Moderator:

Joan DiMicco, Executive Director, BizLab, WBUR

Panelists:

Tina Pamintuan, General Manager, KALW, using Give Lively for donations

Katie Lepri, Engagement Producer, WLRN, using GroundSource for audience engagement

Kathleen Moura, Membership Manager, WBUR, using Hustle for donor engagement

This panel will feature three successful case studies, as well as outline best practices and tips for engaging this unique audience. While we at WBUR have experimented with podcast donation, what impressed us about these panelists is that they’ve figured out the best practices for making the ask.

Panel Video

Moderator:

• Charlotte Cooper, Director of Audience Growth and Marketing, PRI/PRX

Panelists: 

• Rebecca Lavoie, Digital Director, New Hampshire Public Radio
• Amira Valliani, Co-founder & CEO, Glow.fm
• Kjerstin Wood, Digital Fundraising Officer, KUOW

Audience Questions

Our panelists provided written answers to audience questions not covered in the live discussion.

What/when is a good threshold for admitting you’ve failed & need to pivot, in terms of both total podcast listens and podcast revenue?

• Rebecca (NHPR): I think it’s really important to understand why your podcast exists…if you’ve made something simply in order to make money or getting tons of downloads, that’s not enough. It’s also important to understand that some very small podcasts make a LOT of money, and some very big ones don’t. The most honest answer here is that I would have to know/hear more about the project you are asking about in order to weigh in with a solid opinion!

How do you measure success: downloads, impressions, donations, sponsors?

• Kjerstin (KUOW): We’re still learning what success looks like. Yes, we track downloads, number of donors (and if they are new, renewing, lapsed rejoin, etc), revenue generated from events and other typical measures. But what we are seeing is huge progress in how our teams work together and the trust we are building between different departments that may typically fall into siloed behaviors. We are operating from a place of meeting individual goals to serve the overall mission of getting great, eye-opening content to our listeners and flexible in how to get there. That’s been a huge success that we are tremendously proud of.
• Rebecca (NHPR): It depends entirely on the content of the podcast. Honestly…build your success metrics custom for each project you do, because you will make yourself crazy trying to replicate past successes of you don’t take that approach.

How do you communicate the call-to-action? How do you get someone to go from listening to engaging with their device to make the donation?

• Amira (glow.fm): Be crystal clear in your call to action about how to give, and then include an easy link in the shownotes to the donation page. In the call to action, it’s helpful to say how easy it is to give: “It’ll take no more than 30 seconds of your time, and 3 taps. We’ll wait here while you go ahead and click on the link in the shownotes or navigate to www.station.org/donate.” We’ve actually seen massive spikes in giving when the hosts emphasize how easy it is to give and articulate the process for doing so. A lot of listeners anticipate a clunky road to donating, so they continuously ‘save it for later.’ Make it easy to give and tell your listeners how easy it is.
• Kjerstin (KUOW): I second what Amira said!
• Rebecca (NHPR): Think about the listener and make it AS EASY AS POSSIBLE. Put your donation link in your show notes and tell the listener to look there. ALSO put it on your website. Consider using PayPal, which is a platform most people who’ve ever bought anything on the internet use all the time, whether they know it or not. Think of it like buying a magazine or a pack of gum at the grocery checkout, and create that experience for the listener. Ideally, your listener shouldn’t have to remember to do it later, but should be able to hit pause right then and get it done quickly, without having to fill in a bunch of personal information on a donation form. Email is enough.

When in a podcast’s life cycle is the best time to start asking listeners for contributions?

• Kjerstin (KUOW): I don’t think it’s ever too early, because it sets the expectation that this content they are enjoying takes time and resources to create. The earliest we’ve asked at this point for actual donations is the second episode, but we will do other asks like asking people to pass on the podcast to two friends, rate and review in their podcast app, or sign up for an email newsletter. We’ve basically taken the typical engagement ladder strategy for on-air and just sped things up. Our digital director likes to say that the time from dating to marriage in podcasts is a lot shorter than with on-air listening, so you could see a higher rate of return if you start your asks earlier.
  Rebecca (NHPR): It’s never too early, especially if you’re making something you think people will love (which should be everything, right?

Can you share some successful marketing techniques to drive listening?

