A decline in pledge drive call-ins and online donations to public radio stations together with shifts in listening modes signal the need to think outside the membership box that has been the bedrock of support for public media.    

Otherwise audience growth could stall, potential support diverted and significant amount of funding left on the table, according to Melody Kramer. The Knight Visiting Nieman Fellow proposes an alternative vision of membership that engages community members in different ways with their local stations.

The goal is to build relationships. “There are a number of ways in which community members could contribute to their local stations — thereby building connections with both contributors and potential donors, “ Kramer writes in her report, "Putting the Public in Public Media Membership," on the NiemanLab. 

Her ideas for building community outreach and engagement include:

• Create ways for people to become ambassadors for a station.
• Create ways for people to explore the physical space of a public media stations. 
• Design communities to be more deeply connected to each other using the station as a hub or platform.
• Incentivize stations to collaborate and share content and/or code. 
• Develop different communication strategies for stations to contact remote contributors or donors.
• Develop more ways to facilitate both creation and distribution of information.
• Learn from the user, the audience, the listener, the person, and the public.