the community radio toolkit

Monitoring is the process of recording what you do for the benefit of others – usually funders. Evaluation is what you do for your own benefit and sometimes for funders, to improve your performance as a station, and it is another task that is easily forgotten about. Perhaps you are obtaining results which look great on paper and tick all the relevant boxes for your funders and Ofcom alike. But what do your volunteers think? Are they bored by your training, unhappy with your schedule and alienated from each other and the staff? What do your listeners think? Do you even have any? Evaluating your performance is key to identifying your shortcomings and failures and building on your achievements and strengths.

Everything you do must be constantly measured against your stated intents as a station. If your mission statement says you are going to change the lives of local residents, ask yourself how much change you see around you, and whether your day to day activities are responsible.

One popular way of thinking about evaluation is as a spiral (or more simply) a loop (see Figure 6.01).Every time you consider beginning a new project or changing your activities at the station, you should compare that activity against your stated aims,prepare for the activity and set targets, perform the activity, measure the outcome and compare to targets, review and evaluate the performance, then compare the results to your stated aims.

FIGURE 6.01

Evaluation loop for new activities

Although in theory that looks complex, in practice it is mostly common sense. Here’s a purely hypothetical example. You spot some grant money available to increase the profile of over-65s in the media. What happens next?

1. You ask yourselves whether this fits in with the core objectives of your station and whether or motto begin the loop;
2. You plan outreach work and training aimed specifically at that age group, and set targets for recruitment, training and broadcast hours;
3. You apply for and receive funding, recruit and train volunteers and they begin broadcasting their own show every Tuesday;
4. You examine your monitoring data and evaluate the project against the targets you originally set yourself (and which you agreed with the funders);
5. (and 1.) You ask yourselves whether the project(in practice) fits with the core objectives of your station and whether or not to continue.

If the organisational culture is to routinely think about activities in this kind of way, evaluation quickly becomes an integral part of your station, rather than an additional chore.

Some funders will require you to undertake a formal project evaluation and perhaps also to publish and disseminate the resulting evaluation report. If possible, you should employ an external consultant to carry out this work – your project managers will probably not have the time or necessary expertise to carry out such a research exercise, plus the resulting report should be more objective and carry more weight if it hasn’t been produced ‘in-house’. Most funders will be happy for you to include the cost of an evaluator in your project budget. Some easily avoidable pitfalls:

• Choose your evaluator with care. There will be dozens of consultants and academics keen to carry out the evaluation, so make them work for it. If the project is sufficiently large, put it out for tender. Once you’ve short-listed, do some detective work – talk to previous clients (not just the one at the top of the bidders’ reference list)and read some of the bidders’ previous reports .Beware, anyone can call themselves a consultant and we’ve seen some incredibly shoddy evaluation reports in our time.
• Define crystal clear terms of reference e.g. exactly what is being evaluated, how it’s being evaluated, what input is required from you etc. You also need to make it clear to the evaluator that whilst they are producing an independent report,they will need to refer certain things back to you. If they are producing a report based on interviewing volunteers, for example, you will want to check the volunteer statements that they use in the report –the evaluator may not have realised that a particularly vociferous and negatively opinionated volunteer is actually someone with a personal grievance. You shouldn’t cramp the independence of the evaluator but you need to insist that the information they present is valid.
• Build the evaluation into the project from day 1.The report will be as good as worthless if the evaluator ends up scurrying around for the data once the project is over.

Evaluating your audience

Anyone involved in community radio will confirm that when you meet someone and tell them you are from a community station, the first question they ask is ‘so do you get many listeners?’ The usual answer is, ‘erm, we don’t really know.’

Ironically, it is one of the few questions that Ofcom don’t ask. Community radio (thankfully) is not about chasing every listener at the expense of other social gain targets. However there will come a time when you need to get some idea of who is listening. Some funders might insist upon asking. If you intend to sell advertising or sponsorship to any significant extent, then your clients will certainly want to know.BBC and commercial radio stations find out their listings from a company called RAJAR (actually coowned by the BBC and the commercial radio network) which uses sample surveys to calculate how many listeners each station has. Community radio stations are usually too small (geographically)to obtain remotely accurate results using RAJAR,even if you could afford their fees.

