As we begin the final week of our Fall Fund Drive, it's clear that our listeners have come through for us once again. With two days remaining in our Fall campaign, we've increased the amount we've raised by nearly 35% above last Fall's drive while also significantly expanding both the number of monthly sustaining contributors and first-time donors.Both of these achievements are critically important as we work to make up the federal funding we lost this fiscal year and establish a new business plan for the future built entirely on local support.
Public radio stations are only as strong as their listeners empower them to be, and we are fortunate to serve one of the most supportive public radio audiences in the country.
Make no mistake about it, losing federal funding has been detrimental to the entire public media ecosystem. That said, the NPR Network as a whole has come together in truly remarkable ways to respond and support each other as we collectively seek to develop long term solutions. It’s not an easy thing to do since the network is comprised of hundreds of independently run local stations, which, together with NPR, form a complex federation of sorts.Jennifer Ferro, chair of NPR's Board of Directors and CEO of KCRW in Santa Monica, recently described the relationship between NPR and local stations as "married but living separately." NPR public editor Kelly McBride expanded on Ferro’s analogy writing, “I would add that they maintain separate bank accounts and don't always collaborate on their plans for the future.”
In my experience, that’s not a great formula for long term success. Yet, NPR has stepped forward to lead the network in bold new ways. Within 24 hours of the rescission of federal funding, it created an $8 million pool of funds to reduce programming fees for stations that relied on federal funding for over 10% of their operating budgets. JPR was among the stations that benefitted from this one-time reduction of program fees.In addition, NPR immediately ramped up its collaborative fundraising initiative that has attracted some significant contributions to benefit both NPR and local stations.
Looking beyond the immediate challenge, NPR convened a series of weekly meetings designed to build consensus and create an agenda for finding new ways stations and NPR can more efficiently and productively work together.These meetings continue today and have been regularly attended by the vast majority of station leaders across the country and NPR senior leadership, including NPR CEO Katherine Maher.Maher has stressed the importance of strengthening the local-national partnership between stations and NPR, ensuring that stations thrive and can contribute quality content to NPR’s national programs by including their local journalism, voices and storytelling. "It's been a key priority of my tenure to strengthen NPR's relationship with network members and to move the network to a more collaborative, strategic posture," Maher wrote in an email to NPR public editor Kelly McBride. "A premise of my strategy is that our 50-state national network is mission-critical."
The effort to create a new coalition between stations and NPR built on common ground and shared purpose is a major step in the right direction. The result will be a revitalized public radio system fueled by a new strategic vision for public service and a business structure that can advance it.
