Muller

It may be a good idea for you to consider getting a DJ’s services while setting up a community radio station. The DJ would advise you on the best music for you to play on the radio station, if you want the station to be popular. The DJ would also help you in creating the playlists for use in the radio station. And the DJ can also help you in figuring out what is the right music to play at various times is. You can even go a step further, and have the DJ host ‘live’ shows on the community radio station – where he would be playing music under a disco format.

The DJ in question here may be one who practices ‘officially’ as a disc jockey. Alternatively, you can simply pick someone who is (genuinely) knowledgeable about music, and get him to play the DJ’s role. You will be surprised to learn that some folks who are not ‘official’ DJ actually have better music tastes than the official DJs. And thanks to the fact that they don’t have as huge egos as the official DJs, they can help you better when it comes to building playlists for your community radio station.

You have the option of either hiring the DJ as an employee, or bringing him in as a contractor. Of course,  if  you are running a community radio station on a tight budget (as is often the case), then you won’t have much money to pay a DJ. In this case, it would be a good idea to consider working with upcoming DJs, who don’t demand too much in terms of payments for their services. You could find an upcoming DJ who is even willing to accept a dgcustomerfirst $100 gift card in exchange for a full day’s DJ’ing input. So you can get into a win-win arrangement: where you allow him to use your community radio station to ‘build’ his name, while in exchange you benefit from his DJ’ing services.

Community radio stations can come in handy, if you are in a campaign aimed at improving health outcomes. If, for instance, you want more parents to take their kids for vaccinations, community radio stations can be very useful in passing the message. Or if you want more mothers to attend pre-natal and post-natal clinics, community radio stations can help you in getting the message through. Yet another instance where community radio stations can be very useful is if you want more people to attend screening clinics for various diseases.

If you want to use community radio stations to improve health outcomes, you will need to:

1. Craft the messages that are to be passed through the radio stations: the messages need to be clear and set out in a format that is friendly to the targeted listeners.
2. Figure out how exactly you want the messages to be transmitted: so here you need to ask yourself whether you want the messages to be transmitted in the form of ‘advertisements’ or in the form of ‘programs’.
3. Get into appropriate deals with the community radio stations: chances are that the community radio stations will demand to be paid something, to pass the message. So you need to get into appropriate contracts with them.
4. Monitor and evaluate the impact of the campaigns: this is the only way in which you will be able to tell whether the campaign(s) run through the community radio stations have been successful or not. For instance, you may discover that thanks to the campaign, a CVS Health worker who had been postponing his health check up was finally pushed/motivated to go for one. Thus, you find that thanks to the campaign, the fellow was able to actually visit the cvsmyhr  employee sign in page, log in there, and proceed apply for time off to attend his annual health checkup. This is the sort of outcome that would tell you that the health campaign carried out through community radio stations has had the desired impact.

The issue of whether community radio stations should be taxed or not is a controversial one. It is certainly not an easy to tackle issue. For, on the one hand, you have the people who run the community radio stations, and they argue that they shouldn’t have to pay tax. They argue that their stations serve the respective communities, and therefore, like all community service organizations, they shouldn’t have to pay taxes. But we also have another school of thought that views the community radio stations as ‘businesses’ that should pay taxes (like all other commercial ventures).

In my view, it is impossible to come up with a one-size-fits-all answer to the question as to whether community radio stations should pay taxes. Therefore, in answering this question, we need to take a case by case approach. If a particular community radio station is run as a commercial venture, there is absolutely no reason as to why it shouldn’t pay taxes. This, for instance, applies if the station is one that solicits advertising revenue, and if it is aspires to make profits.

On the other hand, you may find a community radio station that is operated as a community service organization. So here, we would be looking at a community radio station that is solely funded through donations. In this case then, it wouldn’t make sense to have such a radio station pay taxes.

It gets complicated when you find a community radio station that is operated through both advertising revenues and donations. You see, there are community radio stations that are unable to raise enough money through advertising revenues. This is understandable, given the fact that the communities (audiences) they reach are modest in size. So, on top of the advertising revenues, they solicit donations. In my view, such community radio stations also shouldn’t have to pay taxes. That is because, notwithstanding the modest advertising revenues they rake in, they are (for the most part) donor-funded community service organizations.