You will have some idea of the popularity of your station from the feedback you get anyway – the phone calls, e-mails, website hits and so on. You should invite such feedback at every opportunity. If you are brave you could hold public meetings on regular or sporadic basis where you invite your listeners to come and tell you what they think. Be warned, it may not always be an entirely inspirational occasion – it’s human nature to want to complain about what we don’t like before we applaud what we do. Nevertheless it can be a highly enlightening and useful process – assuming of course that you take the feedback on board and use it to improve what you do.

Ultimately there is no substitute for well-conducted research among a random sample of your community. There are many market research companies who would gladly conduct a survey in your specific area. The costs are generally extravagant, but if you are bringing in large sums of money from advertisers it may be worthwhile. That way there will be a certain credibility to the figures.In practice, you will probably end up doing it yourself,or if you are very lucky, persuading a school or college to take it on as a class project in social sciences, media studies or statistics. An audience survey would normally either be done using a phone and a directory, or a clipboard and a smile. Another approach when asked about your listening figures is to reply that you know what you do works –that the partners you work with want to continue their partnerships and that volunteers keep coming back to do their shows. They wouldn’t do it if something wasn’t working. Some ‘user testimonials’ are always useful to back up this line of argument.

Designing your audience research

First of all you must ask yourself what it is that you want to know. Do you just want to know the raw number of listeners you have, or the proportion of radio listeners at any one time? Do you want to know what the listeners think of you? Which sections of the community like you most – by age,sex, social class or ethnicity? Do you want to know which parts of your schedule are more or less popular? Do you want to know why those who don’t listen to you choose not to?

All those questions are valuable, but remember that the more questions you ask, the more data you will have to analyse, the longer it will take to conduct the survey and the harder it will be to persuade members of the public to participate. Keep your focus on what you really need to know.

Ideally an evaluation questionnaire should be written and delivered by people with no vested interest in the station. It is easy to skew the results by accident or design – to take a silly example, a researcher can ask the question: ‘would you say your local community radio station was A/ Interesting B/Fascinating or C/ Amazing’ then report back how wonderful everyone thinks they are.

More seriously, the psychology of market research is very subtle. You can actually change the results of surveys by changing the wording of questions or even the order in which you ask them. So if a survey were to start off by listing all the station’s social gain achievements and asking whether the interviewee thinks each one is a good thing or not,the effect is to make the interviewee feel more supportive and positive about the station, making it more likely they will say nice things on the later questions. Such flaws often creep into market research unintentionally, and they can work against you just as often as for you.

Make sure that any data you capture is usable – by avoiding the recording of general comment and by using multiple choice options that enable you to extract those vital percentages.

While it may be tempting to try to manipulate results by framing the questionnaire in a particular way,audience feedback is incredibly useful to community radio, and you will find the value of getting accurate results is much greater than the value of getting positive results. Hopefully you will get both.

Further reading and links

Financial management

• A Practical Guide to Financial Management for Charities (2nd edition). Kate Sayer (Directory of Social Change, 2002)
• A Practical Guide to Charity Accounting (2nd edition).Kate Sayer (Directory of Social Change, 2003)Stress management
• Achieve! Personal effectiveness in the not-for-profit sector. Mark Butcher (Directory of Social Change,2003)
• Managing Workplace Stress: A best practice blueprint. Stephen Williams and Lesley Cooper (John Wiley Sons,2002)
• www.mindtools.com/smpage.html

Monitoring and evaluation

• The Complete Guide to Creating and Managing New Projects (2nd edition). Alan Lawrie (Directory of Social Change, 2002)
• Get It Right First Time: A self-help and training guide to project management. Peter James (Russell House Publishing, 2005)

Market and audience research

• A Newcomer’s Guide to Market and Social Research: download the PDF document

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In our experience it is practically impossible for a community radio station to have all of its annual core funding in place at the start of each financial year – never mind for the next five years. Ofcom don’t expect it, and neither should your board. Obtaining funding tends to be an ongoing process, with bits of money arriving here and there through projects, grants, fund-raising and various windfalls.

