Three Things for November 4, 2021

This week: Some warning signs related to individual giving to public radio. Also, newspaper publishers collaborate to address "churn burn" and four hybrid workplace ideas to consider.

Nov 04, 2021

THING ONE: CDP’s State of the System notes a “lack of overall growth for radio”

In mid-October, Daren Winckel and Michal Heiplik from CDP provided a comprehensive summary of the state of individual giving for public radio and television stations that are part of CDP’s National Reference File1.

The webinar looked at data from the 2nd quarter of 2021 with a tease at how the 3rd quarter was shaping up for stations.

For the sake of this post, I’ll focus primarily on the state of giving for public radio but will also identify trends worth noting on the public tv side for comparative purposes.

The headline from the session is that there are some worrying signs for public radio.

The quarterly year-over-year change for individual giving revenue for radio was down 11.2% in June, which, according to CDP’s Michal Heiplik, is being driven primarily by a slow down in revenue from on-air pledge.

This is also the key factor in the lack of growth in the number of donors at stations since on-air traditionally has been the primary source of new member acquisition. There will always be some attrition in your donor base so, without substantial new member acquisition, stations must raise more money from the same number of donors2.

The CDP data also notes that larger public radio stations have been impacted the most by the loss of donors.

We can also assume that the news cycle is playing a factor in this trend for public radio stations since the data also shows a sizable decline in donor and revenue retention (from 93% in Q2 of 2020 vs. 88% in Q2 of 2021), particularly with first-year retention as noted on the slide below.

I think that we continue to rely far too heavily on on-air pledge as a channel to renew donors instead of making the needed investments in direct mail, email, and telemarketing to retain donors. In addition, stations’ new member acquisition messaging needs to almost exclusively focus on joining as a sustaining member. This strongly increases the likelihood that you’ll keep that new member around beyond that first gift, as the chart below details.

Over the past two years, public radio increased its revenue retention of sustaining donors from 92% to 95%, supporting the idea of the value that a robust sustaining membership program has in providing consistent revenue for stations. Also, the above slide notes that public radio is inching closer to that 60% of its active donors as autorenewals.

If your station has fewer than 50% of your current donors as sustaining members, this is a strategic opportunity that you need to be very focused on in your individual giving program.

The webinar also offered a preview of where we might be headed into the 3rd quarter of 2021, one of the valuable aspects that CDP provides through the National Reference File.

While radio is still underwater, there are some signs of a recovery as we head into the fall fundraising season and year-end giving. However, as Winckel and Heiplik noted throughout the webinar, all of this activity is happening at a time of continued uncertainly from an economic and political standpoint.

Given the worries about inflation as we head into end-of-year giving, will individuals be less generous regarding their philanthropy?
After this week’s election results, will news listeners become more engaged in national events as we approach 2022 and the mid-term elections?
And most importantly, will stations make the necessary investments in their development operations to attract new members and increase giving from existing donors?

For many stations, FY 2021 was a year where individual giving revenue and increased federal funding helped offset downturns in underwriting. However, as stations move into FY 2022, a multi-channel approach to individual giving will be vital for stations when faced with several external challenges in the coming year.

You can view the full video presentation here. You can also learn more about CDP’s work with Current that did a deep dive into an ethnicity and demographics analysis of donors from 34 stations in the National Reference File. From a business intelligence standpoint, this is essential work that we need to do more of in public media.

THING TWO: The Medill Subscriber Engagement Index seeks to address “Churn Burn”

As discussed in Thing One, donor retention for public media organizations is critical in sustaining and growing individual giving revenue. As news publishers continue to shift focus away from their heavy reliance on advertising to growing their subscriber base, they face a similar challenge of retaining subscribers through the ebbs and flows of the news cycle.

With that in mind, a group of news organizations in partnership with the Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism recently announced the launch of the Medill Subscriber Engagement Index. The tool allows local news organizations to see what content encourages subscribers to stick around and lets publishers benchmark their performance against outlets in comparable markets.

The Subscriber Engagement Index will allow news organizations to study audience engagement and digital subscriber benchmarks that will enable participants to build data-driven subscription strategies by better understanding the “customer journey” and what it takes to move casual readers to become loyal subscribers, and, once they are a subscriber, what content will keep them engaged so that they will maintain their subscription with the publication.