• Kjerstin (KUOW): Our marketing team has seen success using an audience engagement strategy that helps influence the algorithms. We ask listeners to pass on the podcast to friends as well as rate and review in their podcast apps. The team also develops robust social strategy and newsletter content that is easily shareable for listeners to help spread the word. We’ve also seen success with doing swaps with other podcasts in similar content verticals, and being selected for new and noteworthy lists has given us a bump.
• Rebecca (NHPR): Buy ads/do ad swaps with other podcasts outside of your station (and maybe even outside public radio). This is, hands-down, the best way to drive listening to a show. Ask your podcast teams for ideas on what shows would be a good fit.

How much are you moving podcast supporters into “regular” members of your station? Does it work / not work?

• Kjerstin (KUOW): We are still working on refining tracking mechanisms, so we won’t be able to evaluate whether our first robustly tracked group of donors from podcast donations renews until April 2020. But overall, when people give to “podcasts,” they are contributing to unrestricted KUOW funds so they end up in our regular membership pipeline. That means they get stewarded like the rest of our members, although we are hoping to do more customized messaging as we move into a new email marketing system that better links with our donor database.
• Rebecca (NHPR): My question would be WHY do you want to do this with podcast supporters? Is it good service to push someone who lives in a different state to think of themselves as a member of your station, or is it a better service to have them support the show that connected them to you in the first place? Is the better answer to change your internal thinking around/definition of “membership?” And then to hyper/custom serve the folks who’ve opted in financially with you via that channel? I think so. That being said, at NHPR we do try to identify folks who live within or near our state and have donated to one or more of our podcasts and then communicate with them in a more membership-focused way. We have some work to do on creating systems around that across teams, however, because our opt-in/open rates for podcast email subscribers are very high, and we don’t want to abuse their trust by putting them in a membership funnel without serving them at the same time. One of the ways we’ve worked around this is to maintain those email lists in duplicate on separate sides of the firewall so that a person could, for instance, opt-out of fundraising messaging but still get podcast emails.

For Kjerstin: When your podcast donors get added into the membership funnel do you treat them always as a separate segment or send them general messaging?

• Kjerstin (KUOW): In an ideal world, they would get a separate messaging stream. Once we have finished transitioning into our email system that aligns better with our donor database, I am hoping to customize messaging streams attached to the campaign codes that we currently use to track funds raised by podcasts. This would still include some education around the larger messaging about our station and how that podcast fits into our overall mission of creating and serving a more informed public.

Do you ever see content donation fatigue with so many asks, often at regular intervals?

• Kjerstin (KUOW): I have not seen evidence of donation fatigue in our podcasts, and certainly not at the rate in which I receive comments about our on-air solicitations.

To the panelists working at public radio stations, does $ raised by a particular podcast go towards that podcast or into the station’s general money pot?

• Kjerstin (KUOW): We are very clear in our messaging that their donations go to support “innovative content like Podcast XYZ.” It is unrestricted fundraising that goes into our general fund.
• Rebecca (NHPR): Right now, we don’t have a dedicated pot, but we are looking at making a change there – I think it’s a good idea to invest directly in the business model when possible, but also know when it’s not.

How do you think about earning revenue off of your back catalog and/or a short-run series?

• Rebecca (NHPR): This is where working with an ad agency and/or hosting your audio on a dynamic platform really helps. If you have the data to show that your back catalog is seeing discovery, that’s a great place to sell new campaigns – ideally, with the right technology, most ad campaigns you (or your agency) sell would be full-catalog, and then expire after a period of time or a set number of impressions/downloads have been reached. The exception here would be a presenting sponsor, which you might want to bake right into the audiofile and sell it as a “forever” ad.

Do premiums work? Branded items? Goofy one-offs?

