Station issues plea for funds

NPR partner loses grants

Fayetteville’s National Public Radio affiliate is asking listeners to help cover a shortfall in federal grant funding this holiday season.

KUAF, the University of Arkansas station that began broadcasting in 1973, is holding a four-day, on-air fundraiser beginning Tuesday. It’s the station’s third on-air fundraiser this year.

Station membership director Leigh Wood said the shortfall - a loss of about $66,000 in federal grant funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting - occurred in part because of population growth in Benton and Washington counties during the past decade. The regional growth led the corporation to reclassify the station’s listening area from “rural” to “metropolitan.”

“We’re no longer a rural station; we’re a metropolitan area,” Wood said. “When you have more people in your listening area, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting figures you should be able to get more money from listeners and less money from them.”

The station’s listening area also includes Madison and Carroll counties, both of which are primarily rural, as well as northeast Oklahoma and southwest Missouri. Wood said about 60,000 listeners tune in each week.

Rick Stockdale, the station manager, said he was notified in September 2012 that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was discontinuing an approximately $20,000grant for rural stations that KUAF had been receiving for about a decade.

The station had to apply for the grant every year. The news of the reclassification of the station’s listener area, which equals about $46,000 in cuts, came about three weeks ago, Stockdale said. The cuts will drop the annual funding the station receives from the corporation to about $119,000, Stockdale said.

Stockdale said the station’s 2014 budget is about $1 million, which includes about $300,000 raised through on-air funding drives, about $100,000 in donations raised through letter-writing campaigns to lapsed donors, and about $200,000 in donations from local businesses commonly referred to as “underwriters.” $135,000 from university, $70,000 in grants from other organizations.

Wood said station administrators had been considering a holiday fundraiser even before they became aware of how steep the cuts to their funding would be.

“December is when people are most generous and give the most,” Wood said. “The most successful stations have fundraisers in December.”

The station normally holds two on-air fundraisers each year, once in the spring and once in the fall, each of them lasting between five and 10 days. Stockdale said the decision to limit next week’s fund drive to four days was made with an eye toward potential “donor fatigue.”

Northwest Arkansas, Pages 9 on 12/07/2013

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