Making St. Jude and other radiothon's happen in a tough economy for non-profits

With special event's coming in the New Year, like The St. Jude Radiothon, Children's Miracle Network and any cause event for your community, the only way to make it work is to image it. Build special imaging and create a format specifically for the event. One of the stupidest things to hear is, a Country station playing the usual 10-in-a-row, regular sweepers and normal programming and trying to squeeze in the special event cause programming. We applaud you if you already did this for your toy drive or Christmas
specials and New Years programming.

Write and produce special beds with fronts, sweepers that sell the event, even promos. Drop everything else, I mean everything. Don't read liners for promotions, give away CD's or tickets and do anything to deviate from the special programming you are doing. This sounds so simple, but I have heard stations doing St. Jude and only breaking twice an hour to promote the event and trying to play 12 songs. 


At Cat Country 96 in Allentown, PA we would shut down the music the last few hours and only air callers, patients and real people telling real stories during St. Jude and we had 50k hours with Partners in Hope. My last year in 2003 we did $365,000 in market 69. When we started in 1999, they figured we do 60k, we did 165k. It was about presentation and purpose. 

Sure it takes more time and makes more work for the imaging director, but as I use to tell my imaging director's: "You know this job was dangerous when you took it".