If you run a college where journalism courses are offered, you have two options in terms of how you can give your students practical exposure. The first option is where you can set up a college radio station, with the intention of using it to give the students practical exposure in broadcast journalism. The second option is where you can partner with a local community radio station, to give your students practical exposure in broadcast journalism. The latter approach is what we will be focusing on, in today’s article.

That approach, of partnering with a local community radio station to give your students practical exposure, has certain advantages. For one, it is more cost-effective than setting up a college radio station. And secondly, it can give the students more meaningful exposure than a college radio station. You see, a community radio station is likely to have more listeners than a college radio station. Its operations are also likely to mirror real world radio journalism practices better than what is possible at a college radio station.

In using a community radio station to train journalists, you need to:

1. Identify the specific community radio station you will be partnering with
2. Approach the community radio station management with a partnership request
3. Identify the students who are to train at the community radio station
4. Orient the students properly, before dispatching them to the community radio station

The community radio station management may charge you a fee, for allowing your students to train at the station. These are fees that you can (usually) pay in cash, using a check, through a bank transfer, or through a credit card. Like if,  having gone through the getmyoffer.capitalone.com application process you have a Capital One credit card, you can use it for the purpose. So you first respond, to get my offer from capital one. Then you use the card hence obtained to pay the fees demanded by the community radio station for the partnership in training your students.

All said and done, the most important thing is to ensure that you find a way of making the partnership between your college and the community radio station sustainable.

One of the ways in which you can enhance your chances of winning a political post is by running your (political) ads on community radio stations. Community radio stations tend to command attentive audiences, especially in the communities they serve. Furthermore, people tend to trust community radio stations more than they trust the national radio stations. In fact, there are people who are always tuned into their respective community radio stations. In other words, there are people who never tune into the national radio stations — they listen exclusively to the community radio stations. Clearly, the only way to reach such people, and sell your political message to them, is by running ads on the community radio stations.

To run ads on a community radio station, you will need to:

1. Identify the specific community radio station(s) to advertise on
2. Approach the station management(s) with your advertising proposals
3. Get into advertising deals with the radio station(s)
4. Design the actual ads
5. Get the ads to run on the community radio stations at favorable times.

Running political ads on community radio station is likely to prove to be a very cost-effective way to spread your political message. The alternative would be, say, to call the community members individually, and try to sell your political message to them on phone. But that can be very costly. You would have to contend with very high phone bills. Like if, for instance, you are using Metro PCS phone services, you would have to make a metro pcs payment (probably a hefty one) before you can start calling the community members, in an effort to sell your political message to them. Alternatively, if you are on a post-paid arrangement, you’d have to be ready to pay my metropcs bill (and a hefty one at that), if at all you are to use the phone system to sell your political message to the members of the targeted community. All these are costs you can avoid, by opting to run political ads on the community radio station that is used by members of the targeted community. Furthermore, your  agenda is likely to be more easily accepted if the members of the target community get it through their (trusted) local radio station.

Community radio stations can come in handy if you wish to drive an agenda – whatever agenda. Say, for instance, you wish to get the people to change the way they are governed. You know that it is a sensitive agenda to push: for the folks who are in charge of the current governance structure are bound to resist their replacement. So in driving this sort of (governance change) agenda, you have to be very stealth. And one way to drive this sort of agenda in a stealth yet effective manner, is through the use of community radio stations.

In using community radio stations to drive an agenda (any sort of agenda), you may need to:

1. Get the stations to play music promoting the agenda.
2. Get the stations to invite guests/opinion shapers who can promote the agenda.
3. Get the stations to cover news in a manner that promotes the agenda.
4. Get the stations’ commentaries to promote the agenda.

The most important thing here is to ensure that you are not too direct in pushing the agenda. In fact, you shouldn’t (ideally) mention the agenda you are promoting in name. The objective should be to get the listeners to make inferences for themselves, and take the necessary actions without being directly told to do so.

