Michael Titterton

Michael Titterton is aware of the many concerns about Hawaii Public Radio’s semi-annual on-air fundraising drives, but for now, he says, there’s probably no better alternative.

In fact, said Titterton, who is president and general manager of HPR, which operates HPR1 and HPR2, the on-air fundraising method is considered a model for many public radio stations nationwide, which are constrained by their status with the Federal Communications Commission on how they can raise money.

HPR’s latest on-air fundraising drive occurred this month, and after its 10-day run — in which HPR announcers and noted members of the community beseeched listeners to donate one-time gifts or become "sustaining members" who commit to regular monthly gifts — the drive, for the first time in 15 years, missed its goal. The goal had been $1,032,000; it fell short by $232,000.

After regrouping, the HPR staff gave it one more try a few days later, on Oct. 15, and managed to meet its goal– and more.

"It worked out wonderfully," Titterton said afterward.

Still, the fundraising stutter step was disturbing, leading many to wonder why HPR had a problem this time and if any changes should be made. Titterton, for his part, remains committed to the current fundraising model, at least until something better comes along.

Before joining HPR 15 years ago, Titterton had been general manager of public radio station WHQR in Wilmington, N.C., building it from scratch starting in 1983. Prior to that he had helped convert college radio stations into National Public Radio affiliates at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and Pennsylvania State University, where he had been teaching courses in broadcasting.

His own education includes earning a bachelor’s degree in communications from the University of Windsor in Canada, then a master’s degree in rhetoric from Wayne State University in Detroit, which is where he started working in radio, first as a volunteer for the college station, then also as a correspondent for NPR during the meltdown of Detroit’s automobile industry.

Originally from England, Titterton is 66 and married to Madeleine McKay, with whom he lives in Makiki.

QUESTION: To what do you attribute the failure of the latest fund drive to reach its goal initially? Do you have any ideas?

ANSWER: We’ve got a lot of ideas, and Lord knows we’ve had a lot of suggestions. (Laughter)

In one way it was inevitable. We’ve had a 15-year run of unbroken good fortune with drives. And it wasn’t just that we were maintaining the operation. We were deliberately building it up. You know, we started from a point where the station was heavily in debt and was, you know, just in sort of sorry shape …

Q: Was the goal too high?

A: The goal, ironically, was exactly the same as the last campaign.

Q: Was that higher than the previous one?

A: Well, they’ve always been higher than the previous one. Oh Lord, we’ve about quintupled goals over the last 15 years, and, on back of that, that’s how we’ve gotten to this state where we’re debt free, we bought the condo that we’re operating in, and we’ve built a dozen stations around the state.

Q: A dozen stations? 

A: Well, you know, repeaters and what not, so we can reach around the entire state. And that’s pretty much how we’ve done it, on the back of the fundraisers.

Q: One theory is that the failure to reach your goal might have had something to do with the stock market dropping significantly right around the last day of the fundraiser.

A: It was impeccable timing that way, yeah. I suspect, you know, that on the one hand, it had to happen some time. Why it happened this time I think was due to a combination of circumstances, and, yeah, choosing the week that the stock market finally decided to plummet … (Laughter)

Q: Do you think there’s a burnout factor going on?

A: I think there’s a burnout factor going on not so much with public radio per se but just with stuff, you know? I mean, I’ve run pledge drives through catastrophes before — you know, there’s always something going on — but it’s been so unrelenting the first few months of this year: ISIS and Putin and now Ebola, not to mention the problems we’ve got here at home with the lava flow on the Big Island and now in the last couple of days there was a hurricane bearing down on us, I mean, it just doesn’t let up for a moment. 

Q: I see what you’re saying.

A: So it’s combination of things. Yeah, there’s a burnout factor there, but as far as burnout with public radio, obviously I think about that a lot. I mean, how could you not, with in the last few years the changing technologies and the difficulties other mainstream media have faced, the newspaper industry being right out there in front. These are troubling times for people concerned about quality media because nobody knows what’s really going to happen there.

Q: Well, you have the sustaining members. How’s that working out?

A: That’s something we developed a little while ago to try and deal with the phenomenon of attrition. You know, we’ve had this unbroken success with fundraisers, but what we noticed a little while ago was that although we’ve been adding about 2,000 members every year, we’ve been shedding about 1,800, so our actual membership base has only been growing incrementally.

Q: Why the drop offs?

A: They just sort of forget to renew. It’s a problem throughout the industry. We’re not unique in that regard. People don’t deliberately not renew. It sort of slips their mind. 

Q: But, too, it’s a financial thing. The bills every month and how much you can spare.

A: Oh yeah. Absolutely. And that’s where, you know, we’ve got the weirdest business model imaginable. We put together a high-quality product and we give it away for free, and then we not only make it voluntary, but people get to decide whatever it is they want to contribute. What I liken it to is … I don’t know if you remember the old-time buskers outside the theaters. You know with the one-man band and the monkey who would pass the hat around. That’s kind of what we do.

Q: There’s a perception that so-called public radio stations are funded by the government. But that’s not really true, is it?

