Professional Development Concurrent Sessions
as of 4/7/2011
1+1=3: The Whole is Greater Than the Sum of the Parts
You strive to retain and acquire new members. Learn how a strategy in cross-discipline coordination can result in a positive financial impact. Focusing on two station stories, this session provides ideas for maximizing communication and station brand messaging in direct mail, online, on-air and special events. Walk away with steps to implement a process at your station to increase revenue.
Acquiring and Retaining Members: Know the Data, Know the Techniques, Know the Messaging, Part 1
Effective fundraising calls for knowing your audience and customizing your message to speak to them. Hear the trends in membership for PBS and how our system compares with other philanthropic organizations. Learn new techniques to acquire new members and what messages capture this audience. Target Analytics will be on hand to share the national membership picture while station and direct marketing vendors discuss how to use this data to gain more members.
Acquiring and Retaining Members: Know the Data, Know the Techniques, Know the Messaging, Part 2
Part two of our membership session drills down on retaining members. From sustainer programs to capturing lapsed donors, you'll learn new techniques and messaging to ensure that once a donor is in your file you'll have them for years to come.
Blow Out Pop-Outs 2011 – Maximize PBS Primetime and KIDS Promotion
Take your campaigns to a whole new level by leveraging publicity, social media, events and promotion. Learn proven national and local strategies to cut through the clutter to create member and viewer engagement, including the latest updates in social media trends — beyond Twitter and Facebook — events and contests. From Ken Burns’s Prohibition to The Cat In The Hat Knows A Lot About That!, we’ll share turn-key tips and strategies to make your campaigns pop.
Digital Media Business Strategy 101 — Trends, Get Audience
Why is a digital plan key to your future survival? What three questions are essential to answer before designing your strategy? What can you learn from analytics and research?
Digital Media Business Strategy 202 — Leverage Audience
Hear about tactics you can use to grow, engage and leverage your audience. Learn more about SEO, social media and ways to raise user engagement including COVE 2.0, Merlin / station Bento, content verticals, original content, mobile, gaming and analytics.
Digital Media Business Strategy 303 — Measuring Your Success
Learn how to measure your results and tell that story to your management team and key stakeholders. In this third segment of the digital media strategy track, hear from stations on the approach they used to define their digital strategy, obtain buy-in and gauge success.
Engaging Local Families: Digital Strategies for any Station
Find out how to grow your online audience through engaging local families! Stations who have been awarded grants to create locally relevant, interactive content for kids and families will share their own projects and strategies for engaging their communities using mobile, video and games.
#FailFaire, Lessons Learned Session
#FailFaire is a movement. Its cause is to celebrate failure, bask in it and then learn from it. Come and hear about the most fantastic failures of the past year. We’ll laugh, we’ll cry, we’ll learn. Please note: this is a confidential setting. No tweeting or blogging allowed.
Full-time Nielsen and Audience Insights
Using full-time national Nielsen ratings, with the generous support of CPB and input from stakeholders, PBS Research has undertaken a large-scale audience analysis — Audience Insight 2010. Go in-depth on what drives our prime time audience, how viewers behave, what networks are our true competitors, where program affinities exist and where there is potential for growth. Also learn how Nielsen data is changing the way we program, schedule, promote and think about our audience.
Going Mobile: The Path Ahead for Public Television
Mobile DTV is no longer just a twinkle in a device manufacturer’s eye — it has arrived. Your viewers are expecting to find public television on the go. To thrive in this space, public television stations must pursue an aggressive mobile strategy. Recent events in Japan show the value of Mobile DTV for public safety alerts and warning. Join PBS Chief Technology Officer John McCoskey, Executive Director of the Mobile500 Alliance John Lawson, and Andy Russell for an industry and technology update and a discussion of strategic opportunities offered by mobile DTV.
Goodbye, Lesson Plans. Hello, Digital Learning Objects!
Lesson plans are out and digital learning objects (DLOs) are in! Create next-generation educational resources that target students rather than teachers. Learn about PBS's Digital Learning Object Academy, an initiative designed to train producers in creating effective digital content for the classroom, and hear from select stations about how they created DLOs that employ innovative devices, methodologies and tools to engage students and impact learning. Learn how the PBS Digital Learning Library is enhancing the delivery of these resources and receive information about contributing content to the collection, as well as how to effectively incorporate educational content into proposals for funding.
