Terry Green Blogs About KUSP

On Sunday morning, December 13, KUSP will broadcast a special 3-hour program looking back at the most interesting moments on public radio in 2009. The show starts at 9:00 AM, right after Weekend Edition Sunday.

Robert Siegel and Ari Shapiro of NPR News are hosting; the supporting cast includes most of public radio’s luminaries, including all the hosts of the programs that usually occupy that time period: Tom and Ray Magliozzi of Car Talk, Peter Sagal of Wait, Wait… Don’t Tell Me! and Ira Glass of This American Life.

The Best of Public Radio is also a fund-raising program, tied in to our overall end-of-the-year campaign. During the show you’ll be able to call a toll-free pledge number or make a gift on-line. Nothing fancy — we’re trusting that you’ll take this opportunity to make a gift to KUSP (if you haven’t contributed recently) and ensure that the best of public radio in 2010 will be coming your way in the months to come!

On Monday 4/20/2009 we were somewhat amused to hear a story about KSCO on Marketplace. Although KSCO is a for-profit commercial radio station, they ask listeners to donate money to support their operations. I know of a few other commercially-licensed stations that have done this, but they primarily offer religious programming, unlike KSCO’s news-talk format.

Here is a link to the Marketplace story — this should launch American Public Media’s audio player on your computer.

(and in a small irony, when you launch the player, you get an invitation from Marketplace to make a donation to them…)

We are very happy to announce that Amy Goodman, the host of Democracy Now! will appear at the Rio Theatre in Santa Cruz at 7:30 PM on Monday night, April 13, in a benefit for KUSP. Tickets are available now on-line at this link; preferred seats are $36.00 and general admission is $24.00. All proceeds from ticket sales benefit KUSP.

Capitola Book Cafe will be on hand that night so you can purchase copies of Amy’s most recent book, “Standing Up to the Madness: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary Times” – written with her brother, David Goodman. Amy will be signing books in the auditorium after the talk.

Amy’s previous two appearances at the Rio have sold out, so get your tickets right away!

We are so pleased that Amy can come to Santa Cruz on our behalf, and grateful to our friends at the Rio Theatre and at Capitola Book Cafe for helping us present this event!

About a week ago I mailed a letter to a lot of KUSP members whose subscriptions are coming up for renewal. In the letter I reported that KUSP’s program stream would be accessible in the public radio directory on iTunes. When I put this in the letter, I was relying on an e-mail we got from Apple on January 6 that said:

Would love to add your station, you should have received an email with all the info we require, which you partly provided. If you can send the full details we can get you added.

And then, after we sent them a bunch of technical info, they wrote back on January 15 and said:

Update will be live in 24 hours.

That coincided with when I finished the letter and we sent it off to be printed. But, as fortune would have it, Apple still hasn’t plugged us into the directory.

Guess I should have known better, and if you’ve been hunting around unsuccessfully for KUSP in their public radio directory, I apologize.

(dear readers for whom this post’s title makes no sense: go here)

In the past week I’ve experienced great pride and satisfaction as KUSP’s General Manager… and also great sadness, disappointment, and anxiety. It’s rare to have one’s work life whipsaw so much from one day to the next.

Some of the best news came at the start of the week, thanks to KUSP’s generous listeners. Our three-day special on-air pledge drive generated over $15,000 in additional financial support for KUSP. No less importantly, the vast majority of listeners who called in or made a gift on line let us give the money we would have used for their thank-you gift to one of our area’s food banks. As I’ve said before, the food banks are incredibly skilled at leveraging cash donations into meals for families in need. KUSP listener generosity last week translated into more than 8,000 additional meals that will be provided this winter. So, from all of us involved in this campaign, please accept my heartfelt thanks.

KUSP Reports will continue our coverage on the topic of food, hunger and generosity through the rest of December, and stories will be available to listen-on-demand at the KUSP Reports page on our web site.

