We have been doing on-air fundraising for decades, way before I started at WFSU. I have been involved in the planning process for all nine years I’ve been here. Our membership department plans the drives then works with our radio production engineers to execute them.
It really resonated with me when Jay said to remember that the way you get members is the way you retain members. I have tried to dial back the expensive and hard to get incentives. I have been on a mission to train our listeners that giving is its own reward! But we do still offer t-shirts and totes, etc. Just try to limit the options to keep our costs down, and to keep our on-air messaging focused on the mission, not some random product that needs a bunch of explanation.
We are a small department, so I manage all our fundraising elements from individuals. We time our direct mail campaigns to support our drives, and we do use emails for pre-drive, and during the drive. Social media has never been productive for us so we have largely stopped doing fundraising on social. We do post, but try to make the posts evergreen since the algorithms can mean that your followers may see your post after the drive has ended. We use volunteers for most of our live pitching, so they also post on their social channels to help- but it works better when they send emails to their network!