Source, which made me realized that all of this activity — blogs, wikis, forums — looks like a cost center. Extra work, extra time, extra staff.

But it’s not a cost center. It’s a profit center.

Public radio traditionally has only one point of real contact with the listener: the phone call to offer money. And listeners — enough of them, at least — are happy to call in and pledge. But we’ve found at Open Source that listeners are tremendously excited to be asked for their opinions and stories, too. As Andy Carvin pointed out during our panel this morning, the ten percent of listeners that actually spends time commenting is likely to be the same ten percent that pledges. How much nicer, then, as a potential pledger, to discover that public radio cares not only about your $50 checks, but about what you think about Iraq, as well.

We’ve discovered at Open Source that the more willing we are to open up about what we do — and it takes time and valuable production hours to do this — the more connected our listeners feel to the show.  This isn’t just a warm fuzzy, it’s quantifiable; when we ran into a funding crisis last October, dedicated community members begged us to tell them where they could send money to help us out.

So yes, transparency is work.  Responding to listeners and integrating their comments in your show is work.  But transparency and real community integration can make people really excited to give you money, too.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 21st, 2007 at 12:55 pm and is tagged as No Tags. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.