To prevent this leading to serious financial problems, the person in charge of your finances needs to be able to identify how fully-funded the station is today, and how under-funded it will be in several months time. Good financial planning will enable you to see budget shortfalls coming long before they arrive, giving you plenty of time to look for alternative streams. So if you are looking ahead over a full year and still have a shortfall of perhaps 25% of your turnover, you needn’t panic. On the other hand, if you are looking only three months ahead and cannot see how staff wages are going to be paid, then a crisis meeting to develop an action plan is probably in order – if not full blown panic. This is far preferable to suddenly finding your cheques bouncing.

Matching resources to tasks

You can get the most out of your resources with a well-motivated (but unstressed) team of staff and volunteers and a careful eye on the purse strings. But that should not detract from the need to have a well-financed project with resources that are (at least nearly) adequate for the tasks you have set yourselves. Your initial Ofcom licence application should be realistic about what you hope to achieve and how it will be funded, and that includes stating what positions you intend to fill.

The premises you choose can make a difference to your core costs, of course – if you can find a community centre which can provide enough space to host your station for a minimal rent then you give yourself a head start, financially. But of all your variable expenditure, staff salaries are the most flexible. If you find yourself short of £15,000 in the coming year and cannot find funding to cover it, the only way you can realistically save that sort of money is with a redundancy. However that would inevitably impact on the ability of the station to match objectives set by Ofcom or your funding agencies. It’s also a poor way to run any form of enterprise, if staff do not feel their position is secure they are unlikely to show the dedication, commitment and motivation you will need from them. And besides, the law ensures that in most cases it’s pretty difficult for an employer to simply click their fingers and dismiss employees.

The secret then, is to ensure that you can find enough resources to do what you have promised to do. More details on finding these resources in Chapters 13, 14 and 15, but a word first on the recurring theme of core funding.

Finding core funding

Core funding is the money you will need to keep your station running – salaries, rent, bills etc. It is obviously essential to any community radio station. As we explain later, some funding agencies are reluctant to pay core costs, and only offer ‘project funding’ to pay for specific activities or functions.

When you are getting your funding in place, if you don’t include claims for core funding you could find yourself awash with cash to perform particular functions, but without a studio or station to work in. Some community stations have a parent group or charity (such as an existing community centre) which can guarantee core funding. They are lucky (if less than fully independent). If your core funding is in place, or you have a realistic strategy to find it, you are well on the way to running a successful community radio station. If you don’t you could find yourself on a rocky path.

When applying for grants from funding agencies, you should always seek core funding. This will probably mean an application budget which includes part of the cost of your core administrator, manager, technician and premises – which is complicated, but necessary. Say funding is available for a project to broadcast health advice to young mothers. A part-time outreach worker’s salary is included, plus a budget for materials. But that parttime worker has to be supervised, taking up the time of a line manager. That should also be included in the budget. The project takes over the training room for two hours a week, meaning it can’t be used for other – possibly lucrative – sessions. The engineer has to maintain the studio when things go wrong, eating into his time and workload. And so on, across the station.

Even a small project might take up a few hours a week of every physical resource and every member of staff, so the application should include these costs as well as the ‘headline’ project worker. If funders refuse to comply with such reasonable requests, you should seriously consider declining the funding. The project could end up costing you more than it is worth. Some funders, such as the Big Lottery Fund, are now talking along these lines (calling it Full Cost Retrieval) but at the time of writing their sister organisation Heritage Lottery Fund point blank refuses such budget lines in some of their applications.

A community radio group might consider itself lucky if it finds 50% of its annual income from a single source (the maximum allowed by Ofcom). However there are advantages to several smaller funding streams running simultaneously – funding would usually be more staggered, which helps cash flow, and if one source dries up, it is unlikely to close the station. Multiple funding streams also help your independence should a major funder seek to exercise undue influence.

Cash flow and overdrafts

Cash flow is one of the biggest headaches for any community project. It is reasonably straightforward to calculate how great your expenses will be over the next financial year and also that you can raise enough money to cover it all. But if the money isn’t going to reach your bank account for another six months, what will you do to pay staff wages next week?