• Amira (glow.fm): Premiums work, and evidence demonstrates that premiums and bonus content earn higher on-average conversions than asks for listener support. Of course, this has to be balanced with the investment required to produce and offer premium content. On average, we’ve seen asks for listener support convert at about 1-2% and premium content convert 4-6% of listeners to paid.
• Kjerstin (KUOW): We’ve seen mixed results. I’d say premiums are a “nice to have” if you have a highly engaged audience who wants to show off that they are part of the community, but we saw that they weren’t necessarily a major driver of donations. About half of the donors to season 2 of one of our highly-engaged audience podcasts selected a thank-you gift, which is aligned with what we see in terms of people taking thank-you gifts for on-air drives.
• Rebecca (NHPR): We have had VERY mixed results with podcast premiums. Outside/In has been the most successful, mostly because the team has had a heavy hand in creating the premiums and made EXACTLY what they knew their audience might want (buffs, custom wooden pins, etc.) They also created content around their premiums (like this cheeky video and this cheeky video). I think our station has also been afraid to do the kinds of premiums that would actually work for certain shows, because they aren’t traditional “public radio” – for instance, we had a brainstorm when we launched Stranglehold (which is very edgy) about creating merch or premiums featuring a quote from the podcast, “We don’t give a SH*T about Iowa!” I’m pretty sure listeners would have loved it, but it didn’t get off the ground here.

Do you make paywalled content available to members who are already giving to the station (as opposed to the podcast)? Or do you treat them separately?

• Rebecca (NHPR): We tried this as an experiment when we launched Patient Zero. I don’t see a downside to doing this at all. We did it as an opt-in, however, by sending current station sustainers an email with a button to push that would indicate they wanted the content. If they did so, they received an autoreply with instructions on how to get the content.

A comment – many public radio stations deploy a paywall strategy with pledge-free streams.

• Rebecca (NHPR): They sure do. This is a great “precedent” to lean on if you’re having a hard time selling the idea of early/exclusive content produced for donors.

Do listeners actually care about bonus (paywalled) or windowed content?

• Amira (glow.fm): Your biggest fans absolutely care. It might be a small subset of your listener base, but the people who love your podcast and can’t get enough of it will pay for more of it and pay early. Podcasts that offer extra content in exchange for payment often see higher conversion rates to paid.
• Kjerstin (KUOW): Yes, bonus content can be a huge driver for those fans who just can’t get enough. It does take a lot of work from the production team, however, so you have to work closely to make sure you’re all on the same page before you embark on producing special episodes. There are lower lift ways of producing special content (mailbag episodes answering listener questions, extended interviews, for example) and then there are more produced bonus episodes like recording a live event and making it available in the bonus feed. We bundled our bonus feed for one of our podcasts into a “Starter Pack” with an enamel pin and poster that was really popular, along with many people opting for the bonus feed itself at the $20 donation level. Where we see challenges is the technical side of getting the feed into the user’s preferred podcast app, so that is something to consider.
• Rebecca (NHPR): Heck yes they do. This is why Patreon is a thing. And you don’t need a lot of people to make a lot of money this way…for instance, my own (non-NHPR) show has only 1550 or so Patrons on Patreon, and while that may not seem like a lot of people to make additional content for, that number of people translates to $8,500 a month. Not bad, right?

Are there any partnerships between Patreon and public media that the panelists are aware of?

• Amira (glow.fm): I’m not aware of any, but glow.fm would be thrilled to chat about partnerships.
• Kjerstin (KUOW): I’m not aware of any – we had looked into partnering with Glow.fm, but we are a university licensee so there are roadblocks to adding new payment processors and we couldn’t find workarounds in time for the podcast launch date.
• Rebecca (NHPR): I haven’t seen any public radio shows using Patreon, but there are a small number of newsroom podcasts using it, including Accused from the Cincinnati Inquirer.

How do you blend donation ask with sponsor credits?

• Amira (glow.fm): The easiest approach is simply to stagger them. For example, you could have a donation ask in the preroll and offer sponsorship for midrolls. Having multiple asks in one show is normal and doesn’t necessarily dilute the impact of the asks. Another approach is to stagger by episode: one week you might ask for a donation, and the next one only allow sponsorships, etc.
• Kjerstin (KUOW): Our traffic manager has created an inventory tracking system for podcasts just like we use for on-air promos, so that we can clearly track which messages are going out in preroll, midroll and postroll. We have not run into any major conflicts yet, and usually only include one message per placement. The production and marketing team also maintain a shared spreadsheet that keeps track of ALL calls to action in each break of every episode. This is important because they want to be sure that we have consistent and simple messaging. So for example, we want to avoid accidentally pairing a donation ask back-to-back with a “leave us a review” ask.
• Rebecca (NHPR): We do a preroll for the ask, and do sponsor ads as midrolls – we’ve also used an ask as a midroll when there’s no ad booked.