With several large and small news organizations3 collaborating on this tool, they will benefit from industrywide benchmarking that will aggregate and analyze user behavior and subscription data. This type of benchmarking is something new for these publishers.

A key player in building the index is Mather Economics, an Atlanta-based company that handles metrics for news organizations and provides the data for analysis in the index.

“The volume of data is pretty amazing,” said Matt Lindsay, President of Mather. “It’s a unique data set for the industry. I don’t think we’ve had this level of detail on digital audiences and subscribers from such a number of publishers ever before.”

“The index provides regularly updated data on the content that’s building reader habit, or driving readers away,” Tim Franklin, Medill Senior Associate Dean and John M. Mutz Chair in Local News, said. “It also includes dashboards on a wide variety of information, like retention rates, revenue per subscriber, and, importantly, how many days per month people are consuming news. In addition, it includes a strategic planning tool that uses current data to predict future results.”

That specific strategic planning tool is one of the innovative features of the index, providing a “What If” tool that uses current subscriber data to predict future financial outcomes of strategic decisions.

Why is this important to local public radio news organizations?

These innovative tools will help competing local news publishers better understand their audiences and, thus, better serve them. In addition, as traditional newspaper publishers focus on building subscribers bases, they are also developing membership models that will directly compete with public radio’s membership efforts. This is not to mention the efforts publishers are making to attract major gift philanthropy from individuals and foundations.

It’s also worth mentioning the collaborative approach that the Subscriber Engagement Index utilizes with a variety of publishing companies joining together for this project.

Where is public radio in its efforts to better understand its digital audiences?

There are efforts at many of our major stations on this front but, as a system, we aren’t making the needed investments or collaborative approaches to bring together the wealth of data within our organizations and across the system to help guide decision making processes to better serve audiences that will lead to increased donor revenue.

Perhaps we should bring in the team at Mather Economics to explore how they might help public radio?

In the press release back in February that announced the Medill and Mather partnership, some of the topics that the project will collect and analyze includes:

Content that drives engagement
Content that reduces subscriber engagement
User journeys
Subscription acquisition levers
Predictive modeling for churn
Acquisition, churn, and lifetime value markers
Marketing tactics that assist acquisition and retention
Average revenue per user (ARPU)

Further, the outcomes envisioned that will benefit publishers are:

Exclusive and unlimited access to the data exploration tool
Anonymized data, untraceable to your company
Access to training and tips for maximizing the data exploration tool
Regular webinars with subscriber engagement index experts and case studies
Exclusive and unlimited access to detailed benchmarking reports with actionable analysis
Early access to additional functionality planned for subsequent releases (e.g., content recommendation systems)

This is precisely the type of initiative that public radio needs to embrace if we’re serious about serving audiences and growing revenue across our digital platforms.

Learn more about the Public Impact Group

THING THREE: Four Ideas to Help Create a Positive Workplace Culture in the Next Normal

I’ve written a bit in the past Three Things about the next normal and our priorities to focus on as we move beyond the current state where many organizations are still operating almost exclusively remotely to the hybrid approaches that work best for organizations.

It goes without question that since March 2020, maintaining a positive workplace culture amid the tornado of challenges that nearly every workplace has encountered has been incredibly difficult.

Over the past several months, I’ve come to appreciate the work of Claire Lew, who is CEO of Know Your Team. Claire describes that her mission in life is to help people become happier at work. The company provides software that helps managers become better leaders.

Lew also writes a great blog with some terrific ideas, including a recent post offering four practices to create a positive culture as organizations move from remote work to a long-term/permanent hybrid working environment.

The challenge facing many organizations right now, as Lew correctly states in her post, is how operating in two team environments – one remote, one in-person – could easily evolve into two team cultures that could have some disastrous effects on employee morale and culture.

So, here’s Lew’s four foundational practices to keep in mind to enable a positive team culture to flourish in your hybrid working environment.

#1: Commit to being remote-first, even if you’re hybrid.

