Mastering digital fundraising: A blunt wake-up call for public media

Compared with other nonprofits and digital-native media organizations, public broadcasters mostly dabble with fundraising. They struggle mightily with how to turn anonymous social media followers into known, identifiable users we can nurture toward donations.”

Tom Davidson, the Bellisario Professor of the Practice in Media Entrepreneurship at Penn State University

These are the most challenging moments public media has faced in 60 years. At this critical time, it’s essential to prioritize the most urgent tasks.

What is the most urgent skill every public media organization needs to perfect right now? Raising money from digital platforms.

No, not lobbying politicians to restore federal and state funding.

No, not crafting the perfect pitch to get ever-larger donations from an ever-dwindling pool of donors from on-air pledge.

Improving our ability to raise money digitally addresses the existential problems that have been looming for more than a decade: The withering of linear audiences and our overreliance on money from on-air pledge drives.

As I’ve noted previously, our traditional audiences are aging. In the case of public television, they are literally beginning to die off.

NPR, PBS and most stations have figured out how to distribute content on digital platforms. However, aside from the modest successes of PBS Passport and NPR Plus, the system still struggles to develop meaningful revenue from those distribution channels.

Fortunately, some folks are figuring it out.

The best sessions at the otherwise depressing Public Media Development and Marketing Conference in July included outlines of several experiments that offer guidance on how to do this. A handful of stations — WBUR and KPBS, for example — are emulating the best digital media outlets by organizing themselves around audiences, rather than broadcast licenses. Others — with significant help from fundraising agencies — are finally starting to address the disconnect between social media platforms where digital users find us and what we know about those audiences, which is not much, because the platforms don’t disclose audience information.

The crispest expression of all this came from Tyler Smith, principal at Tanager Digital, a fundraising consultancy: “Public media, by far, is dead last in investing in digital,” he told the PMDMC audience.

Compared with other nonprofits and digital-native media organizations, public broadcasters mostly dabble with fundraising. They struggle mightily with how to turn anonymous social media followers into known, identifiable users we can nurture toward donations.

Doing that requires a willingness to experiment. Both Smith and Christina McPhillips, vice president of client partnerships at the consultancy Carl Bloom Associates, outlined test campaigns they've run for public media clients.

McPhillips’ stories included using “enter-to-win” contests on social media to entice audience members to give stations an email address — the most powerful tool to get those fans into a nurturing funnel.

“This is the key: That middle of the funnel needs something sort of tangible. [Audience members] want some value in exchange for their information,” McPhillips noted.

“If a station can select some of the items that they have that are easy, low lift, don’t cost a lot,” crafting an effective campaign can be inexpensive — “a few hundred dollars. … You’re going to find new audiences, potentially younger audiences — [if you] capture their information, you can retarget them later on.”

Still, Smith noted, the very word “experiment” scares off many station leaders, who’ve grown used to the tried-and-true principles of on-air campaigns. Hey, on-air still works, but it’s declining, and we’re not reaching new audiences on-air.

But what may seem like a risk experiment to us — such as paid social media campaigns to gather contact information — are tried-and-true methods for digital news sites and other nonprofits, Smith points out: “It is such a proven path. You’re following a proven playbook, and there’s so little downside.”

It’s not enough, McPhillips and Smith both warned, to post fundraising messages onto social channels, or to rely on the “free” ad campaigns some platforms (like Google) offer to nonprofits.

The typical social media post is only likely to be shown to a single-digit percentage of your station’s followers. And, those “free” campaigns get bumped in favor of paid messages at high-demand times like year-end campaigns. So, paid social campaigns are the only realistic answer.

As coercive as that may seem, Smith said, we need to acknowledge the reality and build campaigns that use paid social promotion. This is especially true with those campaigns encouraging social fans to give us their email addresses so we can develop direct relationships with them.

“The only way to cost-effectively get in front of your audience now is with that investment. How else do you find your prospects when your top-funnel audience is migrating to digital?” asked Smith.

Fortunately, such campaigns are relatively affordable. Smith, McPhillips and others report meaningful results from paid campaigns between $500 and $5,000. The trick is getting station CEOs to see that investment as worthwhile, as opposed to paying for another direct mail drop. “The first and most fundamental is budgeting for digital outreach,” Smith noted.

There’s much work to be done as well with infrastructure. Joan DiMicco, the former head of digital products for WBUR and now a professor at Boston University, discussed WBUR’s challenging rebuild of its technology, including its CRM, to better meet the needs of a digitally driven fundraising operation. And Sean Kurth, director of membership at KPBS, described how they are realigning all of their fundraising around cross-platform user journeys, recognizing that many potential donors engage with us both on-air and online.

These are important first steps. More stations need to follow them. Quickly.

Because, and forgive me if I've said this before, but public broadcasters are getting lapped by our peers — publicly-supported media and the nonprofit news and information organizations that are popping up everywhere. Any time I hear a public media general manager say, “Digital users won’t give money,” I point them to VTDigger in Vermont, The Baltimore Banner, and my favorite new organizations, Cardinal News in rural southwest Virginia and Now Kalamazoo in southern Michigan. Neither of the last two is more than four years old — the Kalamazoo site is barely a year old — yet both are raising significant money from small-dollar donations, major giving and foundations.

Tiny organizations that don’t have decades of brand power are raising money digitally.

Why aren’t you?

Tom Davidson is the Bellisario Professor of the Practice in Media Entrepreneurship at Penn State University. He's been a journalist and product development executive at commercial and public media organizations. Comments? Send them to tgd@tgdavidson.com.