A staple of on-air fundraising is matching gifts. Do matching gifts — be they from a major donor or foundation — amplify asynchronous giving on podcasts?

• Rebecca (NHPR): We used a major donor match before the launch of Patient Zero to do a kickstarter-like “help us make this podcast” campaign. That worked okay-ish, but I don’t know how or if it would work on an actual podcast ask. I strongly believe podcast listeners see themselves as individuals supporting a thing they love, and that they don’t spend much time thinking about other supporters.

Are underwriting departments bringing podcast Sponsorship revenue to the table?

• Kjerstin (KUOW): Our business support team is experimenting with overall podcast sponsorship as well as the traditional CPM model. The sponsorship package they are working on pitching includes preroll messages in all episodes, tags in on-air promo (promo and then sponsored by XYZ). There is a high price tag on this package because it involves broadcast and presence at any events held for the podcast, and is pitched along the idea of brand alignment/affinity just like for on-air revenue. This strategy is still in its infancy. We are also experimenting with selling preroll spots in podcast episodes of our on-air shows, which is having a slow start because our download numbers aren’t quite there. One big challenge is that many of our current business supporters are in the local area, and our most popular podcast, The Wild, has national reach. Our business support team has pointed out that willingness to collaborate in this space has been huge – we had one podcast host actually generate a list of businesses that may be good leads for sponsorship revenue because the host knew the audience and content so well, they knew what would best align to produce mutual benefit.
• Rebecca (NHPR): Yes – we work with an agency to sell national ads, but our local underwriting team can also sell ads. The one challenge there has been working with that team on what podcasts ads should sound and feel like (not like public radio underwriting copy), and how to sell the value of them. I wish our sales team all listened to podcasts, but since they don’t, it’s hard for them to sell their value sometimes.

Are there any examples of securing grant funding for podcasts?

• Kjerstin (KUOW): The only podcast we have received grant funding for is our RadioActive Youth Media podcast, which is a little different than the rest of our podcast content. We did receive a grant for an Emerging Platforms Producer, a position that does a tremendous amount of work on podcasts and smart speaker content. That’s who I work with regularly to evaluate donation data compared to listener/download data for our podcasts.
• Rebecca (NHPR): Yes, Civics 101 is supported by a big grant from the CPB, and we are pursuing other grant opportunities for that show and some of our other shows.

Can you share best and worst attempts at raising revenue? ($$$ amounts, conversion rates)

• Kjerstin (KUOW): Our best attempt so far was very low lift: our host asked for a dedicated donation form/link for them to share out, with one in-episode ask, that generated just under $6,000 in less than 60 days. We have not been able to replicate that success since, although I do think it was boosted during the calendar year-end fundraising period. Events have also helped generate revenue, we’ve held a few events related to podcasts and have seen success with including a suggested donation during the free RSVP process (ranging from $10-30), as well as using a DipJar system to quickly collect credit card donation in-person at the events. As far as worst attempts, we had one in-episode ask that sounded too much like the episode content itself, and it wasn’t clear to the listener that it was a separate ask from the content. We would have benefitted from a little more separation or maybe even having someone outside of the host team do the the ask.

Could you provide some examples of excellent independent podcasts who fundraise well?

• Amira (glow.fm): A best-in-class example of this is Making Sense with Sam Harris. Sam’s podcast is entirely listener supported. There’s no ad revenue, but at the beginning of every episode, he makes an extended call to action (sometimes as long as 10 minutes!) explaining why he doesn’t take ads and believes it’s important to create a listener supported show. He has an entire staff that now helps produce the show and manage his website, and 100% of his income is from various calls to action where people either support the show or pay for additional content.
• Amira (glow.fm) (continued): Acquired is a mid-sized podcast about technology that has generated over $40,000 this year through offering premium content. They’re a small show, where both the hosts put it out in addition to their day jobs. But, they’re diligent about releasing both free and bonus episodes regularly, and work creatively to promote their premium content subscription program.

Thanks, everyone!

We shared best practices, tools, tips, and real life examples of this work, enabling attendees to hit the ground running at their own media organizations. The Summit covered revenue generation through digital audience engagement, spinning off new brands, event monetization, text-to-donate platforms, and podcast donation strategies.

https://youtu.be/dIqNF0-vSXg

[I’m Sarah Barden, a BizLab Summer Fellow investigating revenue streams for WBUR CitySpace. I just graduated from a dual degree program between Wellesley College and Olin College studying mathematics, engineering, and user experience design, and I’ve started a Master’s in Engineering Management at Dartmouth this fall.]

