Marketing with Mike Volpe

I enjoy a lot of the content on public radio and public TV.  But, everywhere I have lived  - Massachusetts, California, Maine - both public TV and public radio spend a lot of time on air with their fund raising drives, basically interrupting all the great programming I love in favor of advertising for themselves until they meet their donation goals.  It's pretty annoying.

I was thinking that maybe we could help them do less interruption based advertising and use more inbound marketing to generate the donation revenue they need.

So, any ideas?  Leave a comment below!

Here are some of mine to start:

1. Membership. Offer online memberships that include copies of shows in online archives or DVDs, and the ability to connect with the stars of your favorite shows in chats and other means.
2. Fashion.  Sell some sort of "honor badge" that people would want to display to seem cool for having supported public broadcasting - maybe a bumper sticker, laptop sticker, pin or something.  Run a campaign showing celebrities wearing these pins - maybe it could become like the Lance Armstrong yellow bracelet and millions of people would want to buy it.
3. Training.  There is a lot of demand for media production skills, since inbound marketing and using the Internet requires a lot of publishing skills.  Maybe they could leverage their expertise and offer classes (online or in person) on how to produce a good TV, radio or print story and charge for that.
4. Collector's items.  Maybe you could take items used in the shows and auction them on eBay, like autographed shirts or even the chairs people sit in, etc.
5. Custom news.  Maybe you could figure out a way to record a 10 minute news segment to be posted online each day, but it would feature on person (who paid a bunch of money) in the news cast somehow.