Then, on Wednesday, I had the sad duty to inform three dedicated KUSP employees that they are being laid off, due to the station’s very difficult financial situation. Two of the people affected are upper-level managers (one in programming, the other in fund-raising), and the third is a key behind-the-scenes employee supporting our outreach, training, and production work — some of the most important things a volunteer-based station can do. We did everything as a station we could think of to forestall these cuts, but the trends in financial support we’ve seen so far in our current fiscal year (which started on July 1) give us no other viable options.

The departure of these great people, and the reduction of capacity to do good work in these key areas is all the more painful/frustrating/crazy-making because we’re beginning to see so many things at KUSP just about to come to fruition. Our audience appears to be increasing; I’ve mentioned the ramp-up of our station-produced news coverage; we are very close to finishing what I think is going to be a major enhancement of KUSP’s service to music listeners; there are no end of good ideas in discussion about ways we can be more effective partners for the many non-profits in the Monterey Bay area and beyond who do such great things in the arts, in public service, in education… it’s hard to know when to stop.

And yet, we can’t spend money we don’t have. Thus our cuts in staffing and other areas must go ahead.

A day or so after the layoffs were announced, I did experience a small piece of positive news. Thursday night 12/11 we put into service our new emergency generator for the Santa Cruz studio. In late 2007 and the first part of 2008 our listeners rallied during a special fund-raising campaign that matched a federal grant, enabling us to replace a backup power system that had not been reliable for years. I feel much more confident that in the months ahead we’ll be able to be there for you when you need us.

But at about the same time, the roller coaster dived again; first, word came from NPR that they too were being forced to cut vital staff positions — about 7% of their total workforce. NPR’s mid-day news magazine, “Day to Day,” was canceled, meaning a change in the KUSP schedule will be required by mid-March, when the show ends its run. Several of my friends, some of whom I’ve known since my very earliest days in public radio, will lose their jobs in these cutbacks, and I feel for them, much as I do for my friends and co-workers at KUSP who face the same thing.

In parallel with all that, the city of Santa Cruz moved to make deep cuts in several key public service programs, including their Natural History Museum and Surfing Museum. Talk of the Bay focused on this subject tonight. KUSP has strong links to these museums and their people, and their loss will be felt deeply and personally.

And the final blow came at the end of the week, when Shakespeare Santa Cruz confirmed its deep financial jeopardy. SSC’s 2009 season hinges on raising $300,000 by December 22. Details are linked here and here.

The loss of Shakespeare Santa Cruz would be devastating to the cultural life of our region. You can see the ways in which they are inviting the community to help by following this link.

We’ll try to stay on top of this story in the week ahead. And hope for better times for us all.

Starting Thursday morning 12/4, KUSP will do a three-day on-air pledge drive. Normally we only have to do pledge drives in the spring and fall, but we face extraordinary times on the Central Coast right now and decided this was the best way we could respond.

For this drive we are partnering with the Second Harvest Food Bank (serving Santa Cruz and San Benito County) and The Food Bank for Monterey County — so when you support KUSP, you can also choose to help feed hungry people.

When you make a gift to KUSP during this drive, you can choose to have the value of your thank-you gift (which is usually about 10% of your total pledge amount) donated your choice of these food banks, instead of paying for your thank-you gift. Directing the value of the thank-you gift to the food bank is completely voluntary on your part, but we really hope you’ll join in when you call or go on-line to make a contribution.

Canned food drives are the way many of us are accustomed to supporting food banks (and you’ll find barrels in place for that in locations all over the area now). However, we found out that cash contributions are crucial to the operation of these food banks… and they are able to leverage these contributions into very significant amounts of food. For example, at Second Harvest, every dollar they receive translates into five meals.

It’s also a fact that KUSP is experiencing the effects of having the global economy go into reverse. We need additional listener support to make up for other areas of our budget (such as support from local businesses) that are coming up way short right now.

There’s no getting around the fact that these are times that test us all… but we know the Central Coast community is capable of rising to the occasion. During the drive, you’ll hear many stories from our KUSP Reports volunteers — you’ll learn about the exploding need for food assistance this year, and also hear about the response that’s underway.