The solution is to plan not only how much money you will receive, but when you will receive it. The secret of healthy cash flow is getting the money in before it goes out. Unfortunately that is often easier said than done. Payments from funders and partners can fail to arrive when expected, or you may only secure some of your funding at the last minute. You will inevitably end up spending money for project X on staff for project Y – this is not a problem as long as you know that project Y will receive its funding at some point so that the books balance at the end of the accounting period for each project. The traditional remedy for cash flow problems is an overdraft at the bank. Unfortunately many banks – even those which make ethical and social responsibility claims – will flatly refuse to offer such facilities to community and voluntary groups. Sometimes even waving a promissory letter from a major funding agency will not budge them. It is worth bearing this in mind when first opening your bank account. If you go to a bank manager offering him an account with a £100,000 annual turnover, you are negotiating from a position of strength. Insist upon overdraft facilities as a condition of opening the account, and you will often find banks are more flexible than they first claim. Another option is to talk to a major partner in your station, such as the local council or college, and see if they might advance you your running costs against guaranteed grant income. It costs them nothing and it enables them to have a role in facilitating a vital service for their community. You’ll never know if you don’t ask and they might even say yes – both Manchester City Council and Manchester College of Arts and Technology have performed this vital role for Radio Regen at times of need (thank you very much!)

Monitoring and evaluation

When running a community radio station, it is not enough to make great improvements to your community and the lives of your volunteers. You have to be able to prove you have made those improvements – to your funders, to Ofcom, and not least to yourselves. The way you do this is with project monitoring (recording exactly what is done or ‘what we did’) and evaluation (making judgements about the information recorded or ‘was it any good?’)

It’s very easy to get caught up in the exhilarating side of community radio – making programmes, training volunteers, working with dynamic community groups. But unless you make a good job of the rather dry business of recording your activities, your funding will soon dry up and it will count for nothing. If you approach it in a calm, organised fashion, it need not be a painful process.

There are two areas which funders will want you to account for yourself:

• Spending – have you spent the money as you promised you would?
• Performance – have you achieved what you said you would?

In most cases your accounting system should take care of the former.  Your annual audit of accounts will require you to keep a paper trail to record every item of spending, and each of those should have been apportioned clearly to one budget. It is your performance monitoring that is likely to prove more problematic. Typically, a community radio station will need to be able to answer the following questions to a variety of funders:

• How many individual volunteers have used the station and how much?
• How many volunteers have been through training schemes, and which ones, with what duration and with what results?
• How many volunteers and trainees belong to specifically targeted sections of the community (e.g. with disabilities, from particular deprived wards, from specific ethnic groups etc)?
• How many (and which) community groups have been helped?
• How many other visitors have you had to your station, and to what purpose?
• How many local businesses have been helped and how?
• How many schools have participated and how?
• How many jobs have been created/safe-guarded?

Strangely, at Radio Regen, in six years of community radio monitoring for dozens of different funders, we have never once been asked to report on our broadcast output. That is perhaps a useful reminder of the relative importance of community and radio activities, at least as far as funders are concerned.

Plan ahead (or find out what they need to know in good time)

Before you even accept a grant, you should read the small print. What information will the funder need back from you? Some want only quite general statistics and outcome measures, others will ask for extensive detail. The amount of monitoring required often shows little correlation to the size of the grant involved, and in extreme cases you may judge that a grant of a few hundred pounds is not worth it if you have to report back every volunteer’s height in centimetres and their grandmother’s maiden name.

Assuming you’ve taken the cash, begin collecting the information you need at the very outset, and continue as you go. Much of it may already be available, since ideally you should collect all the information you might reasonably need about your volunteers when they first sign up – age, sex, employment status or occupation, education, disability, illness and access information, ethnic origin and so on. You should then require volunteers to sign in and record the nature of their activity each time they visit the station. Just that simple system will cover many of your monitoring needs.

