Fund raising is the economic engine that pulls public radio’s programming forward. An important Station Resource Group goal is to increase significantly the financial support of member stations, especially community-based support from individuals and businesses. SRG helps members strengthen their fund raising capacity in many ways. Past activities have included research on "Making the Case" for public support, benchmarking local fund raising performance, and tracking long-term national trends in public radio’s financial support. Since 1996, SRG has launched four major projects to accelerate stations’ financial growth. Each is supported by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s Future Fund and investments by participating SRG member stations. Leaders Partnership In 1996 SRG and six members with outstanding records in local development launched a collaboration aimed at fund raising "breakthroughs." The theory was that our best performers in recent years would be a rich source of ideas about next steps to move our field forward and skilled "testers" of how those ideas work in practice. The partners decided to focus on major gifts from individual supporters. Working together, we retained a major gifts consulting firm, Results Group International, and designed and implemented a year-long work plan. After one year, the stations increased their major gifts ($1,000+) by 62%, bringing $371,000 in new funding to public radio. Learn more about The Leaders Partnership. Brilliant on the Basics: Listener Support Contributions from individual listeners arrive a few dollars at a time. But together, these contributions are the largest source of unrestricted funds for most SRG members. If we can boost, even just a little, the amount of the average gift, the renewal rate, or the number of additional gifts, these differences will translate as major gains when they are multiplied across the tens of thousands of such transactions per year. Brilliant on the Basics is a collaboration of seventeen SRG members aimed at discovering and implementing the very best practices in the art and science of listener support. The project is tapping leading fund raisers from within and outside public radio for analysis of membership programs and databases, performance benchmarking, research, and reviews of our current operating techniques. Learn more about Brilliant on the Basics. Major Gifts Initiative Building on the success of the Leaders Partnership, SRG developed a one-year curriculum to start or strengthen major gifts programs at additional member stations. SRG expects, by the end of 1999, that nearly all its members will have major gifts programs in place. Twelve stations started the Major Gifts Initiative in June 1998. More will enter the program in 1999. Learn more about the Major Gifts Initiative. Foundation Project The Foundation Project is an exploration of SRG members’ experiences with foundation funding and an effort to devise projects and strategies that will make a more powerful case to the nation’s foundation community. We are especially focused on collaborative projects. Learn more about the Foundation Project.