Report from the IGM to LSB

Our final fund drive tallies for the spring drive have not been totaled, but it appears as if we will fall woefully short of our goal of 950k. To date the final total is closer to 670k, a deficiency of more than 300k. Pacifica National has done a six state wide mail drop for us.

Lonnie Hicks, CFO has indicated the drop may yield close to 100k, and we can do another one in the fall. Our next on air fund drive is called a 'mini' fund drive. It begins July 11 th. Currently there is a debate on whether it should be converted to a major one, seeing as how we are in such a financial bind.

We want to engage more of our producers in creating premiums for our drives as well as using them more during the drive. I feel that many times we actually divorce ourselves from one of our most valuable assets, our on air talent, for the sake of a DVD or CD. It appears to me that it also would be better to utilize the talents of some of the on-air staff to pitch.

In the meantime we are working hard to extract more money from our major donors. Last week we had a major donor event which was well attended. We intend to have another event for them in order to create a sort of community of major donors so we might be able to decrease our dependence on the onair fundraisers.

We will also sponsor a wellness/health fair during this next drive. This drive will bring together health practitioners and other health related vendors from the metro area to WBAI where they will conduct day long events. Lectures and actual hands on activities designed to bring more energy and volunteers, as well as a more festive atmosphere to the station, thus translating to more on air energy as it applies to raising funds.

I have also been active in meeting philanthropic individuals who I am told would be supportive of our station and its ongoing fund raising efforts. I plan to meet with them in the coming weeks, and am confident we will be able to establish some sort of mutually beneficial relationship with them.

We are also looking to change programming in the coming months. We realize some of the problems we have raising funds starts with programs and program placement. We have some recommendations from Pacifica National

as well as many proposals from local individuals, so we should be able to make some worthwhile changes soon.

It also seems as if we need to be more visible at community wide events. Therefore I am working to have as many of our producers as possible do things like MC at various outdoor concerts as well as other city wide events. But that will only happen if the producers are willing to participate.

Our renewal campaign is pretty stale and hasn't been revisited in quite a while. I am going to revising the text as well as the look and feel and examine each of the segments we mail to determine if we are really providing the desired results (that we're bringing in more money than it costs to mail out). I am going to examine the Memsys reports for return numbers in addition to looking at the vendor contract to see if we might be able to get a better deal from another mailing house as opposed to just being under contract with our current one.

We will run an aggressive on air fund raising campaign via carts, and live reads to engage our listeners to visit the website and make a pledge, which means we have to change the appearance of the site to easily direct people who want to give (the model for this is KPFA's site). Web pledging will be part of our standard on air scripts. Finally we will increase the number of premiums we currently offer online. This should take about two weeks to implement.

Lately we have young people who have wanted to work with the station. We are in the process of really developing a training program in order to entice younger people and provide them as well as us with a solid group of younger future producers.

That's it for now.