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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
