Boston’s Public Radio Station Finds Success With Fewer Campaigns

What’s the best way to raise money? Promise to cut down on fund raising.

At least that’s what is working for WBUR, which promised in its campaign a few weeks ago to cancel its June pledge drive if donors would donate at least $1-million, up from the nearly $702,000 given in response to last year’s March campaign.

“We have been trying to cut down on the number of days of fund raising,” says Charlie Kravetz, WBUR’s general manager. “Everybody hates fund raising—it forces us to interrupt news programming. So we want to raise the money we need with fewer interruptions.”

Mr. Kravetz and Michael Steffon, the station’s director of membership, tried a less-ambitious idea in WBUR’s December campaign. The station asked donors to help them reach that drive’s fund-raising goal in half the normal time, and WBUR reached its December goal in four days instead of the usual eight.

To ensure the success of the March pledge drive, the two men approached the station’s board, asking trustees to motivate donors by providing a dollar-for-dollar match on a Wednesday, typically the slowest day of the March drive, which ran Monday through Friday. Trustees donated $100,000 for that purpose, and Wednesday turned into the biggest day of the drive.

All told, the March pledge drive raised $1.4-million with 6,000 more pledges than in 2010, a 78-percent increase. The average gift also increased by 3 percent, to $98. “We were kind of amazed and heartened by this level of support,” Mr. Kravetz says.

Beyond donors’ desire to keep appeals off the air, some fund-raising experts say they think the controversy over federal aid to NPR is also at work.

Doug Eichten, president of DEI, a nonprofit consulting firm that works with 270 public radio stations, said he believes that many donors are giving more generously now because they know some lawmakers want to eliminate federal subsidies for public radio.

Mr. Eichten says that he knows of a handful of public radio stations that have seen donations rise significantly in early spring pledge drives. “Listeners are aware of possible funding cuts, even if stations are not pushing that message,” he says.

At WBUR, Mr. Kravetz agrees that some donors are probably rallying around public radio now because of the NPR controversy and threats to federal support that provides up to half of the budgets at local stations–even though WBUR took pains not to mention the issue in its March campaign.

“We assume that listeners were more motivated this year because of the struggles around public funding,” he says. “But we wanted to make sure we did not mention this in case we might have been crying wolf.”