A: No, it hasn’t been true for some time. … The Public Broadcasting Act … in the late 60s … essentially provided funding for the jumpstarting of a public television system, and public radio was literally an afterthought. … They were brought into being around 1970 with pretty substantial federal funding. And the way they did it was they took stations that already existed around the country, that were licensed to universities, school boards, libraries and that sort of thing — institutional licensees, is what we called them — and that was how our system began.

Hawaii Public Radio, by the way, is, and always has been, a bootstraps operation … a "community" licensee, licensed to a group of volunteers who wanted badly enough to have a public radio station that they went out and built one for themselves. That was how KHPR was brought into being in 1981 — a true community effort.

But public radio and public television are very different things. People lump them together, but they’re different industries with different kinds of mission statements and different objectives. PBS and NPR are very different organizations. 

Q: At what point did the money from government dry up?

A: It was always meant to be phased out. And it’s a tiny, tiny fraction now of what it was. Back in the day, it was, I don’t know, 85 percent of the total throughput of the whole system. It was set up so the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a quasi-governmental agency, would get the appropriation from Congress … and three-quarters of the money that CPB got would go to television and a quarter would go to radio. And it has been declining gradually ever since. Every time I’ve done a budget, I’ve always phased it out five years out. And I’ve been doing that for about 25 years. (Laughter)

Q: What are HPR’s sources of income right now?

A: The way it breaks down for us is about 65 percent directly from listeners, about 25 percent from program underwriting, and about 6 percent at this point from CPB, which leaves about 3 or 4 percent, which is, you know, we just sort of hustle for that. Concepts and things.

Q: Where does the money go?

A: About 75 percent of it goes right back into programming, whether its program production or buying programming from outside, … running the transmitters, paying power bills and that sort of stuff. So that 75 percent goes right back into product.

Q: How many employees work right now for Hawaii Public Radio?

A: We’ve got 24 or 25 I think, and about 22 part-time.

Q: With this latest round of fundraising falling flat, at least initially, is it time to start thinking about other ways to raise funds? Aren’t you getting tired by all the on-air fundraising yourself?

A: Oh, I’ve been tired of it for years, It’s the price of doing business, you know? And it’s not all bad. They’re very exhausting periods and they take a lot of planning and all the rest of it, but we’re often making the observation that if it weren’t for the money, we’d have to invent something like the on-air fundraising anyway, simply as a feedback mechanism. We get tremendous feedback during these drives. It’s worth any number of surveys every six months to have the interchange that we do with listeners, and that’s how we keep in touch with them.

Q: What about commercials? Are they so bad? You have at least a form of advertising, don’t you? Like those paid sponsor announcements?

Q: Underwriting, yes. Underwriting is, essentially, donor recognition. But there are some very real differences between what we’re legally able to do with underwriting announcements relative to what a commercial announcement can do. There can be no call to action, for example. 

Q: You mean like go out and buy a product?

A: Yeah, urging people to indulge in a certain behavior. And no political advertising, obviously; none of that. … it’s a condition of license with the FCC. 

Q: I’m wondering if the fundraising shows are actually not good for the station, one, because they punish the good listeners who are throwing their money into the pot on a regular basis, the sustaining members, yet they still have to listen to the fundraising. …

A: Yeah, that’s actually true. 

Q: And, two, because they might drive away listeners, and not just temporarily.

A: Yeah, absolutely. You put your finger right on it. Which is why we try to make them (the fundraisers) as much fun as possible. It’s difficult to be fun for seven to 10 days, but we really try to be very inclusive. We invite in people from the community, to a degree. It doesn’t happen around the country the way we do it. 

Q: So it’s worth the risk?

A: It’s a necessary evil but let’s have fun while we’re doing it. That’s really the way we look at it. 

And as far as driving people away, … it’s a real thin line to walk. On the one hand we put out this real quality product, and then every six months we jump all over it with hob-nailed boots. It’s a little paradoxic. 

But you were asking about alternative methods, and, you know, we think about that all the time, and there aren’t any answers that make themselves immediately apparent, if you set down the road to be listener-supported. 

Now, one of the big investments that as an industry we’re making — and here at Hawaii Public Radio we’re doing the best to keep up — is with new media. We stream our signals. We put out podcasts. We have our apps on all the platforms, we have our website and all that. But all that is kind of a sunk cost. There’s no way to monetize any of that. No one in the country has figured that out yet. We just want to be relatively well-tooled should the whole industry need to go that way.

But primarily content is king, and if content is king, then context is queen. We’re very big on content, and almost uniquely we’re very big on context.

Q: And the context is what?

A: The context is long form. You know, treating an audience with respect and granting it intelligence and an attention span. So rather than cram every story into a minute or 90 seconds, if it takes 20 minutes to tell the story, we’ll take 20 minutes to tell the story.

Q: What is your long-range goal at this point for HPR?

A: I guess my personal goal for Hawaii Public Radio is that it be a catalyst and a coming-together point for thoughtful progress around the state. I want to see it become, obviously, a fine radio service … but also a highly valued and prized community resource.