While using community radio stations to drive an agenda, it is important for you to respect the intelligence of your listeners. Most of your listeners are likely to be working class people. A listener may, for instance, be a waitress at a Darden restaurant, who is listening to the community radio station while also trying to figure out how to login to krowd portal. If the community radio station is too intense in its presentation, there is a risk that she would just turn it off, and focus on the krowd sign in issue: which has more immediate benefits to her. Therefore the point we are trying to make here is to the effect that you mustn’t be too intense, while using community radio stations to push agendas.

Having finally managed to set up a community radio station, you will probably need to hire reporters. These are the folks who would collect the news reports to be broadcast on the radio station. You have to remember that people usually tune in to community radio stations to get news about their local communities (that is, what is happening in their local communities). Therefore, if your community radio station is to succeed, it needs to cater for this need properly.

Recruitment options

You have several options, in terms of how you can go about hiring reporters for the community radio station. You may, for instance, run ads in the local newspapers, announcing that you are seeking to hire reporters, and inviting interested people to apply. Alternatively, you may approach people directly, and ask them if they are interested in working as reporters in your community radio station. For instance, you may know of a fellow who studied journalism in college, yet he is currently working as, say, a porter or cleaner at the local USPS post office. As such, he would be getting his paychecks through the usps postal liteblue portal. He could have worked for the postal corporation for quite a few years. And he may even have gotten to a level where the paychecks he gets through the liteblue portal are quite satisfactory. Yet such a person would probably relish the opportunity to practice what he studied at college. Therefore, if you approach him with an offer for him to become a reporter in your community radio station, there is a good chance that he would jump at the opportunity. So there are many recruitment options.

Interviewing the applicants

You need to be objective while interviewing the applicants. Your objective should be to gauge their aptitude for the job, as well as their attitude towards the job. The end-goal here is to ensure that you end up with folks who will deliver satisfactorily, once hired as reporters for the community radio station.

Training the hired reporters

Once you are through with the recruitment process, you will need to train the reporters you manage to hire intensively. Don’t assume that they know what to do, just because they are trained journalists. It is really important to at least put them through some sort of refresher training, so as to ensure that they do their work well once they are send out to the field.

A huge percentage of community radio projects end up in failure. Closer examination reveals a certain pattern, behind the failure. In other words, there are certain common factors that tend to cause community radio projects to fail.

Lack of money

Many community radio projects fail due to lack of money. It takes a considerable amount of money, to keep a radio station on air. Many of the people who launch community radio stations tend to underestimate the required financial input. But reality soon hits them hard, and they are forced to take the radio stations off air. You realize that is very hard to sustain a community radio station using donations. Most of the community members are, after all, likely to be people of modest financial means. The typical community member may, for instance, be a fellow who works (for a modest paycheck) in the Mypepsico customer service department. So, right there, you would be looking at a community member who is only able to earn money by visiting the Mypepsico login portal, signing in and receiving the modest paycheck via direct deposit. Whereas such a person may be inclined to finance the initial setting up of a community radio station, it becomes very hard for him to sustain the project through donations. He expects the project to be self-sustaining, after some grace period.

Lack of interest from community members

You find that in many places, people have access to the mainstream (commercial and public) radio stations. They therefore don’t see why they should expend money on the establishment of community radio stations, for they are already spoilt for choice.

Poor management

We also have other community radio stations that fail due to poor management. Managing a radio station turns out not to be as easy as it looks. There are cases where the management failure is on the broadcast side of things. So this is where you find folks who are unable to run the station well enough to attract a good enough audience. Then there are other cases where the management failure is on the logistics side of things. Due to this, the radio stations are unable to retain presenters, or to remain financially afloat. Either way, the end result is the failure of the community radio station projects.

You have two options, in terms of how you can run a community radio station. The first option is that of using paid employees, to keep the community radio station running. And the second option is that of using volunteers. In today’s article, we will be exploring the second option: of using volunteers to keep a community radio station running.

If you don’t have enough money to hire people to run the community radio station, then you may have no other option, but to use volunteers. But we also have cases where, in spite of having enough money, you may nonetheless opt to run the community radio station using volunteers. That is, for instance, if the community that is meant to be served by the radio station has many qualified people, who are more than ready to volunteer at the station. In that case, it wouldn’t make sense to hire people (essentially ‘outsiders’) to run the station. A better idea would be to use the volunteers, who are likely to be driven by passion – for as we all know, passion tends to be a better motivator than money.

