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In this section, IMA has collected a set of resouces and examples to help you apply online techniques to member fundraising and communications. Before diving into the toolkit for the first time, please take a moment to read the following Introduction. If you feel you know all about the toolkit, they please... Click here to go to the Toolkit Index

Aims and Purpose

The purpose of this toolkit is simple: it’s a resource for public broadcasting staff, intended to expand their capacity to use online sites and functions for membership fundraising and building stronger relationships with listeners and viewers.

Our target audience as we wrote this, was the station

development director,
membership director, and
membership-backroom staff at small to mid-sized stations (that is, for stations with membership revenue under $1 million).

We tried not to ignore the interests of larger stations. Staff from even the largest and most advanced stations will find useful examples and comments in these pages. But, we focused our advice on small to mid-sized stations with the assumption that a CPB investment (they paid for most of this work) should benefit the largest number of public broadcasting licensees.

Suggestions for Use

We hope you find what you need, and find it quickly. If you don't please write to our toolkit manager, so we can contact you to discuss your question.

If you want to stay on top of this important area of marketing we have two suggestions:

First, bookmark this page of the IMA site and return often;
Second, sign up for WebToolTips , our monthly e-mail publication about online fundraising and marketing. It's free and available to anyone inside or outside of public broadcasting! To sign up, use the dark purple bar located just below the navigation area at the top of this page. WebToolTips covers all aspects of the e-marketing from pledge pages, to e-Newsletters, to data synchronization. Each month, we analyze station-based problems and present practical solutions that you can implement in your daily work.

How the toolkit material was compiled

The original toolkit was created by PRISA, the Public Radio Internet Station Alliance, which was later reorganized and renamend ast the The Integrated Media Association. PRISA (and IMA) were formd to accelerate public radio understanding of how to utilize the Internet as an extension of and expansion of stations’ capacity to serve the public.

Deb Ashmore, now Membership Manger at WXPN-FM, served as the initial Toolkit Project Manager and Copywriter. Dick McPherson of McPherson Associates served as fundraising and marketing counsel to the project. Debra May Hughes and Suzanne Brendle from Public Interactive provided online design and technical support. Mark Fuerst, Executive Director of PRISA/IMA, served as Project Director.

In September 2001, Betsy Harman began updating copy and adding new content to keep the toolkit resources fresh. For two and a half years, Betsy also wrote Web Tool Tips, the e-newsletter that was developed to accompany the toolkit.

An important caveat/disclaimer

E-marketing is undoubtedly fastest growing and most rapidly part of the development repetorire. We will do our best to keep the material in this area fresh and current, reflecting our sense of "best practice"--even in areas where the basic practices are still being tested.

Even with the excellent line up of professional support that created the toolkit, the result can only be seen as a first or second draft of an evolving set of practices of online membership work. The field of online fundraising is too new and too challenging for anyone to make final pronouncements about the right way to do most things. If at times we phrased our recommendations in authoritative language, the reader should see this as more of a stylistic convention than an expression of certainty. Almost every recommendation could (and should) be prefaced by a statement like "This could change as we test more and learn more, but from what we have observed..."

Don’t use this disclaimer as a reason to delay implementing the practices we recommend--they are "the best of our knowledge" in this area. And many are based on well-developed direct marketing principles that are unlikely to be overturned in the near future. To put this another way, one of our colleagues has a general rule about applying research: "If you have to make a change, it’s better to do something that is vaguely right than to do nothing." And we feel confident that the recommendations are at worst "vaguely right," even if they will be refined in the next few years.

Sources

The material found here was developed from several sources:

• First, we learned from the field-testing that occurred at the five stations enrolled in the "CPB Online Membership Fundraising Project," launched in the fall of 1999. Those stations included WXPN-FM, WKSU-FM, Wisconsin Public Radio, Vermont Public Radio and New Hampshire Public Radio.

• Second, we drew on the collective professional experience of McPherson Associates, Public Interactive, and Public Radio Management, Inc.

• Next, we learned a great deal from the work of the CPB-funded Public Television project, aimed at online membership work and managed by WGBH

• And more recently, we have relied heavily on the work of the New Basics Project, an advanced E-marketing seminar comprised of representatives from 15 stations and NPR. Under the guidance of Betsy Harman, that project has collected information, refined practices and developed many of the examples used in the toolkit.