Friday Poll: How Does Your Station Handle Requests for Promotion

    • 1373 posts
    January 29, 2015 11:18 PM PST

    Happy Friday, everyone!

    This week's poll question comes from James Young of Prince Albert, Saskatchewan:

    When clients ask about promotional items/giveaways for a staff party, store promotion, or fundraiser, how does your station handle these requests?  Does your station have a budget set aside for such requests, or is the account rep required to source items (and pay out of pocket) for them?

    Looking forward to reading your replies . . . thanks for the question, James!

    • 73 posts
    January 30, 2015 8:45 AM PST

    Our attitude toward give-aways, etc. has has varied through the years.  We have discovered that some folks are more interested in the give-away than what you are doing as a station.  Like other businesses in the community we have our share of groups that want items for their "silent auction", etc.  Most of the time we decline.  However, if it involves a major fund raiser or something like that we will donate a package of commercials with a stated value and folks in business can bid on it.  It has worked well and is very popular when it's available.  Never an easy answer because in essence you'll always have one business that tries to use the request like blackmail.  Good Luck.

    • 13 posts
    February 2, 2015 5:57 AM PST

    We operate 3 radio stations in our market and do not have a budget specifically designated to this part of our "swag" expenses. All of these promotional items come from the corporate budget and never OOP.  Always important to remember that listeners come from every walk of life and we try to "gear" (pun intended) our allocations based on which property best fits the demographic of the event/need.