The biggest pitfall of a hybrid working environment is when your organizational practices are not cohesive. Imagine what happens when a team member is confused about where to find answers to the most fundamental, team-oriented questions.
For example: “If I have a new idea, how/where do I share that with my team?” or “If I have a question for someone not on my direct team, exactly how do I go about asking it?”

In practical terms, this means that you’re committing to a remote-first framework even though there may be many employees working exclusively at the office. This brings additional challenges for a media organization since some departments may be either exclusively on-site or others will be working remotely most of the time.

The key to pulling this off, according to Claire, is that remote communication and collaboration should be the default. This allows everyone to have the ability to opt into meetings, decisions, and information whether they are on-site or working from home.

The Know Your Team folks have published a helpful guide to managing remote teams that’s worth a look.

#2: Make the office the new offsite.

In a podcast published in June, a team at McKinsey discussed the hybrid work model noting the unique opportunity of this moment to remake an organization’s culture.

“It’s rare in a leader’s lifetime to have such a clean drop for reshaping how you run the place,” according to McKinsey talent expert Bill Schaninger.

One idea proposed is to use the office as the new offsite—the place you get together to collaborate and think forward.

Lew from Know Your Team is 100% behind this idea, which I like a lot as well.

The typical reasoning for the offsite meeting is about new idea development, collaborating across departments, and, probably most importantly, building trust and dining with one another. Lew adds in her post:

With the office, you have an opportunity to be intentional and purposeful about how you use that space and time together, similar to an off-site. Consider: For your team, in what ways does “going into the office” mean something rather than just “showing face”?

For a public media organization in the midst of enormous changes in reaching and serving audiences, we need to focus on innovation and new ideas. This concept for “the office” can perhaps inspire us to think differently.

#3: Give opportunities to connect outside people’s direct departments.

I, personally, think this is a really big deal when it comes to maintaining the type positive workplace culture where every individual feels they have a place inside the organization.

Lew refers to Harvard Business Review research from February 2021 that reported that professional and personal networks have shrunk by close to 16% — or by more than 200 people — during the pandemic. The article reporting on the research notes that for companies, it can lead to less creativity and more groupthink.

People with fewer connections at work have a decreased sense of belonging and are less likely to identify with the organization, which puts them at higher risk of turnover and possibly even fraud and negligence.

Harvard Business Review notes that “exchanges between close collaborators increased by 40% post-lockdown at the expense of 10% less communication between more distant colleagues.” Lew adds that “in a hybrid working environment, this is only heightened. As a result, the walls of our silos have increased, causing the risk of a fractured, disjointed culture to emerge.”

Lew suggests that in a hybrid working environment, it is vital to focus on connection points between colleagues in all areas of the organizations, and not just in some.

This means that if you have online coffee chats, make sure that they span across functions, and not always just between remote and co-located folks.

The Know Your Team folks suggest using Social Questions across the organization to build trust across various departments and establish a cohesive sense of connection.

#4: Open up channels for real, unpolished feedback.

The fourth and final recommendation requires a willingness to be courageous with a desire to ask what people think about your efforts operating in this new environment of a hybrid workplace.

It’s okay to admit that you don’t know all the answers and create space for real, candid conversations to be had between you and your team. What does your team really think about working in a hybrid environment? What would like to see changed and/or improved?

Claire Lew from Know Your Team recommends that the most effective way to do this is to have a good old-fashioned 1:1 conversation with each of your direct reports. This may be time-consuming, but by asking specific questions, following up to clarify and better understand what the person is thinking, and modeling positive body language and gratitude for sharing an honest opinion with you.

In her post, Lew offers a few examples of one-on-one meeting questions you could ask to each of your direct reports to collect feedback about your hybrid working environment:

What’s been the biggest gap between what we *said* was going to be true for how we work as a team and the *reality* of actually how we work as a team in a hybrid work environment?
What have you noticed being annoying or frustrating now that we’re in a hybrid remote environment?
Do you feel you have all the tools, context, and support to do your best work in this new work environment?

Here’s the link to the full blog post. I also encourage you to sign up for the Know Your Team newsletter, which offers some terrific ideas during this major upheaval in how we work.

Three Things