However you organise it, try to ensure that volunteers and partners aren’t being asked for the same information repeatedly on several different forms – if for no other reason than that they will become much more reluctant to fill in any of them at all. It is already hard enough getting many volunteers to sign an attendance sheet. There is also the vexed question of letting the volunteers know why you need the information without giving the impression that you are being paid as a result of their work making radio on the station. Far fetched? It’s happened to us. You need to make it clear to volunteers that without the information you are requesting, the station closes – providing the information should be second nature to them.

The ideal would be a single data collection questionnaire which volunteers could complete once and then update with every activity session and at the completion of the project. In practice, at Radio Regen we have yet to design such a form satisfactorily, and we have the piles of paper to prove it.

Many grants will have their own unique monitoring conditions attached. Be quite clear what these are from the outset and get them agreed in writing. There is nothing worse than having to track back through six months of station activities because a funder has suddenly told you (or you have suddenly noticed) that they need to know whether a volunteer was supervised by a trainer for 25% or 50% of their studio time and you hadn’t been recording that information. We cannot stress enough how vital it is to be clear exactly what monitoring you will need to conduct before you begin a project. It can be just about impossible to do it retrospectively.

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There are two principle strands to financial management:

• Budget management i.e. making sure that your expenditure matches your budget projections;
• Projecting income and expenditure. Your Ofcom application form (see Chapter 3) will have spelled out in broad terms where you expect to find the money it will take to run your station.

Budget management

You need to ensure that the money you are spending at the station, day-by-day and month-by-month, is no more than your budgeted amounts. Your station will have dozens of different budget lines, for both core expenditure items (like rent and phone) and expenditure that is specific to a particular project (like the cost of workshop trainers or leaflets to publicise a particular event), and you must make sure that every penny that is spent is recorded and allocated to a budget.

The opportunities community radio offer are so extensive that staff members and volunteers will always be coming up with brilliant ideas which ‘won’t cost much.’ They soon add up to a large hole in station funding. The one question that station managers need to ask their colleagues more than any other is… ‘and who will pay for that?’ To keep track of what money is being spent against which budgets, you should use a computerised accountancy package. It is possible to keep records of income and expenditure using simple spreadsheets, but as you expand this will become unduly complicated and inflexible and will invite confusion and errors. The money and time required to learn a basic computerised system is an excellent investment. QuickBooks is one industry standard that your accountant will understand and which is also very easy for a non-finance expert to use.

Using a system such as QuickBooks, every item of expenditure is given an expenditure account and a project class. So you might have bought some folders for your training project, which you would code on your accounting system as Stationery/Training, or paid a volunteer for the refugee project for the cost of their child care, which you would code as Child Care/Refugee. Some costs might be shared between projects, so if the training and refugee projects shared an office, for example, the cost of the office rent would be split between them when entered on your accounting system. Then, almost at the touch of a button, your accounting system can produce expenditure reports telling you how much a particular project has spent and on what, or how much you’ve spent in total on a particular item, like stationery, across all of your projects. As well as being invaluable for internal monitoring purposes and for producing accounts easily at the end of each year, funders are also very fond of expenditure reports, so the easier they are to produce, the better.

Both your funders and your accountant like to see that a receipt or invoice has been filed against every, that’s every expense. If ever you think this is onerous, summon the mental image of a steely eyed auditor from Government Office descending on you and asking to see your audit trail – it will happen to you. Before you ‘go live’, ask your accountant to help you set up a basic system to help you do this. They really shouldn’t charge you (much) for this as it will make their job so much easier when they come to do your books. Tell them it’s a good will gesture as we’ve heard some accountants actually have this in their vocabulary.

Another essential tip for good budget management is to make sure that you know exactly what money you have spent, even if the invoice hasn’t arrived yet.

It isn’t at all unusual for an invoice from a supplier to go missing, or for a freelancer to forget to invoice you for months. And if you don’t notice that you haven’t paid for these things, you might decide to use your apparent under-spend on buying something else that you actually couldn’t really afford. So keep a list of any items or services that have been ordered or commissioned, and check them off as you pay for them. In this respect, you might want to operate a central ordering system, or delegate the ordering of regular supplies to just one person. In a similar vein, staff should be encouraged to submit regular expenses claims. In terms of your budget management, it really isn’t very helpful to get expenses claims going back a year or more and adding up to possibly hundreds of pounds (really, it can happen, are we paying our staff too much?) As well as the difficulty this causes with your budgeting, you might also have submitted the final expenditure claim for the project concerned.

