This year’s CBAA Conference in Nipaluna/Hobart featured three sessions on fundraising and sponsorship:
- Opening Keynote – Adrian Sargeant
- Easy Station Sponsorship Strategies – Anthony Graham (Binjang Radio), Sue McLennan (MainFM), Steph Riddel (MainFM)
- The Next Step in Station Fundraising: Identifying and Engaging with Donors – Stephen Pyk (3MBS)
Here are 6 key takeaways from these sessions.
1. Use identity-based social proof to lift giving now and later
When donors hear what someone else has given – for example, “another listener has just contributed $X” – their own gift size increases, even for renewing donors. The most effective amount to mention is around the 90–95th percentile of recent gifts for that segment. The experiments that Adrian’s team conducted show donations increase by a minimum of 10%.
2. Shape your language around how supporters see themselves
Donors give through their identity – as local community members, listeners, music lovers, carers, people of faith, etc. When fundraising messages use the same words donors use to describe themselves (e.g. caring, generous, kind) and remind them they’re part of a network of friends and family who also listen, people tend to give more. The job is to understand those identities (by actually asking supporters) and reflect them back in on-air scripts, emails and direct mail, rather than relying on generic language.
Easy Station Sponsorship Strategies
3. Dedicated sponsorship roles and simple, flexible packages drive growth
Main FM’s experience shows that having a staff member focused on sponsorship, even part-time, can transform station revenue. When their Fundraising and Sponsorship Officer commenced (Supported by a CBF grant) this helped the station grow from 12 sponsors to around 60, with most being solid supporters. Most recently have streamlined ten packages down to five clear options, kept pricing accessible, and allowed room for tailoring, which has encouraged even more growth.
4. Understand your local market and build products to suit what businesses can afford
Tony from Binjang Radio demonstrated that sponsorship products work best when they’re built around a potent survey-based hyper-local broadcasting platform meeting your specific community’s needs and budgets with high listenership. It involved engineering a consistent formatic program to deliver the goods to listeners. Marketing affordable products for different budgets (30, 15, 7.5sec) were designed to fit every market segment, particularly small business and large corporates (Corporate Citizen) and locking them in for 12 months increased reliable cash flows with low marketing costs.
Next year’s CBAA Conference will be held in Geelong/Djilang 22-24 October 2026. Sign up to receive our communications to make sure you’re first to know when we release tickets.
This article has been prepared with the assistance of AI for transcription of presentation audio and summarising functions. The article has been reviewed by CBAA staff.