It puts some human faces on and if it's as small and local as you say John Roundtree might be my best friend's sister's boyfriend's brother or something. It gets me realizing the station isn't just two guys at a monitor pressing "play". Breaks up the droning, lets the insurance salesman recharge. I should donate if I want the show to stick around and make sure they can pay John Roundtree.Īlso, those few seconds to introduce John and what he does eats up time that wouldn't be babbling. I didn't know Sandwich and Fries was a local PBS production, the presenter is a guy from channel 4's news, I thought it was their thing, huh. and uh, my daughter says the bird design looks like the bird from the tweeter." "Here's John Roundtree to tell us about the $100-level gift, John is a cameraman who works on Seed Prices Daily and you can also see his work on Sandwich and Fries which is on every Thursday night." "Hello, this is the book bag, you can see it's sturdy because I put two bowling balls in it. Maybe have some unseen crew come up and tell us about how awesome this year's canvas bookbag is. Put some more faces on screen for just a minute or two. yes, yes it's a hundred dollars coming in from Eastlake." bah blah blah.
They end up babbling and doing that porn thing of just narrating what's happening "Oh, yep, here's a dollar-a-day pledge from Westlake, thank you, that will get a nice David Sedaris book set. One thing that grates about the pledge drives, IMO, is that you get two insurance-salesman-type presenters up there who have a good solid sixty seconds of talking points and have to stretch it out to five minutes. Not "everyone takes a two hour shift" but like four times a minute. Given your constraints, I would suggest switching out the people doing the talking very often. So, yeah, thanks for looking and tell me what you think!ĮDIT: Thanks for sharing your thoughts everyone! I am compiling the ideas here into a list for future consideration. "Our" demographic (the 20-30 somethings) that mostly populate reddit are the future donors that PBS will have to court in the future, and if I had to guess, the strategies used to get donations will have to change in a big, big way. I'd be happy even if this doesn't turn up any actually usable ideas for our specific purpose, but turned into a discussion of PBS pledge tactics in general. Obviously, if we're trying to raise more money, we don't want to be showing off a whole fancy new studio design that screams "WE SPENT LOTS OF TAXPAYER MONEY ON THIS LOL."īut you know, if you have some crazy ideas, suggest them anyway. There's not a lot of money to put toward this. I have no power to change the programming we show over pledge. Our "theme" is Hometown Pride - we serve a mostly rural area, and our current station strategy is to drive the point home that we specifically work to serve an area that would otherwise be very under-represented in television media. The primary goal needs to be to politely get people to call in or donate online. Now before you start suggesting topless college-age phone volunteers or hosts doing lines of coke, I need to establish that there are some basic facts I can't change. People hate watching them, we hate doing them, but the fact remains that its one of our precious few income sources and we need them because people seemingly won't donate without being cajoled into it.Īnd so that's why I ask the television enthusiasts of reddit: What can we do to make pledge drives better? (besides not doing them.) I know, I know everyone hates pledge drives. We don't have a big enough staff for a dedicated art director, so I've been volunteered to come up with some new studio set ideas for our upcoming pledge drive.
I work at a tiny public TV PBS member station.
Apologies to mods if its not appropriate. Not sure if this is the best subreddit for this, but I thought it would be interesting to try. R/television's favorite shows of all time (2020 edition) Voting is now open for the 2021 edition of the r/television Favorite Shows Survey! Vote here.