The Olympics are over, the political season is heating up, and radio programmers must plan for the fall. Welcome to Programming Summer Camp. In addition to your normal program management responsibilities, you have other summer tasks to consider:
- Create a vacation schedule and get the air staff back by mid-September, the the start of the fall rating period in diary markets.
- Find and train fill-in personnel (part-timers, board-ops, and future draft picks).
- Establish your high school and college intern program for fall. Talk to the communications department head at local colleges and universities.
- Plan and execute your promotions for the rest of summer – county and state fairs, festivals, outdoor events, sporting events, concerts, amusement parks, backyard BBQs, picnics, and pool parties. These promotions ensure the station is fully visible.
- Check allocation of vehicles and remote equipment for weekend activities. Perform necessary maintenance before every event.
Summer Programming Checklist
- Review your past ratings and what your stations did to achieve those great numbers. What is needed for fall? Set your rating goals.
- Keep a diary of what your competition did this summer. Include how the competition handled their summer campaigns, their listener-involvement promotions, and their best sales promotions.
- Plan fall strategies and set budgets. What will be the hot car, new TV show, “must have” electronic item, major movie release, core artist album release, or biggest concert in the fall?
- Create a Marketing Plan and include e-commerce. As a value-added to clients, find ways to make station merchandise available at online stores (part of proceeds can go to charity).
- Reserve media for fall—TV, outdoor, email marketing, and other ways potential listeners are exposed to your station. Also, include push notifications to show with your station’s app. Set a high priority on increasing your Cume audience in fall; that requires more people turning into the station. Your great programming will keep them listening for longer Time Spent Listening occasions.
- Make your station’s website more topical and interactive, and do the same with Facebook and other social media. Explore ways to take these promotional media to the next level in the fall. Promote usage on the air.
- Schedule research, including music testing, for late summer. Connect with core listeners to find out how the station is perceived and how it can be better.
- Explore new ways to aggressively promote your morning show and garner more listeners.
- Create special programming for the three-day Labor Day Weekend, including music countdowns, music features, blocks of music, and programming and promotional stunts. Consider broadcasting Labor Day from a maternity ward at a hospital client!
- Plan all your fall promotions. Back-to-school is over. Carefully design your fall ratings contests, plus fun promotions for Halloween, the fall election, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve. Find new promotional partners and seize the “street buzz.”
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John Lund is President of the Lund Media Group, a radio programming, broadcast consulting, and research firm with specialists in all mainstream radio formats. You can leave a comment below or email him at John@Lundradio.com.