Station News
Several volunteers have suggested I consider posting a blog to keep you all informed about station business. I'm a little daunted by the prospect, but I do think it's a worthy goal, so here goes.
In this post:
2. End of Year fundraising & CPB update
- Announcement scheduled to start Nov. 29th, encouraging listener donations
- If you work for Boeing, please note they now match volunteer hours! Visit your employee website, or call
- Please make a donation before the end of the year, to help us meet our CPB goal.
3. KSER 20th Anniversary in 2011! - your help needed.
1. Happy Thanksgiving!
As we have every year, KSER will air Arlo Guthrie's classic, "Alice's Restaurant, in its entirety at 2:00PM Thursday. Hope you all have an opportunity to listen.
Also, you may enjoy listening to Thursday morning's Sunlit Room (SLR), hosted by none-other than KSER's own Becky Passarella! I'm sure she'd love a few phone calls of praise, but please don't plan on chatting too long - she'll want to stay pretty focused on her show.
2. End-of-Year fundraising plans and CPB update
As of today, 11/24, we are only $17,121 short of reaching our goal to qualify for CPB funding. To put this in perspective, that means we've raised $281,775 in 2010 toward our CPB goal of $298,896!
Becky and Paige (our new membership assistant) have been working on the enormous task of data entry from our Fall pledge drive, and we are about to send out a final end-of-the-year mailing to those KSER listeners who haven't renewed their membership this year. Last year, our end-of-year mailing brought in about $8,000. (In 2008, we raised $12,000.) We also expect $2,600 in monthly recurring donations by the end of December. Thus we are probably $3k-$7k short of our goal. To bridge the gap, we will begin on-air announcements next week, asking listeners to make a year-end gift to help us reach our CPB goal.
You will soon be seeing an announcement scheduled in the logs for you to read aloud during your show. IT IS ABSOLUTELY VITAL THAT YOU REMIND LISTENERS TO MAKE A DONATION BEFORE THE END OF THE YEAR. Information about what CPB money means to KSER, and our budget, can be found on our website.
In 2009, we ran daily announcements asking listener's to help us reach our Fall pledge drive goal and we raised on average $300/day. We believe this strategy will work for us again this year, but we'll need everyone's help to make it a success. More details to follow, but in the mean time, please pay attention to the program logs and please let your listeners know we need their support.
3. KSER 20th Anniversary
Feb. 9th 2011 KSER turns 20 years old!! This is an historic occasion for the station, and for all who have made KSER possible these many years, and that calls for celebration!
It's also a great opportunity to spread the word about KSER. We've got several things in mind, but I'd also like to hear your ideas for ways to promote KSER and celebrate our 20th Anniversary.
I had a meeting with a few volunteers who are interested in helping put together a promotions campaign for the station, and we came up with a theme:
"KSER - radio for the thirsty ear and the hungry mind." The idea is to highlight the extraordinary range of music and information programming on KSER.
Rather than promote individual shows, however, to make this work we'd like to redo all our promos to focus in on this message. There can be lots of variations and individual takes on this idea, but we need to stick with this theme. The basic idea would be for you to identify yourself and your show, but focus on this main message and direct people to the KSER website for more info.
Please consider producing a promo for KSER that uses this tagline.
We'd also like to make up some cool T-shirts around this theme. If you are of an artistic inclination and have an idea for the T-shirt, please contact me ASAP so we can look at your design!
I'm also considering other swag that we could use to promote KSER and celebrate our anniversary. If you have a strong preference or insight as to what would be the best items to get, please let me know.
I'm also thinking about having a big listener/member/volunteer party on our birthday Feb. 9th, but I don't know what we can realistically afford and pull-off.
Finally, if you have other ideas - and would be willing to help make those ideas or any of these ideas happen - please contact me ASAP. We could use your help!
I suppose some of you might wonder what we do all day, and what our priorities are, so here's a brief rundown:
Staff have been meeting extensively each week to work on the station's 2011 budget, and beyond. We're trying to lay the groundwork for some major new investments, including programming, fundraising, marketing, and infrastructure. We've also discussing our options and plans for reaching the CPB goal.
+Bruce is working on several big initiatives:
- Finishing a 5-year budget for Board approval in December or January.
