Helping
Your Announcers Connect with the Public Radio Audience
By Kent
Teeters
Ongoing challenges for program directors are leadership and being responsible
for staff development. These tasks can be even more challenging when your
announcers are either very young or new to public radio. How do you teach
them to connect with the public radio listener? What do you say to
your announcers to get them to do it? What information can you give them
to foster a better understanding of your target audience? Here is some
information I’ve found useful and the method I developed to share it with
my announcers.
I decided to try using e-mail as an efficient way both to transmit information
and to receive feedback on how well it has been understood. Using e-mail,
you can tailor your “conversations” with the touch of a button to communicate
with an individual or with a full group of announcers.
When I started working with my staff on building a stronger understanding
of the audience, I decided to “follow the money,” using a list developed
by Catherine Harvanko of the Development Exchange (DEI)*. It includes the
names of organizations whose members, supporters, donors, and subscribers
have a high affinity with public radio use. As I shared the list below
with my staff, the questions I posed were, “How could you use the information
contained in this list? How could it help you connect with your listeners
when you are on the air?”
ACLU (American Civil Liberties
Union) members/donors
Amnesty International members/donors
Art museum (local) members/donors
Atlantic Monthly subscribers
Barnes and Noble buyers
Environmental (local) members/donors
Historical Society (local)
members/donors
League of Women Voters member/donors
National Organization for
Women mem- bers/donors
Nature Conservancy members/donors
New York Times subscribers
New Yorker subscribers
Planned Parenthood members/donors
Public Radio MusicSource
buyers
Public Television (local)
members/donors
Repertory Theater (local)
members/ donors
Southern Poverty Law Center
Smithsonian subscribers
Symphony (local) season
ticket buyers/doners UNICEF donors
Wilderness Society members/donors
Williams Sonoma catalog
buyers
The initial responses I got from my announcers indicated that they were
not ready to answer my questions without getting more basic information
about our audience. I needed to provide a context for them about audience
composition, particularly core and fringe.
I sent them pertinent excerpts on core and fringe from Audience 98,** illustrated
with examples from our own station’s AudiGraphics** reports. I made sure
that complete copies of all cited materials were available for those announcers
who wanted to get more detail about these concepts.
To provide further context I summarized some of the most pertinent Principles
of Audience Building, found in the Program Directors Handbook***:
Know thy audience. The more you know about your listeners, the more likely
you will be to provide them with information that’s important and significant
to them.
You can’t serve all people. Audience diversity leads to not serving any
particular group to any great extent.
High affinity in programming is good. High affinity among diverse programming
may be perceived as even better by your listeners.
To put it another way: audience diversity is bad, but program diversity
can be good, if diverse types of programming all have similar appeal to
your core audience.
Everything we do and say
on-air is part of the programming. Everything!
The time spent collecting and sharing this “contextual” material paid off.
After looking at the list a second time, the announcing staff made much
more informed comments:
| “The Jodi Foster character
in the movie Contact said in order to understand an alien, you have to
think like an alien. You kind of have to look at what the target group
is into and formulate a composite of this person. I must fill in the missing
[pieces] with the information I can glean about our audience that the lists
indicate.”
Our youngest announcer said:
“[We need to] find out what the audience is into and what they’re like
so we can connect with as many listeners as possible. That will help focus
promotion for PSAs [and other announcements] by becoming more familiar
with listener interests.”
“I think we should tailor
announcements to reach the largest group of [our core] listeners as often
as possible. Other messages targeted to fringe listeners could be sprinkled
in occasionally, but we don’t want to alienate our core.” |
It became clear that the announcers were starting to “get it,” and were
considering my original questions from a more listener-focused perspective.
The next step was to encourage them to further develop their listener “composite”
with activities and experiences that I suggested in a series of questions:
| When was the last time you
went to the art museum exhibit, or better yet, an opening or artist reception?
When you observe, talk and listen, what do you learn about our core listeners?
When was the last time you
read a copy of Atlantic Monthly, the New Yorker, the Smithsonian Magazine,
or the NY Times? What are these publications about—what is
their appeal? Why do our listeners value them?
Do you shop at Barnes and
Noble? Look around when you do and you’ll see members of our core audience.
What do you see? What are people talking about over their lattes?
Do you get mailings from
Amnesty International, the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, NOW, the Sierra Club,
or the Southern Poverty Law Center? If not, get on their mailing lists
and find out about the issues these organizations (and our listeners) consider
important.
Do you get catalogs from
Williams Sonoma? Have you been to the symphony lately?
Do you go to the repertory
theater? |
All of these exercises present dual learning opportunities, for each individual
and for your staff as a group as they share what they learn with each other.
Each activity lays a solid foundation for more in-depth discussions and
helps deepen their understanding of that amorphous, invisible audience
that’s listening to them far beyond the studio walls.
From my perspective as a program director, it took a minimal investment
of my time to prompt in-depth discussion that set the foundation on which
every announcer, no matter what level of experience, could improve performance
and listener service.
*More information available
from The Development Exchange (DEI), 1645 Hennepin Avenue, Suite 312, Minneapolis,
MN 55403. 1-888-454-2314, fax: 612-677-1508,
http://www.deiworksite.org.
**Information about
Audience 98 and AudiGraphics is available from Audience Research Analysis
(ARAnet) at http://www.aranet.com.
*** Handbook available
from the Public Radio Programmer’s Association, Inc. (PRPD), 517 Ocean
Front Walk, Suite 10,Venice, CA 90291 tel: 310-664-1591,
fax: 310-664-1592, http://www.prpd.org.
Kent Teeters is the program
director for WNIN 88.3 in Evansville, Indiana. He received the Best Announcer
award in the 1997 PRPD FLO competition.
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