Florida Development Agency Implementation

The Television Future Fund is open to all public television stations and station consortia, and to any person, foundation, institution, partnership, corporation, or other business entity whose project is expressly intended to benefit public television.  The key objective of the fund, which was created by the CPB Board of Directors in 1995, is to provide critical support for system wide efforts to promote greater economic self-sufficiency and to preserve core public television services.  The stations in the state of Florida have examined nearly every area of professional activity at the local station level seeking reductions in operating costs and/or increased efficiency and productivity.  They have been led in this effort by Transformations Consulting Group.

All of the primary Public Broadcasting licensees in the state of Florida have been working cooperatively through their association (FPBS) since 1995 to reinvent public broadcasting in Florida.  Overall, the licensees have invested over $500,000 in time, resources and cash to find alternative revenues and to reduce operating costs.  They have worked in three dimensions – individual station efficiencies, cooperative efforts to reduce overhead costs by consolidating or combining resources to achieve economies of scale, and working in collaboration to increase overall system revenue.  Working directly with the stations, Transformations identified the need to consolidate certain data processing, information architecture and related direct mail activities.  In doing so, they created a conceptual model of shared services among the stations for these activities.  In early 1996, FPBS and PBS jointly applied for Future Fund support to investigate the potential to design and implement the Team Approachä development software in a distributed client/server environment and implement a best practices model of development for the entire state of Florida. 
Within the state of Florida, as well as nationwide, most public broadcasting stations of medium and small size are not able to economically leverage the more sophisticated and functional Team Approachä software product.  Additionally, many of these same stations are unable to implement a best practices model of fundraising, due to fiscal or other resource constraints, or simply because the current legacy software product being used by their development departments does not allow for meaningful detailed analysis.
An FPBS project team examined the potential incremental revenue available to the FPBS member stations through application of a best practices model for membership.  This analysis, and others done independently indicated significant additional revenue potential among the member stations.  The team has examined the requirements for customization, capitalization and implementation of a distributed client network configuration of the Team Approachä product, as well as the anticipated operational expenses of the centralized Development Agency, and has concluded that the overall return on investment is significantly positive and warrants implementation of this model.  Moreover, the initial analysis resulted in a decision of the FPBS Board to make the Development Agency available to public broadcasting stations outside of the FPBS group in later stages of the project implementation.

The Development Agency Operational Model

The Florida Development Agency, incorporated as “Infinite OutSource” has been established with the following operating mission:  To provide a high quality development program and support services for the client stations and ensure a consistent and structured focus to increase membership penetration and maximize overall development income.  The services provided to the client stations will include:

1)      maintenance of the database

2)      data entry

3)      direct mail campaign design and coordination

4)      matching gifts processing

5)      renewal mailings

6)      acknowledgements

7)      major gifts leads

8)      pledge processing

9)      vendor coordination and contracting, and

10)    installment and EFT processing

It is anticipated that by relieving the client stations from these duties, stations personnel will have time available to more aggressively focus on donor relationships and major gifts and planned giving revenue, as well as improve customer service to its member base.