We moved away from challenges tied to specific programming a couple years ago. Now we focus on larger themed match challenges. For a two-week radio drive, we offer 5 on-air match challenges – VPM News ($10K goal), VPM Music ($5K goal), VPM Internships ($5k goal), VPM Sustainers ($5K goal – welcome 100 new sustainers) and the Procrastinator Challenge ($25K goal). Each day of the week we focus on a different challenge. All challenges are offered on both our all news and all music FM stations.
1st Monday – VPM News | 2nd Monday – VPM Music
1st Tuesday – VPM Music | 2nd Tuesday – VPM Internships
1st Wednesday – Sustainers | 2nd Wednesday – VPM News
1st Thursday – VPM Internships | 2nd Thursday – Sustainers
1st Friday – no specific challenge promotion, allow time for FM director to forward promote | 2nd Friday – Procrastinator Challenge
All of our match challenges are fulfilled by our Mid- and Major-level donors. Our gift officers work with their donors to solicit gifts (via email, mail, or phone) prior to the drive and request that gifts be designated to support a match challenge. This serves as a good touch point for our gift officers and our larger donors love to support the challenges. So far this has been pretty effective, but we are reevaluating how we define mid- and major gifts so we may need to reimagine this approach in the next year or so. We always report back on the success of the challenges. Even when a match challenge isn’t met (which is rare), the donors have always let us keep the funds they’d offered up for the match.
For our TV drives, we just offer one $15,000 match challenge to support news and public affairs programming on VPM. We only do a one-week drive. Match challenge funds are solicited in the same way.
Lately, almost 70% of the funding we receive during our on-drive comes in response to the complimentary email campaign, typically within the last 48 hours of the drive. Our Procrastinator Challenge is always popular.
Would love feedback on this approach. Again, as a reminder, all of our on-air pitching is prerecorded.