Conclusion

Pitches and Matches

The stakes of achieving widespread resonance were high for the fall 2025 fund drive, which took place in September, the last month of the fiscal year. October would bring with it the full effects of the loss of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, including losing two of the station’s eight paid staff members: assistant news director Noelle Herhusky-Schneider and operations manager Josh Brewer. It was (and at time of this writing still is) uncertain what more staff cuts might eventually come as the years roll on without CPB funding. A successful fund drive would not bring back the eliminated positions, but it would be crucial in the impending struggle to stay afloat.

Even before the fund drive began, WFHB participants started to feel community support. An anonymous donor agreed to match up to $100,000 of pledges made during the fall drive, a genuinely unprecedented amount of money for WFHB. Where normally we would have worked toward a fund drive total between $40,000 and $50,000, staff set the bar at the absolute top, setting our station-wide fundraising goal to $100,000 in the hopes of maximizing the anonymous donor’s almost unbelievably generous offer.

In the spring, when the president’s memo calling for the defunding the CPB came out during our fund drive, it had worked to our advantage, giving us a concrete situation to present to our listeners in asking them for their support. Now, we had not only a specific challenge, but a positive boost demonstrating to listeners that someone believed in us in large (for us) monetary quantities and offering them a chance to stretch their own financial contributions twice as far as they would go on their own.

The pitches were full-throated and whole-hearted. Guests and live sessions abounded. Programming was creative and upbeat even in the face of catastrophe. Development director Brooke Turpin brought in a basket of toy musical instruments that programmers used from time to time on the air. A volunteer-made poster inside the station written in marker read “PUNK’S NOT DEAD! / AND NEITHER ARE YOU / KEEP COUNTERCULTURE ALIVE / DONATE” in large, black-and-red letters (Figure 5.5). Chicago-based drummer Daniel Villarreal performed a live session with his trio on the airwaves, at one point offering his own pitch: “It's always good to support and donate and create opportunities for other people to keep going with what we have with music and what we have in individual cities and towns.” Later that night, he opened his show at local venue Orbit Room with unprompted praise for WFHB and entreaties to his audience to support the station during its fund drive.

Figures 5.4-5.9: Scenes from inside and outside the station during Fall Fund Drive 2025. Top row, left to right: 5.4: A sign inside the station lobby touting the donor match. 5.5: A sign in the air room. Middle row: 5.6: A basket of fund drive noisemakers. 5.7: The noisemakers themselves. Bottom row: 5.8: Programmer Chad Robert’s special guest during our episode of Off the Charts. 5.9: A sandwich board outside the station on the last afternoon of the drive.

Figure 5.10: The Daniel Villarreal Trio performs at the Orbit Room, a session broadcast live on WFHB.

For my Planetary Caravan shift, I invited John Westhues to sit in as my guest. He brought with him music from Finland and Sweden—and his near-encyclopedic knowledge about the artists performing it—and a guide to fund drive pitching that the station had made in the 1990s, before it received any funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The booklet included, among other things, the findings of apparent research into why listeners donate (or don’t) to fund drives. Of particular interest in the moment was a claim that listeners who associated public and non-commercial radio with university and government funding were less likely to make donations themselves.

Figure 5.11: An excerpt from a 1990s WFHB fund drive pitching guide that programmer John Westhues brought to show me during our 2025 fund drive show.

On the last day of the drive, Jar and I teamed up with programmer DJ Kulow on For the Record, the station’s Sunday afternoon all-vinyl show, to make our last pitches of the season. We were in constant motion, three programmers sharing two microphones and two turntables, alternating track selections and bouncing ideas for talking points off one another as we tried to raise $1000 in two hours. Each of us had come in with music picked to match the themes of cooperation and change germane to the fundraising event—Jar brought Hot Chocolate’s 1978 single “Every 1’s a Winner,” Kulow was ready with Bernice Johnson Reagon’s “There’s a New World Coming” from her 1975 Paredon release, I threw on 2018 Ron Gallo track “Love Supreme (Work Together!)”—but we were also ready to improvise. At several points, Kulow was especially innovative, playing with the very materiality of the records and the technological affordances of the turntables. At one point, near the end of Giorgio Moroder’s cinematic 1987 track “Semifinal,” he took hold of the speed lever and started sliding it smoothly up and down, slowing, speeding, slowing, and speeding the track; gently moving the record back and forth a handful of times; and then bringing it to a sudden stop.[1] Later, he started playing a Stephane Grappelli track backwards. It was an exhilarating show, our collective adrenaline rising as the total donations kept inching closer to the overall drive goal. That night, WFHB hit and even slightly exceeded its $100,000 goal. It was bittersweet, knowing we would still lose Josh and Noelle and that this did not guarantee success in future fund drives, but it was nonetheless monumental. It also seemed to lend some credence to the claim in Westhues’s 90s pitch guide that listeners were more likely to support stations when they felt they were needed and that larger institutions were not getting involved.

[1] Audio embedded in companion webpage.