If you listened to WPLN last week, you may have heard some of ePledge, a short on-air pledge drive intended to help us end the fiscal year in the black. (We did – thank you all!) We used to call it ePledge “day,” but since it extends into the next morning, it’s really “e-Pledge day and part of the next day.”

Last Friday I received this question from an alert listener:

Who pays for the give-away trips to Europe, Greece etc.? How can WPLN afford such lavish prizes?

It’s an excellent question and the answer is: WPLN.  We purchased the travel, for approximately $5,000.  I think it’s a good decision and here’s why.

Travel incentives really work. Over the years of conducting on-air fundraising we’ve learned that offering an attractive travel experience to public radio listeners makes a huge difference in the number of pledges we receive. And the destinations need to be appealing: London, Paris, Ireland, for example. Not the Caribbean, and not, as we discovered a while back, Costa Rica.

Two years ago we experimented with a more modest approach, offering two donated Southwest Airline tickets and $1,000 in travel money and received pledges of approximately $22,000. 

This year the trip to Greece, which cost about $5,000, attracted pledges of $72,500.

Simply put, without an attractive trip, our net results would be much lower.

But there’s another question here: why can’t we get the travel donated? We make every effort to secure donated travel, but it’s almost impossible to do so in this economy, particularly since we can’t take advantage of last minute travel bargains.

Early on, the trips were 100% donated.  Later, we were able to secure a partial donation.  Recently, though, we have had to purchase the trips.

If there were a way to attract over $70,000 dollars in pledges in a little over a day without offering travel, we would jump on it.  If you have any ideas, please let us know.

It’s true that the travel offers stand out and are different in scale from coffee mugs and tote bags, but they are part of our arsenal of tools that, taken together, help us raise what we need to operate.

We’ll keep looking for donated trips – maybe it will become easier when economic conditions improve.  In the meantime, it makes sense for us to buy the travel when we need to, since it pays off in terms of the net dollar raised.