Airwaves & Liberty

So you’ve got a community radio station. People in your area are producing shows, going on air, sharing their knowledge and passions about diverse musical genres and local public affairs issues and news happenings. It seems like a wonderland of fulfilling community radio’s mission.

But alas, you have discovered that some of the station’s programmers… well, they don’t sound very good on the air. In fact, some of them inspire listeners to turn off their radios. What do you do?

Community and public radio stations face a complex set of goals and challenges in developing our programs. Unlike commercial radio, we are not motivated primarily by profit. We don’t want to homogenize our programming or our hosts in the way that commercial radio does. But we do want our air to sound good - so that it keeps listeners tuned in and actually reaches into the communities we’re trying to serve.

How do we help people - who aren’t professional hosts - to find their voice and make a connection with their audience? And how do we do it in the most constructive way? Lots of community radio Program Directors and Programming Committees have given this question much thought. On this page, I list several sample program evaluation tools that other community radio stations are using. Feel free to download these PDF files and refer to them as you construct your own evaluation process.

Dan Richmond from KFAI in Minneapolis is regularly asked to present at the NFCB conference and other venues about the station’s program evaluation process. KFAI hired a consultant to help develop a process that worked for a station like theirs, and they came up with a pretty remarkable tool. Each program that is evaluated includes four components: 1) a self-eval, 2) a peer eval, 3) a Program Committee eval, and 4) a community eval. It is one of the best-developed examples of an evaluation process that utilizes a more horizontal approach. Check out KFAI’s Self-Eval Form, as well as the KFAI Peer/PC Eval Form that they use. Also, for what it’s worth, Dan tells me that while they try to do these program evals annually, it tends to take more like 18 months to get through the station’s entire roster of shows.

There are several other evaluation forms in use around the network. KBOO’s Evaluation Form asks the reviewers to quantify how well a program meets various criteria. On the other hand, Making Contact’s Eval Form is entirely qualitative, asking for a text description of various criteria. (Note: Making Contact is a weekly show rather than a station, but the eval form is still relevant.) A draft eval form at WPFW (not yet in use) asks how well a programmer meets various crieteria - high, medium, or low. And it’s a very concise eval - one page!

But perhaps my favorite eval tool on the block is KPFT’s Program Evaluation Process. You’ll see elements of KBOO’s and KFAI’s eval forms in KPFT’s — and that’s not accidental. PD Ernesto Aguilar referenced both when drafting KPFT’s document. There is a checklist to quantify how well a program meets various criteria, but there is also space that asks programmers to set goals for themselves and assess how well they are meeting those goals. Like both KBOO and KFAI, KPFT asks about the programmer’s off-air contributions to the station. And KPFT’s process also calls for four interwoven program assessments: self-eval, Program Council, Program Director, and community.

One interesting element that KPFT’s eval process adds is an assessment of listenership and fundraising trends. (This is only in the Program Director eval, as others don’t have access to this data.) This does not mean that a low listenership alone will spell the end of one’s show. In community radio, if a show has few listeners, it’s the job of the Program Committee/Director and the programmer figure out what can be done to build listenership base. Or in the case of low fundraising during pledge drives, they work on a strategy for the program to carry its fundraising weight. Listenership and fundraising do matter, and they are legitimate parts of the program evaluation puzzle. But they are far from the only things that matter; the key to community radio program evaluations is that we’ put so much emphasis on community service and mission fulfillment.