- Working with our web developer on KSER.org v2.0. We'll be upgrading the site to Drupal 7, and doing some major re-structuring of the database architecture. Our focus is on getting our audio archives working, setting up podcasting, and creating an on-demand streaming archive of all of our programming. The idea is to give listeners multiple ways of listening to KSER programming, both music and news. Numerous other fixes and improvements are planned as well. If you have a feature request or burning complaint, please contact me ASAP. Our work plan and budget for this project will be finalized by January.
- Preparing a final report and invoice to Snohomish County for a $11k grant that I wrote.
- Writing a new grant to the City of Edmonds.
- Researching a new healthcare plan to reduce our healthcare costs.
- Writing an end-of-year additional gift appeal letter and associated website and radio copy.
- Working on a 20th Anniversary promotions plan, press release, website content, merchandise, and a venue for a listener/member/volunteer party.
- Working with 2 Trinity Lutheran interns to produce a short promotional video about the station.
- Paperwork, email, voicemail, and bills. Never a dull moment.
+Becky and Paige have been working non-stop on wrapping up our Fall pledge drive. There's an enormous amount of data entry involved, and they've run into some particularly frustrating problems with inaccurate, incomplete, or invalid credit card numbers. Becky has also been working on a bunch of underwriting contracts, radio angels, business believers and sponsorships. And we're also ready to launch our end-of-year campaign, plus planning our 2011 pledge drives. Tentative dates for 2011: 3/25 - 4/2 and 10/7 - 10/15. We're also considering a shorter Summer pledge drive in June. That depends greatly on the success of our Spring drive. Please DO NOT share these dates with anyone outside of KSER.
+Ed and Sondra have been working on Sound Living, producing weekly news stories and promos for our public affairs programming, and working with volunteer producers on their individual programs. They're also scouting out new contacts, interview opportunities and story ideas for Sound Living for 2011. If you think you might have a lead on a great topic or great interview for Sound Living, please let Ed or Sondra know.
Ed is also looking into alternatives for our current line-up of 3:00pm public affairs programs. None of the syndicated shows are performing well, so we're seeking alternatives to Native America Calling, Parents Journal, and Zorba Paster. We're also considering other changes to the afternoon line-up, including dropping the BBC. That program is very expensive, has a low weekly audience, and gets almost no support during the pledge drive.
We'll be launching new programming in the 3pm and 4pm timeslot in January, so stay tuned. In the meantime, I hope I don't have to remind you, but please DO NOT share this info with listeners or your friends online. If you have a strong opinion about any of these programs, or about any programming on the station, please contact me or contact Ed to share your views. Talking about station business and internal matters on the air or online is not o.k.
+Chris Wartes, our engineer, has been working on too many projects to summarize in one message, but the big priorities are:
- Working on our new KSER 2 and KSER 3 program streams. In 2011, we plan to launch two new KSER channels - online and on HD2 & HD3. KSER 2 will be an all-music stream (available as a web-stream and via HD radio), consisting of as much KSER-produced music programming as we can wrangle into the schedule. The plan is to record and then automate the playback of all of our KSER music programs, giving listeners the opportunity to listen to, for instance: evening programming during the day, weekend programming during the week or evenings, and daytime music programming at night. Combined with our on-demand streaming archive, loyal KSER music fans will have multiple opportunities to listen to their favorite programs. The exact schedule of when your program will be rebroadcast, and how much work and technology it will take to make this happen, have not been determined, but this is a key initiative of our strategic plan in 2011. KSER 3 will probably be an all-news channel, although I'm also interested in Spanish-language programming as a possible alternative use of KSER 3. Chris is working on creating the hardware, software, and infrastructure changes that will be needed to make this a reality.
- Getting the Music Library and Reception Desk computers running again.
- Installing new security cameras and other security enhancements.
- Testing new remote-broadcast equipment that we've purchased.
- The usual FCC record keeping.
NOTE: If you have had any problems with equipment at the station, please make a note in the Equipment Trouble log. Chris looks at this log to find out about what equipment needs inspection, repair, or replacement. Unless you write it down in the log, we won't know about it!
....
I guess this is what I mean about daunting. Trying to summarize a work week into one post, or summarize all the plans and activities we are engaged in is a bit over-whelming.
Please let me know if you value this information, or find if you find it unnecessary.
Hope you have a great Thanksgiving weekend!
See you on the radio...
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