Helping Viewers and Users Find Your Content
Expanding on consumer research findings, learn effective best practices — both editorial (titles, listings) and on-air accessibility (breaks, bugs) — that maximize audience reach and tune-in through consistent messaging and standards across all platforms.
How to Make Your Strongest Case for Funding
Making a successful case for funding at all levels has never been more critical for public broadcasting. In this session, you will hear from APTS, your voice on Capitol Hill, and your station colleagues on the do’s and don’ts of making a successful case for funding.
How to Write Tweets & Facebook Posts (and Influence People)
Increase your social media impact and follower base with turnkey tools you can use. This session will help you support your station's social media outreach needs and focus on:
Press release drafting and search engine optimization
Case studies from the re-launch of PBS.org
Leveraging PBS assets on Twitter and Facebook to benefit stations and programs
Tips for maximizing use of COVE’s embedding options
Helpful free software available now
Implementing Planned Giving Now
Planned giving offers a great opportunity for stations to expand fundraising efforts. Join the PBS Foundation’s Brian Reddington and hear about the best practices and tools to implement a planned giving program at your station.
Major Gifts How-To: Relationship Fundraising for Success
You know why major gift fundraising is an essential program for your station's success. In this how-to session, go in-depth on the work required for success. Learn more about relationship fundraising. Prepare to talk about money and practice making the ask, closing the gift and managing the relationship. Hear more about why major donors give to your station and walk away with tools and practical steps to win donors and create major gift partnerships.
Major Gifts: How Station Senior Management Creates a Successful Major Gift Program
Today’s funding environment offers a renewed opportunity for station leadership to increase revenue through major giving. Join Major Gift Academy Master Teacher and General Manager Rus Peotter and KLRU Senior Vice President Betsy Gerdeman to understand why a Major Gifts program is a good investment for your station. In this interactive session, hear success stories from station GMs about leadership roles and planning required for success. Walk away with a clear picture of how a Major Gifts program can impact your bottom line and how you can breathe life into this fundraising practice.
Making the Nation’s Largest Stage Your Ticket to Adding Local Value
Research shows that the arts are one of the most valued programming services that PBS stations provide. How can your station tap into this value to attract new audiences, showcase local production, enhance local brand value, build fruitful partnerships and raise additional funds? Take a front row seat at this
multi-disciplinary session where your PBS colleagues will offer nuts-and-bolts approaches for making the most of new opportunities available through PBS Arts, including an 8-week on-air festival scheduled for this fall and national web exposure for local arts, artists and performances. Join your station colleagues to share best practices and lessons learned around local arts offerings.
Maximize Effective Cross-Promotion and Break-Building Strategies
What are the best on-air break strategies? How do you cross-promote programs, channels and platforms without confusing the audience? What tools can you use to hold audiences between shows and to message to them during shows? What are some creative ways to promote your online content and social media
platforms? See real-life examples from your station colleagues, hear from members of the PBS Marketing and Communications team on the latest in effective cross-promotion strategies, see examples from our
commercial competitors, learn how to leverage the PBS and PBS KIDS brand package when developing breaks, ask questions and share your own ideas.
New Primetime Content Strategy
Better audience flow! New shows and new formats! Nova on Wednesday! It’s the new primetime content strategy. Learn more about plans and steps to bring stations a larger primetime audience that views your content more frequently and with longer duration.
New Strategies for Increasing Support and Building Awareness with PBS KIDS
After a banner year online, on-air and in communities, PBS KIDS approaches 2011-12 with a shift in focus from premiering new programs to sustaining our existing properties. With this new approach come new
opportunities to build on existing successes while finding innovative ways to promote our content. Join us as we review station success stories and share ideas around fundraising, membership and audience engagement in the year to come.
Next-Generation Pledge Report
Hear from station recipients as they report on next-generation pledge grant projects.
Power Up a Digital Education Service for Your Station!
On June 1, every station across the country will be able to offer a free digital education service to local districts and schools. Combining the content from the PBS Digital Learning Library, WGBH Teacher’s Domain and a wealth of local station and producer content partners, the new service will provide thousands of rich, interactive, purpose-built digital learning objects for teachers and students. The new platform will build on public media strengths, giving stations a unique, local education service with classroom-ready, curriculum-targeted, and multi-platform content that educators and schools in your community need and want. Participants will experience a tour of the new service, a sneak preview of enhanced features customized to states and districts and hear from stations that will launch the service this summer.
