Follow Up To Fundraising

I'd like to mention one fundraising post-script. As I was answering the pledge lines for the syndicated Alternative Radio broadcast prior to my show, I took a pledge from someone who was an ardent admirer of CIUT. We ended up speaking for almost 15 minutes (I'm a bad phone room guy!). Turns out he listens to CIUT 20-30 hours a week and was raving about how great the programming was, mostly on the spoken word side but also the music shows.

This took me aback - who the hell pays attention to one media source 20-30 hours a week? He told me he is disabled, doesn't get out much, and doesn't have internet access. Oh - so that's who... I'll add him to the list of people in my neighbourhood which includes taxi drivers, cops on stakeout and the incarcerated. No joke.

It really took me aback that someone cared that much about CIUT's programming. So often in North America radio is derided as a dinosaur medium (so unlike Europe) , and college/campus-community radio's influence is certainly on the wane. Sure, there's a wide diversity of increasingly fragmented media sources available, but this was one incident that reinforced that many individuals don't just pick and choose and surf to their attention span's content, they actually value the work that a shoestring, debateably unhip operation like CIUT does. Enough to give money to several shows, including my own.

Thanks for the warm n' fuzzies, Fred. Never forget that a very wide range of folks make up the "community" in community radio.