Making Waves for Charity

Nonprofit Seattle radio station offers monthlong publicity campaigns to local organizations

Ann Muno, a charity leader in Seattle, has learned the hard way that free publicity isn’t always as good a deal as it seems.

A few years ago, producers of a local television show invited representatives from her organization, Powerful Voices, to sit in its studio audience and speak on the air about how the group promotes independence among young women by running after-school programs in middle schools and workshops in juvenile-detention facilities.

Powerful Voices has no budget for mass-media marketing, and its leaders eagerly accepted, thinking they had lucked into a great opportunity to spread the word about girl power. Unaware of the episode’s topic, Ms. Muno sat stunned in the audience as the day’s theme was revealed: “What to do to keep your man.”

“It just felt funny to me, personally,” says Ms. Muno, associate director of Powerful Voices, describing her reaction. Appearing on a show at odds with her organization’s message was a mistake she didn’t want to make again.

Ms. Muno and her colleagues encountered no such unfortunate surprises when they became one of the first charities to take part in a new project this year by KEXP, a nonprofit radio station in Seattle whose approach to music fits well with Powerful Voices’ mission.

“They play the individual voices of artists and we look at the individual potential of girls,” Ms. Muno says. “There’s a lot of respect for what they try to preserve, the integrity of diverse music.”

The station’s Community Partnership Initiative promises one nonprofit organization a month plenty of free exposure, including daily radio announcements by its disc jockeys, at least two 20- to 30-minute, on-air interviews during peak listening times, a link from the station’s Web site, and a live-broadcast benefit concert from which the charity receives all ticket revenue.

Ms. Muno and officials of other charities featured on KEXP this year say the program has helped them raise money and, more important, their profiles, without steering precious dollars away from their programs to pay for marketing.

Plus, the charities have gotten a stamp of coolness from a station with a devoted local following and a reputation for playing an eclectic mix of alternative rock, jazz, hip-hop, and blues, as well as electronic, world, and roots music not found on most commercial radio stations.

Spreading the Wealth

Although KEXP has been a fixture on Seattle’s airwaves since 1972, the FM station has undergone major changes in the past five years.

In 2001, it changed its call letters and entered into a partnership with the Experience Music Project rock ‘n’ roll museum, which was founded by Paul Allen, the Seattle entrepreneur who helped start Microsoft. The station, which operates as a free-standing nonprofit group, is run out of a downtown office owned by Mr. Allen’s investment company, Vulcan Inc.

From 2002 to 2005, the station received $2.3-million in underwriting from Vulcan, as well as administrative services from the Experience Music Project, while it worked to achieve financial independence through its fund raising. As of this year, KEXP expects to cover its $2.9-million operating budget without help from Vulcan, apart from the $1-per-year lease it has with the company.

No Time to Volunteer

John Richards, one of the station’s disc jockeys, started the Community Partnership Initiative, after the station started to thrive financially.

“The whole community has always backed us,” he says, “and we’ve always used our shows to support local music and support the local community.”

With the station’s membership drives and underwriting program going strong, lending a hand to other local nonprofit groups seemed like a logical next step, he says.

At the same time, Mr. Richards admits to a personal reason for wanting the program. With his hectic schedule as a DJ and assistant program director at KEXP, he has no time to volunteer. “I wanted to figure out a way to use KEXP’s time and resources,” he says.

When managers of High Dive, a club in Seattle’s funky Fremont neighborhood, asked him to host a monthly show featuring local bands, he came up with a counterproposal: Use the events to help local charities.

“We’ve done benefits for the station for years,” he says. “I wanted to do the same kind of deal but for other organizations.” Mr. Richards persuaded High Dive to donate the money it collects in ticket sales for the concerts to a charity the station selects. The bands at the events agree to perform for no pay.

Mr. Richards says some of his colleagues at KEXP wondered whether the fund-raising events would hurt the station’s own efforts to raise money. “There’s a natural, ‘What if?’” he says. But station management nevertheless approved his idea.

Indications so far are that the charity program does not seem to be hurting the station’s ability to raise money for its own efforts. A pledge drive for Audioasis — the local music show that broadcasts live during the High Dive benefits — that was conducted during the March broadcast raised $4,425 for the radio program, on the same night that Seattle Works, a charity that encourages volunteerism and philanthropy among people in their 20s and 30s, garnered $1,920 in ticket sales and $420 from a raffle and on-site donations.

“What’s happened is by doing these events, it’s opened up a whole new way of thinking,” Mr. Richards says. He adds, “As far as organizations helping other organizations — we have to, we absolutely have to. Who else is going to look out for the little guy?”

The benefit concerts have so far garnered about $1,400 to $2,300 each for seven charities.

Increased Value

Although several of the organizations have generated comparable amounts of money at their own fund-raising events, representatives say they appreciate the fact that they don’t have to spend much time or too many resources to get money from KEXP.

“Sometimes benefit events can be incredibly labor intensive, and this wasn’t, so that increased the value for us,” says Rebecca Ehrlichman, a fund raiser at FareStart, an organization that trains homeless and low-income people for food-service jobs and runs a catering business, a downtown restaurant, and two cafes.

Smart scheduling helped the charity reap benefits beyond the $1,753 in ticket sales it received from the High Dive concert. Given the choice of two different months, the charity chose May as its time to be promoted by KEXP to coincide with the promotion of its major fund-raising event of the year, Guest Chef on the Waterfront.

