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How empowering are you?
Radio stations need to exist to allow their audience to make informed decisions. So how do they go about doing that?
Every radio station should have an element of helping to empower their listeners. This is especially true of stations that have a public-service remit, or receive public funding (so I would include community stations and those student stations which receive funding from a students’ union or university).
Empowerment means helping people to make informed decisions. Those might be consumer decisions (what to look for when you are buying electronics or how to register with the telephone preference scheme), political decisions (which party to vote for, or how to contact an MP), lifestyle decisions (whether to give your child the MMR vaccine or how to get help with a noisy neighbour) to name but a few. Indeed, a cinema or TV review could be a form of empowerment.
The two key words here are informed and decision. Empowerment is not getting people to vote for a particular party purely because that was the one the editorial in their newspaper recommended. People have to be given fair and balanced information, without prejudice, in order to be able to come to their own conclusion.
A decision is a choice – empowerment is all about giving people the choice to do something, or not if they so wish. But equally, not doing something because they don’t know about it (or how to go about doing it) and then being told about it is a form of empowerment. So, for example, finding out about the telephone preference scheme means you then have the choice as to whether you wish to register. If you didn’t know about it, you wouldn’t have that choice.
Empowerment is all very well and good but alongside making an informed choice, you also need to provide practical ways of to help your listeners act on their choice. So, as well as telling people that there is a telephone preference service, you also need to make sure that you tell them how to register. If you are talking about the right to register for a postal vote, you need to explain how the procedure works and where to get the appropriate form.
Using radio as an empowering tool is one of the best uses of the medium, but you must always ensure that your station never becomes worthy-but-dull. That’s to say that in a bid to empower your listeners you ignore the need to present the information in an accessible and relevant way. Empowerment is not having some dull-sounding tax-officer come and go through each form and explain how to fill them in. Your role a radio creative is to find an original and accessible way of getting that information off – if you don’t, your listeners will switch off, not get the information and then subsequently have not been empowered. No-body wins.