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:
- Get the stations to play music promoting the agenda.
- Get the stations to invite guests/opinion shapers who can promote the agenda.
- Get the stations to cover news in a manner that promotes the agenda.
- 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.