NEW-LOOK PLEDGE DRIVES --LOW KEY, HIGHER YIELD?

Public television’s on-air appeals for money are as old as the system itself. Yet they remain a sore point with many viewers and, as another fund-raising drive gets under way today, many stations are striving anew to find a better way.

At one extreme, WNET in New York City and 14 smaller stations have decided to forgo the nine-day August pledge festival, hoping to raise the money through other means.

At the other extreme, many stations are taking a lesson from KCET Channel 28 in Los Angeles and trying to make their on-air campaigns more polished and less strident.

“Stations from coast to coast are trying to maximize viewer support and at the same time be responsive to viewers, station members and, frankly, the press,” Michael B. Soper, PBS vice president for development, explained in an interview this week.

Noting increasing widespread dissatisfaction with the on-air appeals, he added, “There is a diversity of opinion about how to do this, but one way clearly is to make some changes in the pledge drives.”

Most of the country’s 314 public television stations traditionally devote a portion of air time during August, December and March to pledge drives soliciting contributions from viewers, especially those who haven’t donated before. Both the money and the new memberships are vital to most stations’ continued operation.

WNET’s decision this week to cancel the August campaign came after it told viewers it would do so if it could raise its goal of $750,000 in advance. The public responded in time, station officials said.

“We wanted to demonstrate that we hear our audience,” WNET president John Jay Iselin said this week in explaining the idea to promote a “pledge-free” month. He noted that “a great volume of mail” to the station suggested that viewers “feel put upon” by the on-air appeals.

Iselin acknowledged that August contributions to date have come largely from regular supporters of the station and that “the real test” of the campaign’s effectiveness is how many new subscribers came aboard. WNET hasn’t determined that yet.

“We’re hoping that by establishing a sense of good will with our audience, we’ll encourage more viewers to become members,” Iselin said. He said he hopes the August experiment will be continued with the next pledge drive in December.

Other stations have experimented with “pledge-free weeks” in the past, with mixed results. Miami’s WPBT, for example, canceled all three on-air pledge drives last year and is continuing the policy this year. But Boston’s WGBH tried doing without and then went back to them, citing the drop in new members as a primary reason.

It is that concern that has kept KCET from trying the no-pledge experiment.

“The bottom line is that pledge is the best way to get new members,” said Bonnie Winings, Channel 28 director of subscriber development. “And you need new members to add to your coffers because other members don’t renew or move away.”

What she did in 1984 to try to appease criticism of the pledge drives was to take a more professional marketing approach to the campaign--producing the pledge breaks as mini-programs with scripts, a sense of pacing and a respect for the viewer’s intelligence. The idea, she said, was to give the breaks the tone and quality of the programs they were interrupting.

“I think the on-air look before that had been pleasant enough, but the sound was grating,” Winings said. “There was a lot of pleading, cajoling and haranguing. It lacked substance. We weren’t giving them good, solid reasons to give.”

The new format debuted in December, 1984, and pledges jumped to $1.1 million from the previous December’s $699,000. The following March drive took in a record $1.8 million.

The figure dropped slightly this March, to $1.7 million, but KCET averaged $911 for each minute it was on with its pledge appeals--by far the most effective ratio in the PBS system. WNET averaged $791; WGBH in Boston, $794.

On top of that, Winings said, the number of complaints about KCET’s pledge drives has dropped. Indeed, the ratings indicate that the pledge breaks are sustaining an audience, she added.

That’s why PBS approached KCET to share some of its expertise with other stations. The result was the creation of a package of print and videotape materials that can be used to make pledge breaks more effective.

These include a series of audio and visual spots featuring pleas for donations by Johnny Carson, Jane Seymour, Joseph Campanella, Vincent Price and Coral Browne and a series of 15 video spots featuring former KNBC Channel 4 anchorman and commentator Jack Perkins, each giving a different reason to contribute to public television.

PBS officials said at least 20 stations around the country will be using all or part of the KCET package, but an exact number won’t be available until after the pledge drive.

Winings believes more will join later. “The idea that you could use a sort of mom-and-pop approach to pledge where station management and community leaders got up and did a lot of ad-libbing about how great public television is may have worked once, but I don’t think we can get away with that anymore,” she said. “We’ve got an increasingly sophisticated audience and we’ve got to use a reasoned marketing approach.”