Your fundraising and membership drives are an opportune time to showcase how you’re serving your audience through public-powered work and highlight the ways you enrich their lives. Through your Hearken-powered work, you’ve already got some excellent examples to show them as you ask for their financial support! 

Through your Hearken-powered work, by including your audience in your editorial processes, you’re also giving them the opportunity to also enter your membership and audience funnels. How? They’re giving you contact information, and often consent to contact them. 

You can target participants for membership, cross-referencing lists of question-askers against known members and donors. The quickest way to do so is to make sure your membership manager is signed up to receive a Weekly CSV export. Learn how to set that up here.

You can also use that contact information to further build your audience through newsletters and targeted follow-ups on topics you know they are interested in. Consistently creating content that directly serves your audience makes it more likely that an audience member will go from consumer to member or donor. 

For example, WBEZ analyzed data from its Hearken series, Curious City, and found that 56 percent of the people engaging with the project were new leads for membership.They also see a strong performance from Curious City listeners during the pledge drives, said Shawn Allee, senior editor at WBEZ.“We have people say explicitly that (Curious City) is one reason they donate,” he said. “The program gets good on-air exposure (three times a week, during good traffic times), so it’s not necessarily surprising that it’s mentioned as a reason for donating.”A survey of Curious City podcast listeners also echoed that they donate to the station precisely because of that program, he said.

Other organizations have also seen strong one-on-one payoff from these efforts. WFDD in North Carolina saw a member increase donations from $20 to $1,200 due to audience engagement efforts, with the following note: “WFDD’s relatively new series Carolina Curious is not only entertaining but a fantastic way to prove to listeners that you and the news team are listening to them as well. I’d love to see even more.” 

You can also leverage your Hearken-powered series during membership and pledge drives by creating special premiums and perks.Vermont Public Radio capitalized on its popular Hearken series, Brave Little State, by introducing a T-shirt as a special thank you gift for making a donation of any amount. Show host and producer Angela Evancie made a pitch during the drive about how listener support powers their public service.

“Gifts for the Brave Little State T-shirt far surpassed expectations, generating close to 10 percent of the goal for the entire campaign — including gifts from 171 first-time donors to VPR. Since then many of us have seen folks of all ages wearing the shirt, both in Instagram posts and ‘in the wild’ — grocery stores, breweries, hiking trails,” Evancie said.

WESA in Pittsburgh offered a book based on its Good Question! series as a pledge premium this fall. A local company, Word Association Publishers, approached the station about creating the book. WESA chose about 25 stories to go into the first installment, said Katie Blackley, who manages Good Question. They sold 200 books as a thank-you gift during the fall pledge drive, she said, and have plans to incorporate the book into future fundraising efforts. 

Member-only events are also a great way to build relationships with those who believe your work is valuable enough to pay for. Boise State Public Radio held a membership event in the McCall region of Idaho, a first for them. Attendees were able to participate in a live voting round for their Hearken-powered podcast, Wanna Know Idaho, to choose which McCall-specific question would be tackled in the next episode.

“Three people who were new to podcasts came up to me asking for how to find it on their phones, so I got them set up with a subscription,” said Frankie Barnhill, a producer for Wanna Know Idaho. “Two people came up to me with questions and story ideas and I showed them how to submit questions to Wanna Know Idaho.” 

Events that are open to the public are also a great way to build relationships and move people on the path from consumer to member or donor. 

Marfa Public Radio traditionally holds a community block party to mark the end of their fall membership campaign. The party was open to everyone and attracted long-time listeners, Marfa natives, newcomers and tourists for a night of record-spinning, BBQ, and two-stepping lessons.The station also collected responses for their Hearken-powered series, West Texas Wonders, a great way to collect emails and identify leads for future membership. 

Learn more about generating engagement at live events. 

The chance to get closer to the newsroom — and the journalists working on beloved projects — is another thing we’ve seen audience members get excited about.The Dallas Morning News treats subscribers like members, and holds regular subscriber tours of the newsroom. They’re popular, according to Hannah Wise, Audience Development Editor at The Dallas Morning News, and help strengthen the relationship between supporters and the newsroom. They also hold regular “community office hours” at libraries, going out into the community to talk to residents and collect responses for their Hearken series Curious Texas . 

WBEZ has offered members who donated during a certain part of a fund drive to be entered into a drawing to get the chance to sit in on the edit of a Curious City episode. 

During one pledge drive, WBEZ produced a two-hour Curious City pledge special. The special was a hybrid, featuring best-of Curious City pieces and a lightning round of questions posed to a Chicago historian. The questions were specific to the special and were later turned into a podcast episode and digital piece. The station promoted the special over email and worked up a separate page for donations surrounding that work. 

It never hurts to remind your audience of the value of your Hearken-powered work during membership and fundraising drives. 

During drive, send a special email to potential members highlighting the work your newsroom was able to produce with the help of your audience. Show your appreciation for your audience and emphasize how that kind of journalism is not possible without their support.  

Here’s an example from Marfa Public Radio: 

Over an incredibly busy few months at the station, it’s been the support and enthusiasm of Marfa Public Radio members that’s sustained, motivated, and powered us. We’re excited, and we hope you’re just as excited about all that’s been accomplished and fostered here in that time, including:...The successful launch of the station’s ongoing West Texas Wonders program, which used specific questions from residents across the region as the launching point for real stories we covered.

If you’re a TV or radio organization that needs to raise money, don’t forget to include your public-powered work in your fundraising scripts. As you develop those scripts, here’s what you should include in your messaging: 

The footer space in form, poll, and list embeds is a great place to include a brief pitch to donate! You can use a hyperlinked image text with a UTM tracking code to take people to your donation page.