Strange though it may seem, budget management often involves ensuring that you spend enough and not too little money. Most local authority grants, for example, must be spent by a particular date, usually the end of their financial year (the end of March), and this money absolutely cannot be carried forward to be spent in the next financial year. So if you are in receipt of such a grant, you must spend the money by the date specified. The rules on what constitutes spending money vary – in some cases, an invoice indicating that the activity took place before the cut off date will suffice, in others you will have to provide a bank statement to prove that you received the invoice, wrote the cheque and that the cheque cleared your account by the required date. If you don’t spend a time-limited grant in time, your local council will most definitely not be happy to have the money returned to them, since they will then have to return the money to central Government, and will be in danger of having their allocation reduced in future years.

In terms of sticking to the budgets that you set yourself, most grant funders will insist that you spend their money on the items that you detailed in your grant application, sometimes to a high degree of accuracy e.g. allowing no more than 10% divergence from the figures in your original budget. But with some other funding (e.g. Service Level Agreements – see Chapter **) the funders couldn’t care less what you spend their money on so long as you deliver their outputs. The result of the latter is that if you happen to come in under budget, any surplus is yours to use elsewhere on the station (more Lapsang Souchong perhaps).

You will often find that local authorities and other mainstream agencies are looking for ways of spending money towards the end of a financial period, and you may well be able to help them to do this. But think carefully before you accept such grants. £20,000 to run a community outreach project may be very welcome, but if you then have to complete the project in 2 weeks, you will find that spending money can be very hard work.

What’s in your budget

But exactly how much will it all cost to run our station, we can hear you asking. Well, obviously, that depends – on how many staff you employ, on how big and posh your premises are, on how many of your volunteers you pay child care expenses to etc. As a very rough guide, we currently reckon on about £100,000 a year to run one community station. Perhaps more usefully, take a look at Table 6.01 which lists the items that you need to consider including in your budget (and the approximate amount that we spend on each item at one station each year).

Broadcast licences

Two items that your budget must contain are the fees for your PRS and PPL licences. PRS and PPL are music copyright agencies which look after royalties for musicians and record labels respectively, and you must obtain a PRS licence and a PPL licence if your station plays any music. For RSL broadcasts, these licences cost in the region of £40 each per day, but thankfully these fees were  greatly reduced for stations with Access Radio pilot licences. The basic charge to the Access stations was £500 per annum per licence to play as much music as they liked, as long as they didn’t make big profits in the year (do your sums, that’s quite a discount!) It is hoped that the same scale of fees will continue for community stations with permanent licences, and the Community Media Association is in the process of negotiating a deal which will hopefully offer fair recognition of community radio’s small size and limited resources.

TABLE 6.01

Example: Annual community radio station budget

The copyright agencies are still deciding the appropriate level of fees for community radio stations that simulcast their output on the web. At the time of writing, the CMA has requested that a similar fee is charged as for the analogue licence; PPL have provisionally agreed, and we would expect PRS to follow suit. In the meantime, the official advice to community radio simulcasters is to alert PRS and PPL to your activities until a formal request for payment is made. Bear in mind however that it’s possible that the agencies will back-date their request for a licence fee – not good for your budget management. Keep a close eye on the Toolkit website and www.commedia.org.uk for updates.

Full-time community radio stations also have to pay two licence fees to Ofcom. The first of these is an annual Broadcasting Act licence fee, which is £600 per year plus a percentage of your commercial revenue. Since the percentage amount due is offset against the £600, you are actually very unlikely to have to pay any more than this. Note that the Broadcast Act licence fees for all radio broadcasters are currently being reviewed so the amount may change in the near future. The second licence fee payable to Ofcom is a Wireless Telegraphy Act (WTA) licence fee. The cost of this licence currently ranges from £226 to £509 per annum depending on the population size in your broadcast area and whether you are broadcasting on FM or AM.

