What’s the Horsepower On Your Development Engine?
If your radio station is on the air, you probably think you have everything in place to keep it going. You have a studio, a board, some playback equipment, a transmitter, a tower and lots and lots of wires to connect everything together.
But you could be missing a key ingredient that will keep your station on the air long after you’ve had to replace all of the gadgets and gear necessary for broadcasting.
You must have a development engine. What we’re talking about here is more than a strategy or an idea. It is a series of systems and functions all working synergistically to grow vital relationships with donors in order to inspire them, inform them, ask them, thank them and remind them about your station.
Like the engine in your car, which produces the power to the wheels for movement, your development engine produces forward motion for your radio station. It is constantly helping you advance key relationships from just names you’ve gathered to people who are giving regularly. Some of those will be capable of giving significantly more than others and some may even rise to the level of becoming champions for your station. In development, this kind of relationship advancement activity is called “moves management,” but we’ll talk more about that later.
Gasoline for Your Development Engine
Let’s first talk about what’s at the very heart of any development engine, your database.
- Where are you putting the names and addresses of people you meet at station concerts or events?
- Are you gathering names on your web site?
- What are you doing with all of the entries from a letter writing campaign or contest?
Every name, and more importantly, every email address, is VITAL. Next to cash and electricity, radio stations run on names! Names are like the gasoline your development engine runs on. If you aren’t actively adding names to your database, your station may sputter, stall and finally coast to a stop by the side of the road.
Managing all the names and helping you strategically address multiple subsets of your database takes a bit of skill and the aid of some very good software. In this way, the database system is a lot like the carburetor in your car, helping you manage the flow of names so that your development engine can fire on all cylinders and keep you moving. At Advocace, we’re always researching the best database systems available so we can recommend them to our clients. (Give us a call and we’ll help you find a good vendor, free of charge.) Good database systems for radio have these characteristics:
- Affordable. There is no need to break the bank. Expect a reasonable monthly service or subscription fee that’s less than what you are paying for an ISDN line with little or no start up costs.
- Web-based. Not essential but most of the good systems are accessible from anywhere using the Internet. This may not seem important to you now, but it is helpful in a thousand ways. This often raises security concerns, but most of these are easily addressable.
- Robust. Allow you to capture names and all contact data (multiple phone numbers, email addresses, etc.) as well as accurately track pledges and giving history. Also…You need to be able to add notes about individual calls or visits, as well as to be able to track the mailings a donor received, events they attended and how they have responded to your offers and requests. This is what we call “donor intelligence,” the ability to know what you need to know when you need to know it about your donors.
- Intuitive. The average volunteer has to be able to point and click their way to do all basic functions, such as taking a new donation or pledge or adding a new name to the mailing list.
Communications: Like Sparkplugs
Once you have the database system in place, consider the next component in your development engine…Your donor communications stream. How often and in what ways will you communicate with donors? Which donors will hear from you most often? How do you decide?
A good donor communication stream has basic mailings a few times a year that all donors receive and some specialized mailings only a few donors receive. For example, you may produce a monthly e-Newsletter and send it to all donors. But you may only send an expensive direct mail package to donors most likely to give on an annual basis to your station.
If you do on-air fundraising, such as a share-a-thon, you will have mailings that are connected specifically to that effort. You will need to do some careful analysis of your donor file to decide how and when to mail or contact your donors based on their giving levels and giving history. Each mailing, if properly worded and timed has the potential to spark another gift to your organization. Direct mail, while not an exact science, can still be quite effective if certain industry best practices are followed.
The driving concern of any good donor communication stream has to be moves management. What we’re trying to accomplish is a series of definable steps that we move our donors through in order to move them from new name in the database to annual donor to, if they are capable, major donor and station champion.
Calendar: Like Engine Oil
The next part of the engine to think about is your calendar. It’s like the oil in your car that keeps all the moving parts, well…moving!
When are you going to get together with donors? How about potential donors? When will you meet with them individually or as a group?
Like the stratification that occurs when deciding how your donor communication stream, your calendar of donor events must be carefully thought through in order to make it work in synergy with the other components of your development engine. Events aren’t just for listeners; they’re also for donors.
Someone who gives $25, $50 or even $100 will really appreciate it when you invite them to sit with you at a concert or conference. A good station calendar will keep donors engaged and active at your station, helping them find more and more ways to be a part of what God is doing through your ministry.
Major Donors: Like Cylinders
Lastly, if your system is working properly, you will be able to identify the major donors in your file and plan on doing some things to help them stay interested in your ministry.
While everyone plays a part in development, major donors are like the cylinders that really get the station going. The fuel and spark of your development engine come together to help a major donor say “yes” when asked to fund important projects at your station.
Every day, the General Manager or some other top person at your station, should be calling and writing a few major donors or potential major donors. During my stint as a GM, I made this my top priority and completed it within my first 30 minutes in the office to make sure it got done every day. Yes, that’s a lot of effort. Sure, I’d rather played with the station’s music library or helped set up a remote. But, in time, the effort I invested with major donor activity helped our station more than anything else I could do.
Remember the old “80/20 Rule?” It states that 80% of your results come from just 20% of your efforts, and it definitely applies to development. Most radio stations have or could have a base of just 20% of their donors funding the majority of the station’s annual needs. Your development engine has to be good at moves management, which is helping donors like this rise to the top so they can be identified for special handling like handwritten notes, personal emails, phone calls, lunches or in-person visits.
Development Engine Diagnostics
So there you have it. You need a development engine along with a license, a studio, a tower, a transmitter and all those cables and wires to do radio. If you don’t have one or your engine could use a tune up, feel free to give us a call.
Advocace helps stations identify which parts of their development engine are already in place and working, and which might need to be overhauled. Sometimes we find a station has no development engine at all! These stations are merely coasting downhill or they’re being “pushed” by a few well-intentioned souls who will, in time, get tired of pushing and give up! Sometimes we only need to make a few tweaks, adjusting timing or changing out a spark plug or two to maximize performance of the engine.
So how about you? Check under the hood and tell us what you see. Click here to contact Advocace right now.
Some stations are too small to develop a donor communications stream on their own. Advocace is developing a system we call DonorActive to help these stations by providing a series of customizable, regular mailings to various donor classifications at an affordable cost. Interested? Click here to find out more about DonorActive.