Library Gazette

On Wednesday, October 7th from 4-7pm members of the Communications department, the Documentary Film Program and the ZSR Library work the WFDD “One Day Wednesday” Pledge Drive! Rosalind Tedford, Mary Beth Lock, Mary Reeves, Chris Burris and I joined a team of students and faculty to work the phones. I even got to talk about my iPhone on the air! We took hundreds of calls and were rewarded with a great dinner from Downtown Thai!

Photo from the WFDD Fall 2009 One Day Wednesday Pledge Drive

As a Staff Development activity, on Thursday, January 24th, Chris Burris, Joe Harrington, Mary Horton, Mary Beth Lock, Lauren Pressley, Lynn Sutton, and I went on a tour of 88.5 WFDD. Greg Keener, Membership Operations Coordinator for the station, was kind enough to volunteer to show us all around.

The station is located inside a renovated house so the interior is rather crowded in some areas, but everything was well laid out and professional looking. WFDD is staffed by 12 members and has three studios. The station also has three bandwidths on HD Radio: WFDD 1 which plays the regular WFDD format, WFDD 2 plays classical and opera music, and WFDD 3 (which is scheduled to launch in February) plays an eclectic blend of music ranging from bluegrass to ambient.

We sat in one of the conference rooms and Greg shared some interesting facts about the station:

1946: WFDD was “born” as a 5 watt station on the campus of Wake Forest College

1948: Officially accepted by the FCC. Thus, this is the year they consider to be their radio debut. The goal for the first pledge drive of that year was $200!

1967: Became the first non-commercial FM station in Winston-Salem

1971: Charter member of NPR (yes, even before WUNC!)

1989: Hurricane Hugo caused the radio tower to collapse

1991: Moved into current location. Prior to that they were located in Reynolda Hall

After Greg fielded some questions from all of us, we went into a studio with one of the Producers and Hosts of WFDD programming, Bradley George. We were able to watch him push some buttons and announce on-air traffic and weather. He also took a few questions from us. It was very brief, but very interesting.

Our time at WFDD was very pleasant and informative. Greg was also kind enough to send us all off with an 88.5 WFDD flower pot coffee mug. WFDD will be having their Winter fundraiser during the week of February 8th-13th. Tune in and give if you can!

On Wednesday afternoon Chris Burris, Elise Anderson and I worked the phones at the WFDD pledge drive. We took contributor’s pledges and provided them with information about the thank-you gifts that are available at various donation levels. During our 2.5 hours at the studio, we collected $7,394 in pledges for our NPR station.

Why so much? I think three factors motivated listeners to call: we were there during the evening rush hour which is a heavy-listening time; there was a contribution match in place, so each donor’s pledge was doubled; and, there were some awesome thank-you gifts available including five ZSR library cards. For a donation of $200 to WFDD, a listener could receive one of our library cards and in fact, one donor claimed a card while we were on the phones. The other sought-after premium was the Terry Gross ticket package for the Fresh Air hostess’ visit to Greensboro next month.

We enjoyed chatting with our WFDD supervisors and had a chance to chat briefly with Denise Franklin, Molly Davis and other WFDD folks. As always, they fed us well – pizzas from Mellow Mushroom. Working the phones during the pledge drive was a fun experience and it felt good to support WFDD.