Bill Scott “Remote Fundraising”

Most of us have tried doing our show remote over the last year and some are still broadcasting from their closets like Kankelfritz and Steve Sunshine.

I am still getting the question, does remote fundraising work? I also get, can you use a phone center off-site and still make it work? Can you raise as much money being remote? The answer is a big yes to all of the above.

When 2020 began, the team at Vidare Creative was moving towards doing more fundraising events remote. Covid-19 helped to make that happen. No one had a choice but to make it work. I have been saying for the last five years this would work well and perhaps even be a better option for some.

I have personally seen every Vidare Creative client raise more money in 2020 and that happened while we were hosting remote. Here’s a couple of ways we pull off being remote.

• If you sign up for CleanFeed Pro, which is about $35 a month, you can control your bit rate and even record interviews in the cloud on separate tracks. This has been very stable for us to use. We usually connect at 256K stereo so we can play music beds etc… on our side. Again, this has been stable for broadcast.
• Z/IP One from Telos. Again, we connect at a high bit rate stereo if we are going to use music beds from our side or mono if it’s just our voice that is being sent. This also has been very solid for broadcasting,
• This is our third way of connecting to our clients. Again, stable and sounds amazing.

In my opinion, CleanFeed held up as good as the Z/IP One and Comrex and it’s the way to go if you are on a budget. Clean Feed is something I’d use for podcasting and interviews as well.

In regards to seeing the studio, automation, and the personalities, we use ZOOM. We mute our mics on ZOOM, and use the audio from one of the three I just mentioned. It’s amazing but the audio will match your ZOOM video. We also do a screen share on ZOOM so remote hosts can see the automation screen as well.

The dashboard is another item you’ll need to be able to see. This way you can see all the information on the fundraiser, including the donors to thank.

Each of our clients has hired remote call centers to take the donations. For the most part, this has gone smooth. You don’t need a local phone bank in your station to make the fundraiser a success. Some folks have told me that having an in-house phone bank provides energy to the fundraiser, and perhaps that is true. However, you can overcome not having your phone bank in house. You are the only one receiving that energy from having it there, you can overcome that, and still bring great energy on the air.

In some cases, I believe doing a remote fundraiser is something that needs to be looked at long term. I’ve never seen once where less money was raised because the team is not onsite. I hope that helps and if you have any questions, shoot me an email, Bill@VidareCreative.com.

Bill Scott is Chief Content Officer with Vidare Creative / www.VidareCreative.com. Contact Bill at bill@vidarecreative.com