And most importantly, you’ll be able to step up and help!

In recent months, and particularly since September 1st, we’ve been expanding KUSP Reports, the feature stories about news and cultural events in our area that are part of our morning and afternoon news programs, Morning Edition, Weekend Edition, and All Things Considered. The number of volunteers working on KUSP Reports has now outstripped our inventory of portable recording equipment — the gear they need to go out into the field and record sound at news events, do interviews, and so on.

KUSP Leadership Circle donor Paul Johnson wants to see more local coverage on the air. To make this possible, he has offered us a matching challenge grant. If KUSP members donate $1,000 to buy our volunteers more field recording gear, he will match that with a $1,000 contribution of his own. This campaign is starting today and will run until the end of next week.

You can support our news volunteers and meet Paul Johnson’s challenge by making a donation via this link!

For everyone at KUSP, I want to express thanks for the support we received from our listeners during our fall pledge drive. We were apprehensive, it’s fair to say, going into the campaign in the midst of global financial turmoil. In the end, we made our key goal — 900 pledges according to the unofficial tally — and came within 4% of the total number of dollars pledged during our Fall 2007 campaign. Pretty good results!

Membership is the biggest single source of KUSP income, and pledge drives account for a little more than half of our annual membership revenue (with the rest chiefly coming through renewals by mail). While more work will have to be done to keep KUSP healthy in this financial climate, we’ve taken a big step forward in this drive. So, for everyone who has given so far, thanks — and if you haven’t, you can go here and make a gift right now!

In the past two weeks I traveled to two public radio meetings… one quite small, a meeting of the NPR Board of Directors; and one quite large, the PRDMC (short for Pubilc Radio Development and Marketing Conference). I could easily perceive the pressure on public radio rising at these meetings.

NPR is experiencing pressure on its major sources of revenue while the need for the programming it generates (and the expectations of the listeners) grow steadily. NPR gets significant income through program underwriting announcements from foundations and businesses, and the sagging health of the general economy puts the squeeze on those budgets. Income from the NPR endowment is affected by the return on their investments, which isn’t so great right now. The biggest share of NPR’s revenue comes from member stations like KUSP, and we’re not seeing our budgets grow – so we’re ill equipped to send more to NPR.

At the same time, people want and expect more from NPR, over-the-air and on-line. They’ve resisted making cuts in the news-gathering part of the company (probably the only national news operation in America that can say that), meaning that the pressure comes even more acutely on other activities. I’m sure that played a large role in the decision to end the Bryant Park Project.

At PRDMC, the financial pressure on local stations was evident, for the same basic reasons. “Development,” in non-profit jargon, means getting the resources you need to fulfill your mission. That obviously includes fund-raising. One overriding theme of the conference was that station people need to pay close attention to the feelings and attitudes of their listeners – something we certainly try to do at KUSP. Those needs can be hard to reconcile with what stations can do… many listeners now regard pledge drives with absolute scorn, but there’s no revenue model for public broadcasting that doesn’t depend mostly on voluntary support. Pledge drives, it must be said, give people the chance to become new member-supporters of public radio.

Once a member is “in the door” and we know who they are, we can ask for their continuing support in various ways – through the mail, via e-mail, and so on. Getting that first gift in a way that’s affordable, though, is very hard to do without pledge drives.

As I’ve said before, I’m happy that KUSP’s pledge drives are shorter than most. Also, not many stations have fewer drives than we do (at two per year). But our number of new members is tailing off dramatically in recent years, and overall we have fewer current donors. This is something that’s been true in other communities as well, and I hope it is a trend we – and you – can turn around.

Todd Mundt tipped his blog readers (myself included) to a post by Diane Mermigas that discusses different ways public media might be able to gain the financial support it needs to function in the future. There are some interesting intersections between the ideas she writes about and things we are working on right now at KUSP… particularly in the context of our RadioEngage project. She also mentions Nonprofit Finance Fund, a very forward-thinking organization that has been a primary capital resource for KUSP for many years.

I’d love to know what you think about Diane’s ideas…