Two main ways to generate revenue from your audience at events are through tickets sales and donations. Making revenue through tickets sales has been CitySpace’s main source of audience revenue so far, with about $58,000 in net ticket revenue for events since opening in February, through the end of July. 

Asking for Donation at Events

Prior to this summer, CitySpace had not asked event attendees for donations. Based on our data analysis, that over 70% of our attendees are not WBUR donors, yet the majority of event attendees are WBUR listeners and familiar with WBUR’s events and content.

Because of this, we hypothesized this audience was primed to give to WBUR’s CitySpace.  So we decided to test asking for donations both at the event and at the moment of ticket purchase. For our testing, we used two different platforms: GiveLively, a donation platform, and OvationTix, our existing ticketing system. 

We first used GiveLively to test live donations asks during events at CitySpace. The GiveLively fundraising platform is free for nonprofits that includes text-to-initiate donations and a live display showing real-time donations. During events, we could project a screen with instructions on how to donate: 

When attendees text “cityspace” to the number 44-321, they receive a donation link where they can donate using Google/Apple Pay or credit/debit card. The mobile-friendly webpage is shown below:  

We made asks at three different events, receiving $216 in donations from 11 donors. There were 306 attendees total over these three events, so only 3.6% of attendees donated, and donated an average of $19.64 per donation. We had widely varied results across events: most of the 11 donations came from just one event, which we suspect has to do with the emotional content of the event, inspiring people to donate. 

Asking for Donations at Ticket Purchase

After the event donation experiments, we turned on the ability for people to donate to WBUR CitySpace while purchasing or reserving tickets through our ticketing system, OvationTix. 

In the first two weeks this capability was on, we received $167 from 27 donors. There were 585 ticket transactions total, so 4.6% of ticket buyers added a donation — a higher percentage than asking for donations with GiveLively at events.

There was an average of $6.19 per donation, which was significantly less than the average donation through GiveLively. This is likely due to the recommended donation amounts displayed. As seen in the screenshots below, the OvationTix preset amounts were 5, 10, 25, and 50, whereas in the GiveLively test, the presets were 10, 25, 50, and 100. 

Our experiments found that the effort to raise donations at events was high (because of our team needing to break the event flow and coach people on texting to donate) and the yield was lower than the zero effort approach of asking ticket purchasers for donations. Our team will continue to run experiments, including one where OvationTix is set to the same preset amounts as GiveLively, to compare more easily. But our overall conclusion is that donations are best asked at the time of ticket purchase. 

Ticket Pricing

Ticket sales were an existing revenue stream for CitySpace, and we wanted to analyze ways in which this revenue could be increased. Since opening, most events at CitySpace were priced between $0 to $20. We hosted 17 free events, 5 $5 events, 17 $10 events, 12 $15 events, 7 $20 events, and 1 $50 event. 

In the survey discussed in my prior post, we found that price was not a driving factor in attending (which indicates price flexibility) and we received comments about pricing such as “Very reasonably priced which makes it affordable for a broader audience than many other events.” ($20 show) and “Thank you for making this affordable for the whole family.” ($20 show).

This led us to believe that we could raise prices for certain events, but how much and when? Our CitySpace team wants to keep some low prices to have an economically, geographically, and racially diverse audience. Raising the price of all events to $50+ would make events economically out of reach for a desired population. But tickets can not always be free or below cost, because CitySpace needs to remain financially sustainable. 

More evidence for raising ticket prices is the relationship between ticket prices and attendance. In analyzing audience data, we found that that a lower ticket price is correlated with lower attendance. In the chart below, each of the vertical bars is one CitySpace event and the height of the bar is percent of ticket purchasers who attended. If 200 people bought tickets and 100 people came, the bar would be at 50% attendance. The data shows that as the price for events decreases, the percentage of attendees decreases. This relationship makes sense because the more you have financially invested in an event, the more likely it is that you will want to cash in on that investment by attending the event.  

Because CitySpace wants to have some free and low cost tickets to not exclude any groups from attending, a mechanism for addressing the willingness of some to pay higher prices is variable pricing, which is offering different ticket prices for different levels of perks at an event. 

