Betsy replied to my second post on "Pledge Drive Don’ts" and mentioned Ira Glass (from This American Life) and his Pledge Drive bit about how a WBEZ-FM listener will enthusiastically fork over $1.81 every day at Starbucks and listen to WBEZ five hours a day but ... he hasn't made a pledge to WBEZ.
Click here to stream the "Ira Glass Guilt Trip” bit . Good stuff. No, wait … GREAT STUFF. It is worth a listen. (Click here to view the track listing of the audio stream.)
I also found this interesting tid-bit from The Onion. In their interview with Ira Glass, Ira goes off on why he hates pledge drives and what he has done to make pledge drives less boring.
The Onion: You mentioned pledge drives. You're famous for taking a very proactive stance toward fundraising. How do you feel about pledge drives in general?
Ira Glass: Like all public-radio listeners, I hate the pledge drives. In fact, at one point, the public-radio system did audience surveys where -- I'm not even sure I'm allowed to talk about this in public, but anyway -- they did these surveys, and our listeners said that during the pledge drive, they felt like their local radio station had been taken over by these morons that they hated.
They felt that the people on the air were stupider, and they hated them, and they felt they did not share the values of the programs that they listen to, where people seemed to be kind of smart and inquisitive and alive.
So my feeling about the pledge drive is that I don't like things to be bad. I just didn't want to be boring on the radio. I couldn't face that, so we put a lot of work into trying not to make it boring, some years with more success than others.
There have been two different times, once in Chicago and once in Boston, where we did a thing where if you called during our show, once every five minutes we'd choose another name from a hat, and I'd deliver a pizza to that person that day. At the end of an hour, I had to deliver 12 pizzas to people.
John... thanks for these fascinating posts. I loved the Ira Glass audio stream.
It strikes me that the challenge NPR faces is one that faces so many organisations that are trying to do the right thing, be generous, give things away, share knowledge, liberate ideas..
How to get people to value things that seem to be free but have taken effort to create... how to get people to value community...
Isn't it interesting that somehow Ira manages to do the guilt trip thing in a palatable way... the direct focus on the individual. And how interesting how his chosen listener squirms and still procrastinates. Somehow the documentary quality of it conveys honesty and authenticity.
I loved his challenge "Can you explain the tone of your voice right now?" "You don't have to feel bad about this" I loved his riposte to the idea that the Federal Goverment should deal with the problem, it was so authentic and passionate.
Your point about featuring the listeners seems very smart to me.
Posted by: John Moore (the British one) | April 01, 2004 at 03:21 AM