On this Gratitude Monday, I’m giving it up for my local
NPR outlet, KQED. I’m thankful that they’re there to give me Morning Edition
and All Things Considered (weekdays and weekends), and for Wait, Wait, Don’t
Tell Me; Fresh Air; Car Talk; World; and other programs. NPR is my primary source
for news, both on air and online; and for on air that means KQED.
Plus, unlike their sister TV station, they only run
pledge drives about three times a year. (I swear KQED-TV trots out the tired
old warhorses and guilt-trip interruptions on average three weeks out of
seven.)
In the past, I’ve donated money, but this year I decided
to volunteer. So if you called for the past few mornings between 0700 and 0900,
you might have got me at the other end of the line. It was an interesting
experience.
First of all, let me remark on how good-natured the pledgers
are. The very first day of the drive, the KQED people didn’t actually have all
the systems properly set up (which seems odd, because after all, this
definitely ain’t their first rodeo), and their idea of training on both the
computer and the phones was a little on the sketchy side. But callers were
really exceptionally patient as I stumbled through the various screens.
Thankfully, they did have an address verification
capability that meant all you needed to do was input the street address and a
ZIP code, and it filled in the city and state. This was apparently from the
USPS, which is interesting, because my experience
with USPS reps back in December seemed to indicate that they themselves
aren’t capable of extrapolating that information from a ZIP code.
Naturally, most contributors were calling in for the “thank-you
gifts”. Because they’re trying to encourage sustaining (= never-ending)
membership, there were only two levels of giving that got you gifts, $15/month
and $30/month. At the higher amount, the one gift on offer was 125 years of
National Geographic on DVD-ROM, which wouldn’t have inspired me (and they’ve
been giving that away for a couple of years), although you also got to choose
any of the ones being offered at the lower level.
Those, in my opinion, varied in attractiveness. One
(which they apparently thought was going to be a door-buster) was Season 4
(currently being broadcast) of Downton
Abbey on DVD or Blu-Ray. Listen, you couldn’t pay me enough to have that in
my house, and it did not seem to be raking the callers in. (The Soda-Stream
water carbonator was somewhat more attractive, as was a water purifier.
Although they did make me wonder about the quality of the local water systems.)
On the other hand, if they’d just consistently offered
the AAA backpack with emergency kit and Rugged Ruckus solar-powered radio (with
USB port so you can charge your mobile phone), they could have ended the entire
pledge drive after about five days. (Instead, they parceled them out ten or so per
nine-minute break, so that if you called after all ten had been taken, you were
stuck with Downton Abbey. So people
rang off to call back another time.)
Not everyone was in it for the giveaways, though. I had a
couple of callers who made their pledges and refused the gifts on offer. And
one woman raised her monthly pledge from $2 per month to $5, which (when you
think of it) is more than doubling the commitment.
And there was one guy who called not to pledge, but to
express his disgust that the gift for that break was four tickets to the Walt
Disney Family Museum in the Presidio, because Disney was a “known fascist”.
(There was no real mechanism for me to take his complaint, so I gave him the
number of member services.)
My fellow volunteers were interesting. One day I was
seated next to Pep Squad Girl—you know the one you went through high school
with, who oozes perkiness in equal measure with omniscience. I rather got the
feeling that the rest of us were surplus to requirements with her in the room;
had this image of her answering multiple lines simultaneously and sprouting
octopi tentacles to enter data into three rows of laptops…
There was also one guy with Ted Baxter hair and an ego to
match. All conversation with him was a pivot for him to talk about himself.
After a while I was taking the (very polite) piss; but he never noticed.
One last interesting point for me was the whole concept
of the relativity of time. The nine-minute pledge breaks (two per hour) just
whizzed by when I was answering phones. But when I’m listening to them, they
last about 20 minutes, just like they always do.
Still, I’m grateful for public radio, for the people who
support it, and for the opportunity to get in there and help out from the
inside.
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