TV Worth Blogging
by David Thiel, Program Director for WILL-TV
An insider's view of public television programming and the issues that help determine what and how you watch
Letters, We Get Letters
Posted: Monday, March 03, 2008
The Monday morning after a pledge drive weekend often means that there'll be an e-mail waiting for me reading something like this:
Every Saturday I wait patiently until 7 p.m. so I can watch Antiques Road Show and then As Time Goes By which happens to be my favorite Brit Com. I also really like Waiting for God. You can imagine my disappointment when I tuned in to find all my shows had been preempted once again by one of your constant bids for money. It seems to me you could find other ways to achieve your goals without hounding people to death on TV. I am an avid watcher of WILL and would be more than happy to donate, but your mindless jabbering (is) a huge turn off. Tonight, your programming not only stunk, but it was an insult to an intelligent person's intelligence.
There has to be a better way of soliciting funds. It seems to me, mailing letters to people or advertising once or twice a day in a commercial format would be much better than the endless rambling you do while trying to raise money. This is the main reason I have not contributed. Just ask. I'd be happy to donate. But please quit insulting me with these goofy ramblings by people who...very often just keep repeating themselves.
I trimmed a bit of this to remove the personal invective, but you get the idea. While I think that most viewers understand our need for an occasional pledge drive, I offer this as an example of the frustration that some feel when they tune in and find that their favorite program isn't on this week. I do understand it; much of our schedule tends to be more consistent from week to week than that of the commercial networks, so it's perhaps more of a surprise when we preempt regular programming.
Here, in part, is the response I sent to the viewer in question.
I would strongly disagree that we "hound people to death." To the contrary, WILL-TV conducts fewer days of on-air fundraising than the national average for public TV stations. Furthermore, while many stations conduct a pledge drive in August/September, we do not.
That said, the brief periods of the year in which we do conduct our pledge drives are absolutely vital to our continued ability to bring you "Antiques Roadshow" and "As Time Goes By" the other 47 weeks out of the year. As a matter of fact, we do find other ways to raise money throughout the year, including mailings, phone solicitations and short on-air messages. Pledge drives are still the best way to reach out to people who aren't currently members of the Friends of WILL.
The people who appear in front of the cameras during pledge breaks are either members of our staff or devoted volunteers who are passionate about WILL. We feel that having real members of our community sincerely express themselves in their own words about the value of our service is better than having prettied and polished presenters reading a script from a teleprompter.
Yes, we do repeat ourselves over the course of the evening. That's deliberate. We assume that people will be joining the program in the middle, so we need to inform those new viewers why they're seeing us instead of Hyacinth Bucket.
As an avid watcher of WILL-TV, I'm sure that you understand we depend upon viewers like you for the largest part of our operating expenses. These programs aren't inexpensive to purchase, and they wouldn't be here without those who've taken the next step of becoming Friends of WILL. You don't need to wait for a pledge drive to make a donation. We accept them year-round, day or night, and you can find all the information willpledge.org.
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