Program Aims to Demonstrate Major-Gift Strategy for Public Media

Public media organizations have long had the kind of donor loyalty that other charities can only dream of. With their ability to talk to donors every day over the airwaves, those groups continue to build a broad base of support through membership and sustainer programs.

A new effort aims to help organizations translate that loyalty into big gifts.

Greater Public, a membership group of public broadcasters, teamed up with the fundraising-consulting company Veritus Group to create a two-year pilot program to demonstrate how a major-gifts strategy can substantially boost station revenues. Participating nonprofits include Colorado Public Radio, WCMU in Mount Pleasant, Mich., WHYY in Philadelphia, and a fourth station that will be announced soon.

Consultants work closely with development staff to comb through donor lists, create reasonably sized portfolios for fundraisers, and measure the results. Pilot participants will share what they’ve learned with other public broadcasters throughout the two years.

Understanding Donors

The program provides a framework similar to the model of big-gift fundraising employed by higher-education and health-care institutions, says David Heck, director of philanthropy at WHYY.

“You’re really just trying to better understand where your supporters are,” he says. Do they want to be members and give smaller amounts to many organizations? Do they want to be midlevel donors and give to a few other organizations? Or do they want to make larger gifts and have one-on-one communication with the organization?

In his first year at the public broadcaster, Heck was already beginning to establish a more systematized approach to major giving. He says the pilot has enabled him and his staff to get the strategy up and running much more quickly than they could have on their own, while still keeping up with the day-to-day demands of fundraising and managing.

Consultants began with an in-person visit to each station and an analysis of their existing donors, prioritizing outreach based on factors including how recently someone gave, the size of the gift, and that person’s capacity to give more. Fundraisers then began a process of further qualifying donors — with letters, emails, and calls — to determine their interest in deepening their relationship with the organization.

Public media tends to work with the same donors year after year, without necessarily identifying the best candidates for higher levels of giving, says Richard Perry, founding partner of Veritus Group. While donor retention is high, he says, “there’s a bunch of flat giving. You see these $500 donors who give $500 forever, and there’s no upgrade thing going on.” But it takes work to identify those people. In his experience, just one donor in three with the capacity to contribute major gifts will actually want to talk to a fundraiser. He recommends that each gift officer have no more than 150 of those donors in their portfolios.

During the pilot, consultants help create an outreach plan for each donor and schedule weekly check-in calls with fundraisers to chart their progress and answer questions.

‘Low-Hanging Fruit’

Other pilot participants had also started rethinking their approach to major gifts before joining the effort.

Two years ago, Colorado Public Radio did a wealth screening of 60,000 of its donors, revealing 7,500 people who had the capacity to make a five-figure gift, according to the data. “It was an astronomical number,” says Jim East, senior vice president for development. “There’s all this low-hanging fruit.”

Using that data, he made the case to hire two more major-gift officers, both of whom are receiving training as part of the Greater Public program. His development staff of seven now includes four full-time employees and one part-time employee, who all focus on bringing in gifts of $10,000 or more.

The Veritus process is already starting to generate additional revenue, East says.

By qualifying new donors and deepening relationships with existing donors, Colorado Public Radio projects it will bring in an additional $850,000 this year. East expects that three to five years from now, the organization will raise several more million annually. This year’s budget is $24 million, up from $20 million in the previous fiscal year, though that increase comes from all of the station’s funding sources, not just major gifts.

Online Training Program

Greater Public started the pilot program because too few public media organizations have sophisticated major-gift operations, says Joyce MacDonald, the group’s CEO. “We think this is going to not only substantially improve revenue at those stations but really spin off a lot of wisdom to the rest of our members to get started on this themselves,” she says.

A New York-based family foundation made a $1 million program-related investment in Greater Public to support the pilot. Greater Public draws on those funds to cover Veritus’s fees, and the participating media organizations will reimburse Greater Public over the next few years, a sum ranging from $100,000 to $300,000, depending on organization size.

At its conference in Dallas earlier this month, Greater Public announced a $500,000 grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to simultaneously develop an online training program on the fundamentals of major-gift fundraising for the broader public media system based on the same principles. That program will launch this fall at a cost of $1,000 to $2,000 per participant.

Building on Sustainer Programs

Stations have been successful converting one-time donors to give on a recurring basis. In a Target Analytics report drawing on 2017 fundraising data from 78 public broadcasters, a median of 53 percent of all radio donors and 31 percent of all television donors were sustainers.

But this kind of philanthropy is often transactional: Donors get a tote bag or a mug in exchange for their contribution, but they’re rarely given the opportunity to direct their gift to the areas of the organization they’re most passionate about.

Veritus helps the organizations analyze their budgets in a way that allows them to make specific proposals to donors that include the true cost of the programs they want to support, including overhead. Fundraisers can then go to donors whose interests are in line with their plans with a more personalized request, say for a new podcasting or investigative unit, and provide specific information about how their money will be spent.

This strategy recently paid off for Colorado Public Radio, which had talked about adding investigative-reporting positions for years. One donor who gave $10,000 annually for seven years had expressed interest in supporting that work, but the positions had not been included in the organization’s budget. When staff positions for an investigative team were finally added to the budget in 2018, East was able to go to that donor with a detailed proposal. The donor committed $100,000 a year for three years and made the first gift in January.

Getting even a handful of stations to change their fundraising strategy “would be a whole new day for the finances of public media,” says Perry of the Veritus Group. “Buried in these donors, in these organizations, is so much unrealized potential. I haven’t seen anything quite like it.”