NPR’s Uneven Climb to Attract More Big Gifts

Jarl Mohn, NPR’s new chief executive, says getting more wealthy people to open their wallets will be crucial for the organization to close its deficit.

“My contention is there are a lot of people out there that are big listeners, big believers, big fans, that are high-net-worth individuals that just have not been presented with a great, compelling story,” he says.

Mr. Mohn, a commercial-media entrepreneur, is a public-radio philanthropist himself. He says he has donated more than $5-million to Southern California Public Radio, whose board he now chairs.

He says he wants to do more than just put NPR in the black; he wants to help it grow. And that will mean working with member stations to develop a “very big plan, a bold plan to raise a lot of money.” Asked if he is looking for another Joan Kroc, the McDonald’s heiress who made a bequest of about $235-million to NPR in 2003, he says: “I don’t need one of them. I need 10 of them.”

Clashes Over Big Gifts

The public-radio world has discovered major gifts relatively recently. Before Ms. Kroc’s donation, NPR “barely had a working endowment, and its major-gifts program was rudimentary at best,” Ken Stern, who at the time the gift was made was NPR’s chief operating officer, recalls in his book With Charity for All. Stephanie Bergsma, head of fundraising at KPBS—the NPR and PBS affiliate in San Diego—brought Ms. Kroc, one of the station’s major donors, to NPR’s door, he says.

In addition to the enormous gift to NPR, her will left $5-million to KPBS—seeming to suggest that working together could benefit both parties.

Since then NPR has tried to solicit more major gifts, but it has not always gone smoothly because of clashes with local stations, which also need philanthropy to keep their operations going. Donovan Reynolds, president of Louisville Public Media, says NPR has historically “put a lot of people off” by contacting potential donors without coordinating with local managers.

Doug Eichten, president of Greater Public, a public-radio fundraising and marketing group, recalls serving a few times as “sort of a Jimmy Carter” during talks between NPR and stations on the issue. He says they spent more time working out the “rules of engagement” than they did building trust.

Working Together

Mr. Eichten says the tide seems to be turning, however. He praised the work of Monique Hanson, who was hired in 2012 as NPR’s chief development officer after serving as a senior fundraiser at two other big nonprofits with affiliates, YMCA of the USA and the Alzheimer’s Association. She is now working with a 12-member committee on a public-radio collaborative fundraising strategy that involves about 40 stations—an effort that has produced several big gifts.

One was solicited last year by Kathryn “Kit” Jensen, NPR’s board chair and chief operating officer at Ideastream, a Cleveland public media group that operates WCPN, an NPR affiliate.

Ms. Jensen says NPR’s board had just adopted a strategic framework calling for more collaboration with member stations, and “I thought, you know, I should do one of these.” Ideastream was planning to double its spending on content, including increasing its arts and culture coverage, so Ms. Jensen thought of Toby Devan Lewis—a Cleveland arts patron and longtime donor to Ideastream and its predecessor, Cleveland Public Radio. She pitched the idea of a gift that would be spent to bolster arts coverage both locally and nationally.

Ms. Lewis was intrigued by the possibility of drawing more national attention to Cleveland’s arts institutions, says Jennifer Frutchy, her philanthropic adviser. “Cleveland is a one-newspaper town,” Ms. Frutchy says. “The local paper doesn’t have the ease of moving local stories to a national venue.” So Ms. Lewis offered the largest gift she had ever made to benefit public radio. NPR officials say the amount was $500,000, to be split equally between the Cleveland group and NPR’s arts desk for both on-air and online stories.

Tips for Collaborating

Ms. Hanson offers the following suggestions to national organizations that want to work with local affiliates to raise money:

• Work to build trust between the parties. Cooperation is more important than an approach that relies heavily on technical goals like “market penetration.” Each side should learn what is important to the other and integrate those goals into the fundraising plan.
• Build transparency and good communication into the process, including sharing success stories. Her NPR task force meets in person about quarterly and communicates with the larger group regularly by telephone.
• Before approaching a donor, the national organization should contact the local group and honor its advice. “One will hear either ‘Yes, let’s go talk to the donor together’ or ‘Not now, we’re in a capital campaign, let’s have a longer cultivation period’” or ‘No, not ever, ever, ever, no.”
• Raise your aspirations for smaller and midsize markets, which sometimes produce the biggest gifts. “Often headquarters spends a lot of time on the coasts and loses site of the middle part of the country,” she says.
• Don’t focus so much on the logistics of your collaboration—for example, how you will split the money—that you ignore what the donor wants to pay for. “Donor intent comes first,” she says.