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Are you supportive?
If a member of the public phoned your radio station to ask about the helpline you gave out a fortnight ago, would you be able to give them it?
Certain radio stations have the belief that they’d be a better place if it wasn’t for those pesky listeners. Listeners are, after all, what we are all here for, but sometimes they do seem to get in the way. When they are not stalking your offices or requesting completely inappropriate tracks to be played, they are phoning up as asking for the recipe you gave out four weeks ago.
And yet, radio stations are giving out more information than ever before. Every organisation we talk to tends to have a helpline and website that they want to plug, we give out lots of consumer advice and reviews through news bulletins and programme features; and that’s not mentioning when we play new or selectively-available music.
Listeners don’t see the station as individual programme blocks made by individual teams – it is a single product like a newspaper or magazine. So they are often surprised to discover they listen to the station more than you do, and that you don’t recall the information or feature that they heard mentioned.
There are a variety of reasons why listeners will get back in touch long after a programme has finished. More often than not, they are simply too busy at the time of broadcast to note down the appropriate information – radio is seldom listened to without doing something else; so people don’t have the time (or ability) to find a pen and paper whilst driving, cooking, changing the baby’s nappy or painting the stairs. And like many things, it is one of those things “you’ll get around too” at a later date, so that finally when you have some free time to phone up the station it could be days or weeks after the broadcast.
But there is also a case that at the time of listening you weren’t aware you needed that information – the grandmother who hears about a health charity only to discover several weeks after that her grandchild has been diagnosed with something similar.
So, the question is, how good is your programme support? For the big television and national BBC radio networks, there are teams dedicated simply to answering listener’s queries. But how would your station manage to provide the helpline number for a charity who your station spoke to several weeks ago.
Unfortunately, at many places, the support is definitely inadequate, if present at all. People who phone and ask for a number and are told too phone back at a particular time or passed around a number of people simply because no-one quite knows what they were talking about. Listeners can rarely remember exactly what show the subject was discussed, let alone the time of day or even the day itself. But then you don’t start conversations with your friends “remember three Tuesday’s ago at about 14:30 when you said…” (or if you do, you have some strange friends!).
The most obvious place to put your programme support is on a website. This not only means that information is available without people having to contact your station by telephone, but if they do you can quickly find the information yourself.
Put details by day, rather than programme – people are far more likely to remember when it was than what show they heard it on. And keep that information available for at least six weeks – longer if you can – as you’ll be surprised how far back people will research.
If you don’t have the facility to give everyone easy access to updating a website, then make sure there is a diary or folder somewhere near the phone that everyone puts details of the numbers and details they have given out. (One station I worked at had a paper programme log for each programme, which as well as ticking to say you’d played the correct trails and adverts also required you to put in subjects discussed and any helplines etc).
Then make it a station responsibility that the person who answers the call is the person who finds the information; if it isn’t there, it is the fault of the person who put the programme out. That way the station presents a united approach, in that everyone knows everything about what everyone else is doing.
Finally, remember that a log of information is a fantastic resource for programme ideas – have you returned to that story for two months ago to see whether the new law is working, whether the helpline is being overrun with calls etc. The worst thing you can do as a researcher is spend time trying to track down a guest who was on your station a few weeks prior but no-body seems to have any details about.