Putting the fun back in the funnel

I’d encourage your station to think deeply about the current state of your development funnel. ... How can you rebuild and adapt your development funnel for an era when over-the-air audiences are disappearing?”

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

Over decades, public media has perfected small-dollar fundraising. Our methods are so ingrained that we barely think about them:

• Create great content.
• Broadcast it to a large audience.
• Through promotion (and a lot of hope), turn some casual audience members into loyals.
• Use a pledge drive (and more than a little guilt) a few times a year to convince a percentage of those loyals into donors.
• Lather, rinse, repeat.

Yeah, there are variations around the system — some stations supplement on-air pledges with door knocking, and television stations substituted DVD incentives for good ol’ guilt. But the basic model hasn’t changed much since the ‘80s. And like anything that’s decades old, we’ve tended to forget why it works.

In this era of declining (and aging) over-the-air audiences, forgetting why is deadly.

Our on-air pledge method is a classic example of a donor development funnel. Build awareness of your service; get some of those people to sample your content; work to turn a double-digit percentage of those samplers into habitual users; then convince some of the habituals to become donors.

There are two problems with that model today:

First, declining and aging over-the-air audiences mean we’re no longer filling the top of the funnel with new audience members — our future prospective donors.

Worse, over the past decades, we’ve focused on optimizing on-air pledges (“Let’s test out The Three Tenors at the Acropolis DVD!” or “I heard KXYZ had good results with mason-jar radios as a pledge premium — let’s give that a try!”). However, too few in the system know how to translate funnel management into the new world of digital content consumption. Those problems are becoming deadly.

I hear bad station leaders saying things like, “Our digital giving doesn’t support our digital costs,” when no one at the station is actually responsible for fostering giving through digital channels. One of these stations has lost over a quarter of its members in the past four years, and its strategy appears to be doubling down on on-air pledges.

Meanwhile, our peers in the digital news sector — INN and LION members — would beg to disagree. Individual giving, including small-dollar donations, provides about one-third of that sector’s revenue, which has nearly doubled in less than a decade — from roughly $350 million in 2018 to approaching $700 million today.

Generalizations are dangerous, and it’s not hard to find local news nonprofits that struggle to build audience and revenue. However, the best of those organizations are sustainable because they relentlessly focus on understanding their audiences, building loyalty and making persuasive cases for support. Consultants and service providers like Blue Engine Collaborative and Blue Lena help those nascent organizations build and manage thoughtful audience funnels that would make many of us jealous.

One public media leader even suggested to me that “those digital nonprofits stole our model!” Ummm, guys? Did you ever hear of the March of Dimes? They perfected that small-dollar donor funnel decades before most of our stations went on the air.

So, as you think about revising a strategic plan to reflect today’s rapidly shifting audience trends, ask:

• How are you gathering email addresses?
• What might you do to generate more?
• What are you doing with those addresses once you have them?

Too many stations, I see, do no nurturing. The very first email a new prospect gets is a request for money, often during the next on-air pledge drive. It reminds me of a commercial a few years ago where a skeevy-looking guy threw out a marriage proposal to every woman he met at a speed-dating meetup.

• Can your CRM tell me why a new email address entered your system? Was it from an arts and culture event? Kids programming? Some other special interest? Those details give you clues about how to message particular audience segments — plural.
• Who manages your digital marketing? Someone who has experience with building and managing digital funnel flows? Or is it just one more task for an overburdened on-air pledge manager?

Hence this month’s exhortation: I’d encourage your station to think deeply about the current state of your development funnel.

As many of us start planning travel to PMDMC in July, go there with a set of questions: Who's building a thoughtful digital engagement funnel? Who can help your station attract new and different users into the top of that funnel? How are you managing and nurturing users who give you an email address?

Most important: How can you rebuild and adapt your development funnel for an era when over-the-air audiences are disappearing?

Tom Davidson is professor of practice in media entrepreneurship at the Bellisario School of Communications, Penn State University. He previously was a reporter, content leader, general manager and product builder at Tribune, PBS, UNC-TV and Gannett. He can be contacted at tgd@tgdavidson.com.