WETA and the spirit of on-air fundraising

Tuesday I paid a visit to Dan DeVany, vice president and general manager of Classical WETA 90.9 FM, the all-classical station in the nation’s capital. We talked about WETA’s quick journey over the past three years from a dual-format news/classical station to an all-news station and finally to the music outlet it is today — a move that has brought it to a new level of success. It was a great discussion, and I’ll share the highlights with you soon.

But I did want to share something in particular right away. Dan brought to my attention a blog post by Robert Paterson, a consultant who has been helping public radio and TV stations adjust to the new realities of the media world. In fact, “New Realities” was the name of an ambitious strategic planning exercise that involved all of public radio, led by Rob and his crew a few years back. Take a look at Rob’s blog and you’ll see that he is the ultimate big-picture thinker. I often find his observations provocative and inspiring.

In this post Rob drew on a conversation with Dan about on-air fundraising around classical music. Dan told me and Rob that WETA’s first fund drive after going all-classical early last year was a smashing success. But in the fall they encountered a dauntingly slow start, forcing them to take a fresh look at how they were trying to connect with their listeners. As Rob describes it:

What was wrong was that they were treating the whole thing as they had in the past. They were trying to make transactions with listeners – you give us this and we’ll give you that – a premium for a pledge. They were treating the audience as consumers of a thing. They were not connecting to where the listener was.

On day 4 of the drive they threw all the scripts out and talked for the first time from the heart about their own passion for music and what it meant to them. For the first time they found the energetic frequency of their new audience. They tuned in. The calls picked up as did the money.

I think we call this a learning experience don’t we?

Rob also writes quite movingly about the power of music to stir the emotions. His thoughts dovetail nicely with studies performed within public radio of how listeners relate to music programming. It’s often been observed that lovers of classical music speak of it as a refuge from the stress of everyday life, a sanctuary of timeless treasures. And to connect to these listeners — as WETA has found — stations have to speak to them in that context, aiming not for the head, but for the heart.