-
Period: to
ON-AIR PLEDGE
The start of pledge drives is often traced to the founding of Pacifica Radio at KPFA in 1949. Specialized pledge programming in TV can be traced to Festival 75, the first national pledge campaign. The first national coordinated radio pledge drive came in Dec. '08. Efforts to shorten/reduce pledge surfaced in TV in the 1980s and in radio in the '90s, with modest effect. The largest pledge drive was the post-911, October 2001 at WNYC, which generated $3.14 million from 28,000 donors. -
KPFA holds first on-air pledge drive
-
Period: to
AUCTIONS emerge and decline
-
KQED pioneers public TV Auction
-
Period: to
DIRECT MAIL BEGINS AT WGBH
-
Public Broadcasting Act
Johnson signs the Act -
WCET, Cincinnati launches its first acution
CET (then WCET) hosted its first TV acution in 1968 and raised $31,000 in two days. -
Nixon calls for de-funding public radio and TV
-
Period: to
TELEMARKETING
Stations begin to use telemarketing in the mid-1980's, and by 1989, WGBH raised more than $1 million via telemarketing. -
Period: to
MAJOR GIFTS
Major and Planned Giving has been part of fundraising throughout the history of public broadcasting, but attention to major gifts accelerates in the second half of the 1990s with the NPR Planned Giving Partnership, SRG's Leaders Partnership and Major Gift Initiative, Robert Stein's DEI Center for Major Giving, the PBS Major Gifts Academy. It expands further in 2004 with the CPB funded Major Giving Initiative. -
Reagan calls for de-funding public broadcasting over three years
-
DEI Founded (now Greater Public)
DEI's Inception
The roots of DEI originate with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and its establishment in 1974 of a Station Development Unit to assist local public radio stations in establishing and expanding their fundraising activities. As part of its work, CPB's Station Development Unit began to host an annual Public Radio Workshop in the late 1970s to provide fundraising training. In 1982, in the wake of reduced federal funding, CPB discontinued its Station Development Unit an -
Drive to Survive
NPR holds three-day national on-air pledge drive of soliciting over $2 million as part of a resusitation plan, after suffering a near-fatal accumulated budget deficit. (needs specific date) -
"Cheap 90" study by David Giovannoni
-
MEMSYS software developed
-
Audience 88
Audience Reseaerch Analysis -
WGBH raises more than $1 million via telemarketing
-
WCET Action Auction breaks $1 million
-
Major Market stations use donorCentrics for benchmarking
-
WPBT and WGBH use automated outbound telemarketing
-
WGBH launches Sustainer Program
-
Target Tags Predictive Response Models first used at WGBH
-
Period: to
SUSTAINER PROGRAMS
Sustainer programs had been in development for decades using EFTs. WGBH launches a formal sustainer program in 1994. Interest in sustainers explodes after MPR focuses on sustainer giving in 2007, championed by Valerie Argenbright and Barbara Appleby. -
Gingrich announce plan to cut funding
Republicans win majority in House; new Speaker Newt Gingrich soon announces plan to “zero out” CPB funding.One of Newt Gingrich's first acts as speaker of the House in 1995 was to call for the elimination of federal funding for CPB, and for the privatization of public broadcasting. Neither attempt was successful, though it did keep the hot-button issue in the limelight for years. -
PBS launches first website
PBS established its own web page March 1 [1995], which is now getting more than 14,000 "hits'' or contacts a day. Last month, PBS announced it was moving its Learning Link services for teachers services to the web site. -
CPB Board creates Future Funds for radio and TV
-
Team Approach went live at WGBH
-
Infinite Outsource Recieves CPB funding
-
Target Cooperative Database created to provide Aquisition Lists
-
Virtual Pledge is tested and adopted
-
Infinite Outsource Begins
Fundraising collective to end sharing of servicesNot this way. Infinite OutSource Inc. (IOS), a Tampa-based collective of stations that was backed by CPB to try the idea, decided last month to shut down in the spring. It started with high hopes and 13 of Florida’s pubcasting stations in 1997 and since then has lost all but two of them as customers. Seven clients from other states are also on the final customer list. -
Eichen and Appleby arrive at DEI
In 1997, following the interim leadership of Carole Nolan, Doug Eichten became President of the Development Exchange, Inc., and the organization's offices were moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota. Station membership had grown to 127 members (now called members). The organization ceased common usage of its full name and began branding itself exclusively under the acronym DEI. -
