Up until the pandemic we pitched in studio, on-air. I’ve been at the station for less than a year but as a long time WFDD listener I know we’ve tried a few different approaches to fund drives: pre recorded, rapid drives etc. But now a lot of us have gotten use to pitching and producing those shifts from their home. So, for now, we’re trying to decide if we go back to in person pitching or continue pitching from home. We’ve been playing around with the possibility of a model it seems some other stations are using; pre recorded pitches during certain times of the day. Since moving to at home pitching during the pandemic I’ve heard that we have more detailed scripts written out by the producers of each shift. I would like to see these go back to bullet points to give the pitchers a focus for each 3 hour shift but not as much word for word structure. Some people enjoy the producer’s detailed scripts and others would prefer to have bullet points. We’re trying to find the middle ground so no one feels over produced or like the pressure to create X amount of scripts for each 3 hour shift. I’m interested to hear how other stations produce on air pitching. The most common pushback we receive is about pitch lengths. For instance we have shortened the morning shift from 6-9am to starting at 7-9am with our on air host covering that first hour alone. I hear that it’s hard for people to keep their morale up during the drives while they aren’t seeing the needle jump during their shift. So hopefully shortening some shifts and adding in prerecorded pitches will help.
