Over the past six years, I have worked with public broadcasting stations to tailor the theory of Psychological Type for membership drives and capital campaigns. Knowing and applying Psychological Type can give a big boost to creating a cohesive campaign that truly reaches each and every member of your listening audience, turning them from passive listeners to engaged, and pledging, members.
Using Psychological Type, learn how your station and staff can
- identify your personal style, strengths, and “stretches” as individual staff members and create personal development goals.
- identify your organization's overall Type makeup, and how that bias is both helping and hurting your fundraising efforts.
- identify your individual on-air pitching style during pledge breaks, and how you can use the natural differences amongst your on-air staff to create complimentary Type pitch-teams.
- tailor and refine your station's overall mission statement and goals so that it both reflects your organization’s Type and appeals to all kinds of different Types.
- analyze your past pledge breaks in terms of vocabulary, themes and effectiveness, and see which Types you’re hitting, and which you’re not.
- avoid creating "scripts" to be read during pledge breaks and create "platforms" from which you can launch "structured improv."
- create a comprehensive package of materials that highlight every segment of your audience to get the most out of your capital campaign efforts.
- use new media (social networking, blogging, twitter, facebook, etc) most effectively so that they don't become resource traps.
- identify market segment gaps in your programming, and how your program scheduling can be structured so that it is perceived as "eclectic" instead of "random" or "focused" rather than "monotonous."
- identify your station's likely market segment without needing to spend funds for expensive marketing surveys that are usually designed with for-profit broadcasting companies in mind.
Psychological Type for Public Broadcasting can be tailored as a full-day retreat, a series of mini-retreats, or as an ongoing program. It is a valuable way to analyze past efforts, or as a way to create a brand-new methodology and continuously refine your fundraising.
Recessionary times hit non-profit organizations and public broadcasting stations especially hard; and a modest, but targeted, investment in your staff development can be both personally and *materially* rewarding. Program costs are developed with public broadcasting stations in mind. All sizes of stations, from small and scrappy, to large and institutionally-supported, can benefit from this kind of training and education.
Psychological Type is based on the theories of Carl Jung, and applied in the popularly-known Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). Over 50 years old, the MBTI is the most widely used psychological type instrument used in the workplace today, with over 1 million people taking it every year. Today it is used in professional coaching, team-building, marketing, communications, organizational development and personal development. Psychological Type training can be a valuable addition to any ongoing program.