Period: to
ONLINE FUND RAISING ERA
begins in the late-90's as stations add online transaction forms. DEI puts up its first website in spring 1999. Online pledge is propelled by "Cyber Monday" campaign at WAMU-FM in Washington on Oct. 4, 1999, when the station received 3,500 online pledges totaling $227,000. -
Minnesoata Public radio sells mail order sub-sidiary
-
PBS First Major Gifts Academy
PBS is launching a Major Gifts Academy, the first of which will be held June 4-5 in San Francisco, in conjunction with the PBS annual meeting. The two-day workshop will feature intensive, interactive training, said Laurel Alexander, PBS director of major and planned gifts. PBS plans to offer two academies a year, which are in addition to its yearly development conference. -
Period: to
EMAIL MARKETING
PRI and 15 partner stations launch Public Interactive in 1999 to provide a shared web-based contribution and email platform. In 2008, PI is sold to NPR and becomes NPR Digital. -
First Cyber Drive: WAMU raises $300,000 online
Two days of Internet pledging, promoted on-air, brought in 40 percent of pledges at WAMU-FM, Washington -- helping the station pass the million-dollar mark for the first time in this month's pledge drive. The station scheduled "CyberMonday" for Oct. 4, the third day of the drive, promoted it on-air for several weeks beforehand, and then did no on-air pledging that day--and got nearly 3,500 pledges through the Internet in a single day, an extraordinary turnout, said General Manager Kim Hodgson. -
Large number of stations send E-renewal notices
-
PBS Membership Academy
-
Infinite Outsource ends
“The concept makes sense—the idea of consolidating backroom fundraising operations to build economies of scale,” says Sikora, a former executive v.p. of Oregon Public Broadcasting. “What I think happened with IOS is that it’s a model built on volume, and when clients left the organization it could no longer sustain the economic model.” -
Period: to
SOCIAL MEDIA
Facebook was founded on February 4, 2004, by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow Harvard University students Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. The founders had initially limited the website's membership to Harvard students, but later expanded it to colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. By September 2012, Facebook had 1 billion users. -
Contributor Development Partnership is formed
-
Planet Money Kickstarter raises $580,000
-
Founding of Lewis/Kennedy
http://lewiskennedy.com/LKA’s assessment and planning services help you evaluate your strategy, pinpoint your capacity, set strategic priorities, define a budget and action steps, and identify measures of success. -
Period: to
CROWDFUNDING
The signal event in crowd funding is the launch of Kickstarter on Apr 28, 2009. Several dozen stations and programs launch Kickstarter projects, but the largest and most talked-about crowd-funding effort is the Kickstarter campaign for Planet Money which raised $590,807 from 20,242 donors in May 2013. -
Period: to
MOBILE GIVING
: Experiments with text-to-give begin in 2009-2010. In March 2010, Current reports: "Text-giving" remains a sparsely settled frontier of fundraising." Pilot projects at WXPN, KQED and Twin Cities Public Television all report disappointing results. In 20Pledge pages move to responsive web design to accommodate rapidly expanding mobile traffic. -
WGBH launches Contributor Development Partnership
For the first time, public TV will have a systemwide donor database to provide analyses of best practices in individual fundraising.
“We realized that we’d possibly taken our eye off the ball” with fundraising efforts, Abbott says. “We didn’t seem to have ability to focus attention to address strategic issues as the media world is changing. We didn’t have a locus of leadership to help us address challenges or opportunities. No systemic commitment to identify best practices, or share and adopt th -
Period: to
CANVASSING
Begins at Rocky Mountain Public Television, soon spreads to other large-market PBS stations. In August 2011 RMPBS signed its first contract for a test campaign of 480 canvass shifts over two and a half months. That work yielded 1,680 donors contributing an average gift of $45, beating the station’s initial projections for the strategy. By 2014 it has become a major source of new members, brining in 90,000 donors. - See more at: http://www.current.org/2012/12/winning-members-at-their-doors/#stha
