Over the weekend film critic Roger Ebert posted on his Facebook page that his new movie review show had been pre-empted in many PBS markets by stations getting an early start on their December pledge drives. Not surprisingly, this prompted a variety of negative comments about public TV fundraising. When it comes to public television there’s probably nothing more contentious than pledge drives.
That viewers don’t like them is a given, but they're not alone. I know quite a few people in the PBS ecosystem both personally and professionally, and my sense has always been that they’d rather be doing something else with their airtime as well. Unfortunately, that's not the world we (or PBS) live in. Government support of public television is constantly under siege, frequently the target of partisan hatchet-men like New Jersey governor Chris Christie who cut funding to the the state's public TV network as much because he didn't like their coverage of his administration as for any legitimate fiscal reason.
Against that backdrop, pledge drives are likely to remain a necessary evil for the foreseeable future, because viewer contributions can literally be the difference in being able to keep the lights on, let alone license programs they need to fill the portion of their schedule the national network doesn't provide. Emotional reactions aside, though, there's one key fact that gets overlooked about PBS fundraising. During pledge drives there's typically about 20 minutes of fundraising per hour. When you break it down, this is basically the same amount of time taken up by ads in an hour of programming on a commercial network. Sure, that concentrated burst of pitching can feel a bit long, but it’s all for a good cause.
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