All in all, having opted to go the route of using volunteers to run a community radio station, you need to:

1. Identify suitable volunteers: you can put out adverts, inviting people who are interested in volunteering at the radio station to do so. You can alternatively opt to visit individual members of the community whom you feel are well qualified to run the radio station, and try to sell to them the idea of volunteering there. But advertising tends to work better — so as to ensure that you get genuine volunteers. Either way, you may need to put the volunteers through an interview process, so as to identify their talents and figure out where to deploy them within the radio station’s system.
2. Put the volunteers through a training program: even if the volunteers have tons of experience working in other radio stations, they still need to be put through a training program. The objective is, at the very least, to get them to understand how you expect this particular station to be run (given its unique circumstances).
3. Consider paying small stipends to the volunteers: notwithstanding the fact that they are ‘volunteers’, it would nonetheless be a good idea to pay them small stipends, to cater for their transport costs, lunch costs… and so on. If you don’t like the idea of giving them hard cash (because, after all, they are ‘volunteers’), you can opt to give them gift cards – from which they can withdraw cash, or use for shopping. With Visa or MasterCard gift cards, they would only be having to visit the Mygiftcardsite login page, signing in, and checking their card balances. Then, as per the instructions given in the Mygiftcardsite guide, they can either use the cards for shopping, or withdraw the funds in the cards in the form of hard cash… Whatever you do, you need to ensure that the volunteers working at the community radio station can (clearly) see what they stand to gain, by opting to work there. This way, they will remain motivated, even when the initial euphoria wears out.

There are several steps that you need to take, while seeking suitable premises for a community radio station. These steps apply, whether you are seeking to buy, lease or simply rent the premises from where you will be operating the community radio station. In trying to find suitable premises for a community radio station, you will need to:

Work out how much space you need

How many square feet (or square meters) of space will you need for your community radio station? How much space do you need for the studios? How much space do you need for the offices? Will you be operating open plan or enclosed offices? How much space do you require for other amenities – including the space you need to keep the broadcasting and transmission equipment? Those are the relevant questions to ask yourself at this stage.

Be clear on the type of premises you need

Do you, for instance, need space in the central business district? Or would space in the outskirts of your city do? Do you need to operate from a stand-alone building? Or can you operate from an apartment-style building (where you share the building with other organizations)? Do you need a ‘prime’ location? Or can you operate the community radio station from a ‘less-than-prime’ location? These are the important considerations here.

Search for vacant premises around

Once you have a clear idea on the size and type of premises you need, you can embark on the actual search. You can use a search engine at this stage. Or you can call and engage a realtor to help you get the space you need for the community radio station. You can also walk/drive around, looking for ‘vacant premises’ signposts… Searching for the space is likely to be a time consuming affair. If you are working elsewhere, you may need to ask for some time off-work, to search for the premises. If, for instance, you work for a company like Nordstrom, you may need to visit the Mynordstrom login page, sign in, and navigate to the work schedules section. Then, after logging in at the Mynordstromsign in page, you can proceed to request for time off work: that being the time you spend looking for premises to house the community radio station you wish to set up.

Contact the relevant people

Once you identify premises that you consider ideal for the community radio station, you need to contact the people who are selling, leasing or renting it out. You can then proceed to organize a meeting with the people, to discuss the possibility of you buying, leasing or renting the premises for your community radio station.

Pay for the premises

The next step here is to pay for the premises. Depending on the developer you are dealing with, you may be required to pay for the premises in cash, using a check, through a bank wire transfer… and so on. The amount to be paid will naturally vary, depending on the size and location of the premises, and also depending on the terms you are acquiring the space on (whether you are buying, leasing or renting it).

Prepare the premises to host a community radio station

Having acquired the premises, you need to prepare them to host a community radio station. This will entail partitioning the space, sound-proofing it, branding it… and so on. Then you can install the broadcasting equipment, hire people, and get the radio station on air.