Project VoiceScape: Supporting a New Generation of Young Filmmakers
With funding from the Adobe Foundation, PBS, POV and Adobe Youth Voices are working together to support PBS stations to implement student media projects to reach community, education and partnership goals. Learn from the recipients of six $25,000 station grants about how they bring student voices to public media. Discover how you can create and sustain student media projects and gain funding support for your station. And learn about the important roles of partnerships and see examples of local exhibition strategies that put stations and students in the spotlight and impress potential funders.
Raising Readers: Preparing Preschoolers for Success
Funded by the Ready to Learn grant, PBS TeacherLine’s Raising Readers courses use PBS's NPS content to help early childhood teachers build their students’ early literacy and reading skills. The first course, “Raising
Readers: Preparing Preschoolers for Success” is one of TeacherLine’s most popular online courses for pre-K teachers. This session explores areas in all three courses. Hear how station representatives use Raising
Readers courses to develop strong local partnerships with early childhood organizations, daycare centers, local agencies and community colleges. Learn how station education representatives localized courses to meet the needs of English language learners and developed innovative ways to serve the needs of daycare providers, teachers and young children.
State of Pledge
Take a look at the state of pledge — past and present — and learn about plans for forthcoming pledge drives.
Steal this Idea!
Back by popular demand! Dive into this dynamic rapid-fire, idea-sharing session and get energized through real-world examples from several of your station colleagues on how they’ve increased the number of people who watch, log on and support their station. Leave with new ideas percolating for both kids and general audiences plus you’ll have a list of new ideas, resources and station contact information in hand.
Taking it to the Streets: Hands-on with the Explorer Positioning Strategy
You’ve heard the research and seen the new creative. Now it’s time to dive in and take a firsthand look at how to bring the explorer to life in your everyday work and make sure your audiences have a real explorer
experience every time they see your promotion material, spend a night of primetime with you or visit your website. Join representatives from two stations as they share their experiences putting the explorer
positioning strategy into practice now. And bring your own work-in-progress for a real-time review from brand positioning expert Margaret Mark.
BONUS OFFER: Brand expert Margaret Mark will be available after the session to discuss how you can optimize the explorer locally including messaging, fundraising activities, programming decisions, online experiences and special events. Schedule your 20-minute appointment today by e-mailing Jennifer Kweller at [email protected].
The American Graduate Initiative: Public Media Responds to the Dropout Crisis
The high school dropout rate is one of the biggest crises facing the United States today. Public Media is responding with a CPB supported initiative where 12 “community hub” stations, in partnership with local education, community, civic, corporate and other relevant organizations, will develop and implement effective plans to positively impact the dropout crisis. This session provides an opportunity to learn how stations are leveraging community partnerships to engage civic leaders, teachers, parents and students to address the crisis and to find out how your station can become involved in the project.
The New Ready to Learn: Unlocking a World of Learning with Transmedia
Learn how the latest Ready to Learn grant allows PBS KIDS to harness the power of transmedia — the concept of having a narrative unfold across multiple platforms — to create learning opportunities to suit every child, classroom and home, as well as benefit your station. This grant will create math-based content across different devices and build on the extensive literacy resources from PBS KIDS Raising Readers. Both new and beloved characters will “live” through TV shows, research-driven games and mobile apps, meeting children wherever they are to reinforce core curriculum concepts like math, science and literacy. With outreach partners like Chicago Public Schools and the Boston University School of Education, paired with the grant’s heavy emphasis on research, this wide-ranging project provides stations with ample new resources and an unprecedented level of customization. Session participants will learn about “transmedia” and how PBS is creating groundbreaking educational resources around this concept. Participants will generate ideas about how to harness transmedia resources into meaningful outreach for stations and create new station resources around math-related content.
Trends and Innovation in Successful Corporate Sponsorship
From national to local — the opportunities for PBS Sponsorship are gaining momentum. Join us for ways to leverage national program opportunities at the local level. Hear innovative ideas on corporate support from core News and Public Affairs programming and success stories from PBS Arts initiative. PBS National
Underwriting staff will share the latest research, trends and tools to help your local underwriting program succeed.
What is Authentic Engagement?
Explore engagement strategies for your station and its role in the community. What does it mean to authentically engage the community on-air, online and “on the ground”? How does your strategic choice impact internal functional areas from management to development to communications/marketing and the digital space? We’ll provide a general overview and will look at one or two case studies.
What you need to know about your Pledge Audience for Viewers and Members
Hear from PBS Research and learn more about what your viewers are doing during pledge, the relationship to your member files and best practices for speaking to your audience to gain support.