Variable pricing is also a way to increase the number of attendees at an event. If tickets are $20, that might attract 100 people to the event. If there is also a discount ticket price for $10, it can attracts students, senior, or low-income individuals that otherwise would not have come. If there is also a high ticket price for $40 with better seats, for example, this attracts people who have more disposable income and perceive an added value for attending.

In analytical terms, a flat price of $20 might only make $2,000 in revenue, but with three different ticket prices, revenue increases to $3,000. The 100 people who bought regular tickets will still attend the event, but different ticket prices attract new buyers, as outlined in the table below:

To predict future ticket sales revenue based on variable pricing, you can use spreadsheet calculations to plan out how many events of each ticket price you plan to hold. For example, say you plan to aim for 60 events in a year and want half to be free or low cost. Predicting the tickets sold per event and how many of each event will show the total revenue for those events. You can add to this basic model premium and discount pricing, to fine tune the model to determine where variable pricing will most increase revenue. 

The CitySpace team is currently testing variable pricing for events this fall, where higher ticket prices get front row seating and sometimes an extra gift, and they will be evaluating the revenue generated from these events.

Summary

1. For donations at events, we recommend choosing the ask strategy that works for you. In CitySpace’s case, using our ticketing platform to allow ticket purchasers to simply add on a donation was the best route forward, and doing live donation asks will only be done at a few events, since it is not feasible for the team to do live asks at all events. For events where your audience is seated for a long, unique event with breaks, like a conference, gala, or dinner, live asks may work very well.
2. Variable pricing is a wise move to increase revenue while keeping events affordable for certain populations. In particular, variable pricing can attract new attendees that would not have otherwise come. It is worth it to try this method at a few events to test out logistics, revenue amounts, and attendance.

Background

WBUR’s iLab produces a variety of critically-acclaimed podcasts, but we’ve never asked our podcast listeners for donations. Our traditional on-air pledge drives have been limited to the region covered by our radio towers. In contrast, our podcasts are downloaded by listeners from around in the world; asking these listeners for donations could provide a new revenue stream from an untapped, global audience.

We identified three challenges for this experiment, primarily stemming from the inherent difference in mediums between broadcast radio and podcast downloads.

1. Podcasts are on-demand, so we won’t have the traditional advantage of a captive radio audience. While a commuter may remain tuned in for the length of a radio donation ask, a podcast listener can advance the audio using the built-in ‘advance 15/30 seconds’ buttons available in podcast apps.
2. We’ve never asked for donations through a podcast before, meaning we’ll need to experiment to determine what messaging, donation amount, and premium offer are most effective at activating the audience and persuading them to follow through with their donation.
3. Podcasts are primarily a mobile experience, and our standard donation form is not what mobile users have come to expect from payment processors. It asks potential donors to fill in far too many fields on their cell phone keyboard, and a lot of those fields are not necessary to process a donation or identify the donor. To make it as easy as possible for mobile donors to give, we need to make this a more seamless experience by taking advantage of mobile payment processing technologies.

First Experiment: Circle Round – Coloring Book

Planning

Circle Round is a storytelling podcast aimed at young children and families. For our first experiment, we offered a pledge gift of a Circle Round coloring book in return for a donation of $5 per month or $60 for a year. The coloring book tied into episodes so children could color along while listening. However, this value was not effectively demonstrated by our donation page – there was no way to view the coloring book at this point in the process.

In this experiment, we placed the call-to-action in the podcast’s midroll. Listen to an example of our Circle Round coloring book mid-roll:

Metrics

• Activation Rate (downloads to attempted gifts): 0.17% (452 users activated out of 262,260 downloads)
• Conversion Rate (attempted to successful gifts): 11.5% (52 users donated out of 452 users activated)
• Effective Conversion Rate (downloads to successful gifts): 0.02% (52 users donated out of 262,260 downloads)

Second Experiment: Endless Thread – Six-Second Song

Planning

Endless Thread explores stories found in Reddit threads and interviews the people involved, as well as experts on the subject. We offered a customized 6-second song written and recorded by the hosts in return for a $10 donation. We went this low in our ask amount in an attempt to make this an ‘impulse purchase’ and get a larger portion of the audience interested. Instead of relying only on a web donation form, we used a text-to-donate platform, with a web form as a fallback. Successful donors were routed to a form that collected their information and preferences for their custom song. As we approached the end of the campaign, we updated the pre-roll to enhance the urgency of the request, and to provide examples of the six-second songs.