Ms. Ehrlichman says that compared with 2005, the first year the guest-chef event was held, this year FareStart sold twice as many tickets (700) and raised twice as much money, bringing in more than $53,000. The July event also sold out four days before it took place.

“The exposure is something that we couldn’t afford to buy,” Ms. Ehrlichman says.

Other organizations haven’t been able to quantify the amount of money they have raised as a result of being featured on KEXP.

After its radio appearances, Powerful Voices received six gifts totaling $550 that did not appear to be in response to a fund-raising appeal, but they have no concrete evidence that KEXP listeners made the donations.

And Ms. Muno hopes that the group’s radio spots might lead to a more substantial windfall.

“Maybe someone who heard that is sitting on a grant-review committee,” she says.

Representatives from the nonprofit groups featured on KEXP say the publicity they received has proven far more valuable than the extra cash. KEXP reaches about 108,000 radio listeners a week, and an additional 60,000 a week who listen to the station online.

“Anytime anybody dangles free marketing in front of a nonprofit, you have to jump at the chance,” says Ms. Ehrlichman. “Money in our budget goes to programs.”

Alison Carl White, executive director of Seattle Works, says what is so impressive about KEXP is that it is so committed to putting charities in touch with its listeners. Often, she says, radio stations run public-service announcements to fulfill Federal Communications Commission requirements or to make themselves look good. “It’s, ‘Look at us, we’re trying to promote volunteerism,’ rather than being in service to the community,” she says.

For Seattle Works, teaming up with KEXP also made sense because of the charity’s focus on members of Generations X and Y. Seventy percent of its listeners are ages 25 to 44.

“We know our volunteers are probably also listeners,” Ms. Carl White says. The radio station has “a hip, cool vibe, and we’re always striving for that.”

In February and March, the two months overlapping with Seattle Works’ airtime on KEXP, the number of people who volunteered through the group grew by 13 percent. Sixty-six people who contacted Seattle Works during that time identified themselves as KEXP listeners, by far the largest single source of interest they have had, Ms. Carl White says. Of those, 19 KEXP listeners have signed up for volunteer activities.

Ms. Ehrlichman says airtime on KEXP introduced FareStart to a whole new audience. Typically, the charity gets support from chefs, restaurants, the hospitality industry, and other nonprofit groups, as well as “people who like to go to restaurants once or twice a week — definitely an adult population,” she says. “KEXP grabs a demographic that we haven’t been able to grab.”

Minutes after one on-air interview, FareStart’s phone rang with a request that FareStart cater a KEXP listener’s party. And this year the charity’s FareStart Restaurant has sold out its Thursday “guest chef” nights, which feature a meal cooked by a different Seattle chef each week, weeks in advance — even during the typically slow summer months.

Ms. Muno says Powerful Voices received calls from dozens of listeners, including an inquiry from a teacher in the nearby town of Renton who asked how to organize a similar program.

“At the moment we don’t have the staff really to go out and start programs in other communities,” she says, but the group does send callers a bibliography on female adolescent development, and offers to have a program officer speak to them about working with girls.

About a half dozen callers asked for such information.

“It wasn’t an overwhelming number of people contacting us, but for an organization our size, it was a good number,” Ms. Muno says. “It was about what we could handle.”

Among the callers to Powerful Voices was Aaron Montgomery, a Seattle house painter and drummer, who wanted to find ways to support the group. “I was listening to what their representatives talked about and how they help young girls,” he says. “It just seemed like a really good organization and people who could use some more help.”

Mr. Montgomery hopes at some point to use his band connections to organize a fund-raising concert for the charity. In the meantime, he has volunteered to teach a drumming workshop for Powerful Voices this fall.

2007 Applications

Already, KEXP has heard from 30 applicants for next year’s 12 monthly spots, and Melissa Collett, a volunteer who coordinates the Community Partnership Initiative, expects to receive about 75 to 150 applications total by the October 15 deadline.

Mr. Richards and Ms. Collett also have yet to pick a charity for December 2006.

“We’re waiting to see what organization needs help,” Mr. Richards says. “There’s always an emergency that time of the year.”

Of the selection process, Mr. Richards says, “We’re learning what kinds of organizations fit with our listeners,” citing Seattle Works as an example of a good match between KEXP’s listeners and the target audience of the organization. He says that, in general, the station prefers to feature grass-roots organizations rather than larger charities. “Where would our listeners be more likely to help?” he says. “At a huge organization, we really won’t have much of an impact.”

One change planned for next year is that the station hopes to give organizations more notice that they have been selected. This year, many of the organizations only learned of their selection a month or so ahead of time.

Mr. Richards says that KEXP would like to aid organizations in incorporating their partnerships with KEXP into a larger strategy. “We’d like to help them take as much advantage as possible,” he says.

He says the station is open to the idea of repeating some of the charities selected for the program “because we want to build on the impact.”

Seattle Works would like to appear again. Ms. Carl White says the group has begun revising its strategic plan and is developing a new marketing program that will focus on entertainment and news outlets that appeal to adults in their 20s and 30s.

“This is a great first stab at a partnership,” she says of the relationship with KEXP. “I definitely see this as a start rather than an end in itself.”