Your Radio Donors are Watching. Are You Listening?

At CDP, we’ve spent a lot of time analyzing how Passport, the PBS streaming member benefit, has changed public media. It’s changed how stations acquire donors, it’s changed how donors interact with content, and it’s changed the strategies needed to keep bringing in – and retaining – donors. Simply put, Passport has become a vital acquisition channel, and understanding how donors are using this valuable benefit is critical to formulating the right strategy to keep them around.

We’ve kept tabs on what Passport-acquired donors are watching, whether they’re younger than pre-existing public media donors, and whether Passport is affecting the donors we’re getting from Canada. But could there be a group of donors watching Passport right under our noses that we’re not paying enough attention to?

Who are we talking about? Radio donors* at joint licensee stations.

While we’ve often talked anecdotally about radio donors’ use of Passport, we decided it was time to take a closer look. So our data analysts crunched the Passport streaming data of more than 60,000 active radio donors across 18 joint licensee MSB** stations.

And what did we find?

It turns out that an impressive 24% of radio donors have streamed Passport. In fact, radio donors stream at nearly the same rate as non-Passport-acquired TV and institutional donors. The only cohort that streams more? You guessed it: those donors acquired directly through a Passport donation form.

So now what?

The Passport streaming numbers for radio donors serves as a reminder that your donors don’t exist in a vacuum, no matter how they choose to give. They have varied interests and habits and are consuming your content across channels. Your TV donors are listening to your radio service, your radio donors are watching your TV service, and both groups have streamed Passport at nearly identical percentages.

On a practical level, if you’re at a joint licensee and you’re not already doing so, it’s time to start cross-promoting Passport on radio. Vigorously. Make it part of your annual Development marketing calendar for on-air spots. Talk about it as a member benefit in radio spots and showcase it during radio drives. Highlight new Passport content much the way you promote TV tune-in. In addition to on-air, promote Passport via pre-rolls in your radio streaming sessions.

You can also take steps to get your non-activated radio donors (all donors really) to activate Passport by promoting activation and providing activation codes in your program guide, if you have one.

Pulling back the lens a bit, consider using this data to inform your branding. This Passport data makes it clear that embracing a truly institutional brand strategy makes sense and that marketing yourself as channel-specific or call letter-specific services does not fully leverage your brand and may in fact create confusion. If you’re still doing the latter, consider a more holistic approach that will improve marketing muscle, drive engagement, build more brand value, and just may improve donor retention.

*For the purpose of this blog post, a “radio donor” is defined as a donor who has given predominantly to radio. We find that, for the stations we track, about half of these donors have given only to radio and half have made at least one TV or institutional gift (while still giving a large majority of their gifts to radio). If you’re reading this, it’s clear you care about details, so here’s another one: of the half of donors who have never made a TV or institutional gift to their station, 16% have still streamed Passport.

**Member Services Bureau (MSB) is a centralized fundraising service managed by CDP.