We placed the call-to-action in the preroll and varied it week-by-week. Listen to an example of an Endless Thread pre-roll, including a six-second song:

Metrics

• Activation Rate (downloads to attempted gifts): 0.11% (471 users activated out of 433,447 downloads)
• Conversion Rate (attempted to successful gifts): 49.47% (233 users donated out of 471 users activated)
• Effective Conversion Rate (downloads to successful gifts): 0.05% (233 users donated out of 433,447 downloads)

Third Experiment: Circle Round – Summer Camp Sweepstakes

Planning

The text-to-donate tool used in the second experiment showed a high failure rate, so we wanted to try an alternative mobile payment system called Give Lively. This tool allows non-profits to quickly create mobile-friendly fundraising pages. Critically, it also functions with Apple Pay or Google Pay, largely eliminating the cumbersome process of filling out those fields with a mobile device’s keyboard. Give Lively doesn’t use the donor’s cell phone bill to process the payments, a significant advantage because it eliminates issues around cell phone providers declining donation attempts.

We conducted a third experiment, again using the Circle Round podcast audience. This time, we offered entrance to a summer camp sweepstakes in return for a $25 donation made using our Give Lively-powered donation page.

Initially, we did not feature the voice of the host in the pre or mid-roll noting the sweepstakes, and very few users were activated to visit the page, let alone donate. Activation and conversion rates improved when we added a host message as a mid-roll. Another factor is that the sweepstakes offer had numerous eligibility restrictions, including the requirement that a winning camper be between the ages of 8 and 11.

Listen to an example of a Circle Round sweepstakes creative mid-roll, before we added audio in the host’s voice:

…and after we added a message from the host; this addition improved our activation and conversion rates for the campaign:

Metrics

• Activation Rate (downloads to attempted gifts): 0.07% (375 users activated out of 504,460 downloads)
• Conversion Rate (attempted to successful gifts): 8.00% (30 users donated out of 375 users activated)
• Effective Conversion Rate (downloads to successful gifts): 0.01% (30 users donated out of 504,460 downloads)

Conclusions

Payment Methods

• Our conversion rate suffered when we relied on the traditional donation form in the first experiment. Compare its 11.5% conversion-rate to the 49.47% we achieved in the second experiment by adding text-to-donate.
  • This likely a result of a) the cumbersome mobile experience offered by our traditional donation form and b) the absence of a coloring book image on the donation form.
• Text-to-donate platforms that charge to donor’s cell phone bills is not an ideal solution; 55% of attempts failed. 13% was due to technical failure (the donor’s cell phone bill would not accept the charge) and the remaining 42% did not send a second text to confirm their donation. Additionally, with these platforms we are not permitted to re-market to contacts acquired through text-to-donate, and recurring donations are not an option.
• Give Lively did not offer the marked improvement in the conversion rate that we’d been hoping for. However, we attribute that to the low level of interest in the sweepstakes offer. We plan to try this tool again with a more broadly appealing offer.

Donation Amounts

• We recommend asking for at least $20 for a one-time donation or at least $5 for a per-month donation. Lowering our ask for Endless Thread to $10 for the six-second song did give us the impulse purchase volume we’d expected, but our avid listeners voluntarily donated more, averaging $20.
  • The Endless Thread donors who used the web form could choose their donation amounts. When users made their donation via the web form, 25% chose to donate more than the suggested $10; one even donated $100.  This suggests we could have easily doubled the Endless Thread ask to $20 without losing many donors.

Donation Messaging

• The audio clips where we made our asks were quite short, and we’ve begun to hear success stories indicating that a longer ask is more effective at activating the listeners.
• To effectively activate the audience, the ask must come from the host, it must convey a sense of urgency, and it should be placed in the pre-roll.

If you’re interested in learning more about these experiments, as well as others from NHPR and WNYC, please register for our upcoming Greater Public Webinar, Podcasting Donation Experiments With NHPR, WBUR and WNYC by Greater Public (must be part of a Greater Public member station to register) or view our free Bizlab webinar on this subject, Podcast Donation Experiments with NHPR & WBUR.