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Community radio is a greedy beast. However many resources – financial, material or human – you may have at your disposal, a community radio project will swallow them up, burp and ask for seconds.

Managing on low resources

A 24 hour commercial radio station might typically employ 30-40 full-time staff. A community station is attempting to produce a similar volume of output with many more broadcasters to manage, not to mention a host of additional social and pastoral responsibilities, with perhaps 10% of that number of paid staff. The demands for equipment, facilities and marketing resources are endless. What’s more, community outreach work, education, training, volunteer development and other social gainrelated activities tend to be self-generating – the better you are at doing them, the more people will seek your help. Sooner or later you have to draw a line under your spending. The question is how you can get the best results from the least expense.

Look at the big picture

While good management of a well-designed project can sometimes generate miraculous results from minimal resources, it is important that you give yourself a realistic chance. The overwhelming majority of station costs are entirely predictable. Hypothetically, if a station has an annual turnover of
£100,000, as much as £95,000 of the costs may be predicted in advance.

Expenditure can be categorised as ‘fixed’ or ‘variable’:

• Fixed costs – whatever you cannot change: rent, business rates, insurance etc.;
• Variable costs – some bills (especially telephone), emergency repairs, special events, stationery, marketing etc.

Staff costs are fixed when your employees are on permanent contracts, but will be variable if you have staff as freelancers or on temporary contracts. Like your expenditure, your income can also be described in different ways:

• General income – money which can be spent as you see fit. This may come from general fundraising, business activities (e.g. selling advertising or services) or general donations;
• Core funding – money you are given to keep your station running to cover the basic costs of staff salaries, premises etc.;
• Project funding – money which is provided for a particular purpose, such as running a community drama project or conducting outreach work with a specific section of the population.

While the vast bulk of your station income will go on staff salaries and fixed costs, it is often the apparently trivial budgets that cause most anguish. When a studio CD player breaks and there isn’t £100 spare to repair it, the stress and inconvenience caused can be out of all proportion to the money involved. We will return shortly to the larger picture of budget management, but first we’ll consider ways to keep your variable costs down.

Look after the pennies …

With several over-worked members of staff and dozens of enthusiastic volunteers coming and going at your station, it is incredibly easy for the petty cash supply to be eaten up, whether literally in the shape of chocolate-covered Hob Nobs, or metaphorically with a ready supply of blank minidiscs or stamps. At Radio Regen we try to avoid the use of petty cash altogether – maybe it’s just us but it never adds up at the end, and the time and aggro expended in trying to track down that missing receipt for teabags is just not worth the sums involved. Instead we use an expenses system which is pump primed by giving an expenses advance to those staff who buy a lot of teabags.

Someone at the station needs to make themselves deeply unpopular with their unashamed stinginess. While you really should supply your volunteers with a sack of teabags from the cash and carry, if they want to drink Lapsang Souchong they can bring their own. Keep an eye on the itemised bills and try to instil a culture of cost-awareness at the station – small details such as switching off lights and equipment in empty rooms or not filling the kettle to the top every time it is boiled will actually make a noticeable difference to the year’s electricity bills and will be a constant reminder to everyone at the station that money is tight (plus maybe saving an inch or two of the polar ice cap). There’s nothing as sobering as explaining that replacement ‘pop’ shields can’t be bought because the station spent too much on bottled water.

Make sure that all volunteers understand that if equipment is lost or damaged, it cannot always be replaced. Focus people’s minds on the need to treat every microphone and every machine with the utmost care and respect. And keep a very tight eye on your phone bill. This is one expense that can suddenly rocket if someone at the station – whether thoughtlessly or selfishly – makes some long calls to a mobile phone or overseas (our record at Radio Regen to date is a £54 call made to the Congo). You may want to consider blocking calls to such numbers on the station phone, if you can.

Never pay for anything you can get for free

One of the great strengths of community radio is that people want to help. A station manager needs to be utterly shameless in asking for favours, donations or freebies – just remember “It’s for charidee!” If your team of volunteers includes a joiner and you have a broken door, just ask (see Voxbox 6.01). If the volunteer is happy to use their skills to help you out, that’s fantastic. But always be gracious with refusals – it isn’t fair to pressurise someone into working for you for nothing, even if they do get a show once a month.

