It’s Time to Raise the Price of PBS Passport
And other hot takes based on public media fundraising data
Last week, I heard something striking on my local NPR affiliate. They stated exactly how much money the station stood to lose if the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s funding were rescinded and were fundraising for that exact amount. If you’ve ever paid attention to how public media stations ask for donations, you’ll notice that this is a departure from the norm.
Take this national fundraising spot I produced for NPR in 2020, for example: My primary goal was to establish an emotional connection between the listener and their local station’s programming. Or, if it already existed, to remind them of it. The station’s fiscal need for the listener’s donation comes from a local host at the very end, almost as an “oh, by the way” cherry on top. Not all fundraising messaging is structured this way of course, but most follow a strategy that emphasizes personal needs first and station needs second.
It’s important to keep this strategy in mind as we look at donation data for public media stations for two reasons: One, because that’s how public media has approached fundraising up until this point; and two, because the threats to public media’s federal funding have upended it.
Public Media Fundraising: 2020 to Now
Even before President Trump’s inauguration, public media was facing significant headwinds. A private report commissioned by a group of public television stations last year reportedly showed that PBS’s prime time broadcasting audience had essentially halved over the past decade. Another from the Radio Research Consortium showed listening declines so large among public radio stations that the organization used the word “crisis” in the report’s title. Both sent jolts through the public media ecosystem.
Of course, smaller audiences also mean a smaller pool of potential donors. In their most recent “State of Fundraising for Public Media” study, Contributor Development Partnership reported several worrying declines in new donors for both public radio and television stations since 2020. As you can see from the graph above, radio stations were the most affected, losing approximately 13% of their total new donors between 2020 and 2024. This is a trend that was seen throughout the entire nonprofit sector.
The common explanation for these audience and donor losses is that the pandemic upended long-held listening and viewing habits among public media’s audience. With several years of consistent downward audience trends behind us as well as the recent economic uncertainty surrounding tariffs, it’s hard to see how public media’s situation in this context could improve.
Where We Currently Stand
In my dataset from FY2023, I found that public media stations relied on small-gift donors (meaning less than $1,000 per year) for an average of 20.5% of their total revenue. Unlike federal revenue, I view above-average reliance on donations as a neutral-trending-positive attribute: The challenges we discussed earlier regarding new donor growth (or the lack thereof) make high reliance a risk for station revenues, but it’s also, more or less, the unofficial goal of public media.
The risks of low reliance, on the other hand, are completely dependent on how much revenue a station is bringing in through other means. Take a look at the graph above: 90% of all public media stations rely on small-gift donations for 40% or less of their total revenue, and no stations with a total revenue of over $100 million have a reliance on those donations of more than 17%.
Indeed, if we rank stations by their total revenue and compare how much they relied on federal funding in FY23 versus how much they relied on small-gift donations, we can see that both attributes basically shrink as a station’s total revenue gets larger…though not at the same rate.
If we were to draw a trend line for reliance on federal support, for example, it would pretty much look like an exponential decay curve. There’s a reliable correlation between revenue size and reliance on federal support across all of the surveyed stations. The correlation between donation reliance and revenue, however, doesn’t strengthen until station revenue passes the $30 million mark. A trend line for this, if we had to draw one, would either be linear or maybe an inverted S-curve, though the distribution of donation reliance among stations with revenues under $30 million is pretty uniform.
Overall, total revenue isn’t a good predictor of reliance on small-gift donations for all but the very largest stations.
TV vs. Radio (Again)
One of the things that has been most surprising to me since I started on this station data journey is the stark difference between public television stations and public radio stations. I found that, on average, public media stations received $150 in small-gift donations per donor per year, or $12.50 a month. Now take a look at the bar chart above: NPR affiliates received an average of $168 per donor per year, while PBS affiliates were only received $118. That’s basically the difference between $14 a month and $10 a month - a pretty big gulf for stations that could soon be losing their federal revenue.
For most of my data, stations unaffiliated with NPR or PBS tended to more closely resemble NPR stations, mostly because they tend to also be radio stations. This metric wasn’t any different.
So how do we explain this discrepancy? We know that public television stations have generally have higher operating costs than public radio stations do. They also, arguably, have more star power than their radio counterparts. Shouldn’t public television stations be able to convince each viewer to give more?
One simple explanation could be that radio listeners tend to listen while engaging in another task - mostly driving - and therefore are exposed to more fundraising messaging.
Contributor Development Partnership, however, continually points to PBS Passport as a root cause. Many stations don’t ask for a donation of more than $5 a month to gain access to Passport. The only services that even come close to that price point are the ad-supported tiers of Netflix, Paramount+, and Peacock at $7.99. That is an absolute bargain.
Using our station financial data, let’s do some very quick and unofficial math to estimate the potential small-gift revenue increase if each PBS station were to raise the minimum monthly giving level needed for Passport to $8 a month - in line with the next-cheapest streaming service tiers:
There are 114 PBS stations in my dataset with small-gift donation data. If the average monthly gift per donor among these stations was $9.80 (dividing the yearly average of $117.62 by 12), that means that 51% of their small-gift revenue was theoretically from PBS Passport. That’s $172.18 million out of a combined small-gift revenue of about $337.6 million.
We want to raise the minimum donation needed for PBS Passport by 60% - an additional $3 to the base $5 - which theoretically would add $103.31 million to our small-gift revenue. That means, with a $3 minimum donation increase for Passport, PBS stations could potentially increase their total small-gift revenue by as much as 30%.
Of course, this assumes that every PBS station small-gift donor at the $5 or more a month level would give an extra $3 a month for Passport, a wildly unrealistic scenario. Additionally, CDP has also speculated that any decline in gifts and/or donor growth related to the streaming service could simply be due to a lack of interest.
Still, the point remains: PBS Passport, at the $5 a month level, is underpriced compared to its competitors. A modest price increase could help vulnerable PBS stations stay afloat.
Final Thoughts
Fundraising is hard, and there are a lot of smart people who have thought long and hard about how to raise more money from their station’s audience. If you’re one of those people, take these data and insights as a jumping-off point.
As we discovered, there’s no reliable predictor for how much a station will rely on small-gift donations for their total revenue (apart from being a massive station), which means that there’s not necessarily a good or bad level of reliance for stations. WGBH’s revenue was over $250 million in 2023, and they only relied on small-gift donations for 4.6% of their budget. We certainly wouldn’t say the Boston behemoth at risk.
NPR stations receive significantly more per donor per month than PBS stations do - you shouldn’t bet on seeing a 30% increase in total small-gift donation revenue, but raising the minimum PBS Passport donation to match other streaming services is something stations should seriously consider. Public media has suggested $5 a month as the minimum sustainer donation for a long time, maybe raising that is something all stations, not just PBS affiliates, should consider too.
As always, here’s a shareable dashboard containing this newsletter’s graphs and data. If you enjoyed this article, please leave a like. It’s very much appreciated.