NONPROFIT BRANDING: Revisiting the University Budget Clowns

The last post expressed this heresy: despite self-serving claims by university administrators, higher education budgets are driven by political constituencies, not by institutional priorities. This budget circus is an adverse environment for the radio station without a strong internal constituency. (Missed that post? Try here.)

To flourish during tough economic times your station needs to have its brand supported by a robust group within the university. Begin with a simple process of acknowledging the institution in ways that don’t challenge your journalistic ethics. Consider the following steps:

FIRST STEP: Understand the two reasons you need to re-position your brand internally to accommodate the way the budget game is played.

• Reason #1 is that your station is not essential to the higher education enterprise. Nearly everything else in the budget is more important to the institution’s mission.

• Reason #2 is that the mission of every public radio station is focused on the external public.  That focus causes most stations to pay insufficient attention to the internal environment of the host institution. This creates political vulnerability.

SECOND STEP: Put in place several minor but effective interactions with the university’s internal constituencies. Here are five easy places to start….

Scatter Goodies: Every station has mugs with station and program logos left over from prior fundraisers. Scatter them around campus. Put some in the student government offices. In the faculty senate offices. In the alumni office, the development office, the faculty lounges. Don’t allow leftover mugs and other branding products be wasted by sitting in your premium closet. Put them to work within the university. Because institutional budgeting is political, your goal is to make members of the university community think of your station as their station.

Mention The Home Team: Many stations feel uncomfortable about reporting on university activities. That attitude is nonsense. Do it properly. Do it modestly. AND do it for this journalistic reason: within your broadcast reach is a vast network of groups that are centered on and/or affected by the institution. They want the university news you can deliver.

Those constituencies include faculty, employees, students, families of students, suppliers to the university, sports fans, local business people, area media, neighbors and many other groups. They combine a media market of size, complexity and interest. That means covering news generated by your licensee is surely not journalistic pandering. So suck it up – report on athletic scores, cover the newest flare-up in the faculty senate, mention the actions of the board of trustees, broadcast an excerpt or two from the president’s annual State of the University Address. Because institutional budgeting is political, your goal is to make members of the university community think of your station as their station.

Play Host: You sometimes arrange tours for your listeners. Go out of your way to offer tours to any university group above 8 or 10 people. Periodically invite faculty, staff & students over for a 20 minute tour of your studio plus a 15 minute Q&A session about your public service mission and how you accomplish it. Because institutional budgeting is political, your goal is to make members of the university community think of your station as their station.

Admit Your Parentage: Your station is not an orphan. As a former university vp, I have wondered for 25 years why so many stations express concern about mentioning the university in their station ID.  You always existed in an arena of political budgeting, the uncertainty of which is today compounded by the pressures of financial austerity. Given that context, how can there be resistance to minor steps that build the value of your brand within the university?

Turn this proposition around – what will members of the university community think about the station if it disassociates itself from the university which is its licensee – and which is also their employer or alma mater? Because institutional budgeting is political, your goal is to make members of the university community think of your station as their station.

Emerge From Your Studio; See If You Cast a Shadow: Look at the president’s daily workload – a telephone argument with the governor, an unsettling meeting about faculty complaints, a too-long phone call from the chairman of the board, an intense review of defense pleadings in a lawsuit against the institution, a meeting with contractors over the escalating cost of roof replacement on the north campus and thoughtful analysis of memos asking for reallocation of institutional resources in favor of a petitioner….all that before lunch!

Yet the president will still find time to light the campus Christmas tree and give the first toast at the faculty awards dinner and march in the founder’s day parade and speak at the honors convocation and attend the Phi Beta Kappa reception and stop in at the secretary appreciation luncheon. Why does the president, swamped by complex issues of substance and working 70 hours a week, make an appearance at these low-impact events? Because they are important to the university’s constituencies. In these difficult times I suggest that if the president can acknowledge these constituencies and their events, so can your station – even if it only sends an intern to do a couple interviews that never reach air. Because institutional budgeting is political, your goal is to make members of the university community think of your station as their station.

There are many ways to build a constituency within the institution. Fail to take those steps, fail to realize that you operate in a swamp of political budgeting, and you increase your peril at the hands of senior administrators who can become budget predators because they do represent internal constituencies.

Up Next: Statistics. Interesting ones. Stuff that will help make informed choices when selecting branding products.  The next post features market research data about what logo-ware items people prefer, how long they keep them, how many impressions are made by each and how the cost per impression for specific products compares to the cost of other media like TV and newspaper ads. That last metric is especially interesting – you’ll find the right product will give your logo more exposure than a TV  or newspaper ad at a lower price per impression!