Check whether there is any form of LETS (Local Exchange Trading Scheme) operating in your area. These schemes allow individuals and groups to trade skills and services for tokens instead of cash, and as a radio station, you have a lot to offer. You could, for example, run a regular slot about services needed and offered on the scheme on your community programmes, in return for an agreed number of tokens which could be traded in for maintenance work or other basic favours.

Some newcomers to radio imagine that buying records and CDs is a major cost for radio stations. In fact there should be no need to spend a single penny on them. Record companies employ publicists (either on their own payroll or contracted specialists, called ‘pluggers’ in the trade) specifically to send new releases to radio stations. At present, some record labels are more willing than others to include community radio stations on their mail-out of new music. Some are yet to be convinced that a community station is anything more than a hobby project or pirate. As the sector grows in volume and profile we would hope this should change. One significant development is the arrival of free download services specifically aimed at the radio industry such as www.musicpointuk.com, which allow record labels to get their music to you without even the cost of postage. Small independent and specialist labels might not routinely send out promotional music, but they also tend to be flexible if your station is offering to publicise their music for free. As ever, if you don’t ask you don’t get.

VOXBOX 6.01

“The building we are in now was an old boatshed that we renovated. When we first came in there were no partitions, no doors, no floorboards in some places. It was horrendous. We had a lot of help – many of our volunteers are tradesmen, plumbers, joiners and so on. They helped us, and we give them some advertising, so it benefits them as well as us.” Kathleen MacIver, Station Co-ordinator, Isles FM, Stornoway

Never do something for free if you can get paid

With your place at the very heart of your community, you will regularly be approached by other groups, agencies, businesses, charities etc. wanting you to do things for them, whether it’s broadcast a message, publicise an event, or borrow your facilities. There is always a temptation to say yes, especially to well-intentioned community projects or charities. But don’t assume that these groups are completely cash-strapped. Their staff have probably read a similar book to this one and are following the maxim above: ‘never pay for anything you can get for free.’ Don’t be embarrassed to ask them if they have a budget available for publicity or hire of facilities. If they have, then you are entitled to your share. If they haven’t, you may well end up agreeing as a favour anyway, but try to get an assurance that the favour will be returned in some way at a later date. If you are offering a service to another group you may wish to try a pilot scheme first for a minimal or zero charge, but be clear what is being offered and for how long. If the arrangement is to continue, then
you are entitled to be asking for payment.

Asking for payment from like-minded groups shouldn’t trouble you – they can always say no, and you’ll be no good to them if you go belly up by being too generous with your services. Even if nothing comes back to you, the request is a way of placing value on the services you offer.

Help each other out …

The nature of a community radio station is that everyone tends to muck in together. If you save money by not hiring a cleaner, it is incumbent on everyone to do some cleaning occasionally (Voxbox 6.02). More seriously, a large number of the tasks required to run a station fall outside the remit of any one particular member of staff. The words ‘someone else’s problem’ or ‘more than my job’s worth’ should never be uttered at a community radio station, everyone needs to support everyone else and one person’s problem is everyone’s problem.

VOXBOX 6.02

“A woman from a funding agency visited the station for a meeting early one morning, and when she arrived I was doing the hoovering. My colleague introduced us and we chatted for a bit. Then she asked me what my job was and I told her ‘station manager’. She looked really puzzled, and asked ‘so why are you doing the hoovering?’ I answered, ‘because the floor was dirty.’ Alex Green, Station Manager, ALL FM, Manchester

… but not too much

It is very easy for staff members to get sucked into a tornado of minor tasks – nailing down loose carpets, hoovering (!), settling personal squabbles, undertaking lengthy face-to-face support with troubled volunteers etc. It is crucial that paid staff remember what it is they are being paid to do. Your station will thrive or struggle according to your performance in your key tasks. If an employee is being paid to conduct outreach work and liaison with other community groups, then that is what he should spend his time doing. If he can do that well, and still have time left over to help a volunteer make a jingle then so much the better, but the work must be prioritised.

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