A Case Study in Cooperation: Connecticut Public Broadcasting and Emergency Responders

Discussion Summary

An innovative program conducted by Connecticut Public Broadcasting (CPB) illustrated the great potential of partnerships between nonprofit groups. CPB decided to partner with nonprofit groups to create collaborative on air content for a series promoting volunteerism. With the Knights of Columbus as a founding partner, the series “The Power of Giving” was born. Instead of seeking monetary pledges during program breaks as was traditionally done with CPB specials, people would be asked to pledge themselves and their time to a volunteer organization.
The first in the series of “The Power of Giving” was “On Watch,” a documentary focused on the need for more volunteer emergency responders in the state of Connecticut. “On Watch” featured real life emergency stories highlighting the importance of first responders. Telephone banks were manned by uniformed emergency responder volunteers. For “On Watch”, CPB partnered with 15 different groups. The volunteer-a-thon netted 500 leads, a number equivalent to a two-year traditional recruitment period. The success of the initiative indicated the tangible benefits that effective nonprofit partnerships can realize.

Jerry Franklin of Connecticut Public Television:

We have been in this business for a long, long time, and that is Neighbors Helping Neighbors.

While we do not have a gospel mandate to help thy neighbor, we have a moral mandate to work with our neighbors in Connecticut. Eight or nine years ago we really made a concerted effort to say how can we use our statewide telecommunication resources to help our neighbors? What can we do to work with nonprofit organizations to take their content and their expertise beyond their walls and spread it across the country, and now on the web across the world? And I’m delighted that one of our newest community partners is Fairfield University.

Neighbors Helping Neighbors is not new to us. We’ve been doing it for a long time, and guess what, we discovered that it’s pretty darn good business to operate that way; when you take your institution and join forces with another institution.

A former board member of Connecticut Public Television, Mr. Larry Grossman came on our board and he really had a mandate. He was charged up to get us into this Connecting Our Communities project. And he had some wonderful connections with the Ford Foundation, so it was through Larry Grossman that the Ford Foundation discovered us. But the Ford Foundation selected Connecticut Public Broadcasting as a model entity.

The Ford Foundation said here is an organization who knows how to work with independent producers and other non-profits. And we had a statewide program that was very intense. We actually interviewed thousands of individuals and hundreds of institutions. We were looking for funding and content partners, but we don’t believe that all the expertise resides within our walls.

We think the experts are out here, so we started looking for them, we started asking them to work with us, and we will talk to you about the joys and the pitfalls of bringing people into your business and making them equal partners. But it’s been a wonderful success and. I guess about a year ago our fuzzy crystal ball showed some problems in the economy just around the corner. And so, we said okay what does that mean for us as a nonprofit? We have a lot of people in Connecticut in the financial services business, so we began to wonder what will happen to our budgets and other nonprofits. We said what will happen if the economy does turn sour.

So, the pressure on non-profits became immense. And then we said okay what can we do, how can we use our resources to help our non-profit partners? And that’s why this project that we’re going to unveil to you today developed. At the same time we knew that the need for services for non-profits would accelerate if the economy really turned sour. And I think the economy really has turned sour because the needs are immense.

Yes, our dollars are thin and the needs are greater, but people are understanding more and more about what nonprofits do, so that’s where I see the opportunity. And just as we’re nearly 50 years old, as I said, last year we had a 19 percent increase in our audience. But we wanted to use our media platform to make a difference. We just didn’t want to broadcast a news hour. And for 15 years we were the largest producer of children’s programming in the country, but we just didn’t want to put on another half hour children’s program. We said what else can we do? How can we make a difference with our media platform?

So, we created a program called “On Watch.” That’s a program that highlighted the need for emergency service volunteers in our state and the power of giving; in other words, the power philanthropy and the power of volunteerism.

Then we discovered the Knights of Columbus. That that’s your mission, if you will, and so it seemed to be a perfect way for us to work together.

Nancy Bauer of Connecticut Public Television

Good afternoon. In order to explain the program, “On Watch,” and our new initiative the Power of Giving Volunteerism, I think we need to step back a bit. Public television knew, as well as all commercial stations, that there was a government mandated digital transition movement. It was supposed to be February 17th. It’s now moved to June.

So, the Ford Foundation recognized that public broadcasting stations around the country had trouble finding content and funding for one channel. How could we possibly do it in a multichannel environment? So, the Ford Foundation chose our station to be the pilot station to document the process of engaging nonprofit community partners about we can work together to jointly develop content. So, as we said, we identified hundreds of nonprofit institutions in our state whose mission and services would benefit from a partnership with public broadcasting.

We call this phase mapping the assets. We began to connect the assets by bringing the community groups together at our stations. During the connecting the assets phase, we made two very significant observations. This began in 2000 and there were two projects that we took on. One was asthma and the other was leadership skills for young women. I sat on the asthma panel. And in our boardroom there were about 35 people and everybody in that room was an expert in one way, shape, or form, whether they came from a university or the American Lung Association. We had all the power players in our state sitting at the table. And this is in no way meant to diminish the work that these organizations do, but as an outsider we began to really notice that many of the organizations sitting in that room were duplicating efforts.

Connecticut is a pretty small state. We learned that one group had raised a million dollars for one project. Another group forty miles down the road had just raised a half a million dollars for the same exact project the folks in Hartford were doing. We also learned that in this model everybody wanted to be a content partner, but no one wanted to be a funding partner. It was through this process that we sat down and said, yes, we could serve a vital role by convening community partners. We brought in people with specific areas of expertise, we sat in a room, and then we collectively agreed that we would work together for the common good. That meant egos needed to be checked at the door, individual agendas needed to be set aside, and yes, some partners had to be funding partners. We all needed to work together to create meaningful content for the public good. This expanded into what we now call  “Connecting Our Communities.” We make it very clear to our community partners that it’s a shared responsibility. Everyone is a stakeholder. Since 2005,  “Connecting Our Communities”  has touched hundreds of community partners in our state and resulted in almost 50 different programming initiatives, from energy conservation issues to people living with disabilities to mental health, foster and adoptive care services, and the list goes on and on. Our latest “Connecting Our Communities”  initiative that we’re here to highlight for you today is “On Watch”  and the “Power of Giving.”  You need to understand “On Watch”  and how we got to the “Power of Giving Volunteerism,”  which is really the reason why we’re here today.

Mary Harris of Connecticut Public Television

One of the things that makes “Connecting Our Communities” such a successful collaborative model is the fact that it’s much more than a single television program. “Connecting Our Communities” initiatives are at a minimum year long, multimedia projects. It’s a series of TV and radio vignettes, public service announcements, and a program Web site. We create print ads for Connecticut Magazine, and we then repurpose those as fliers and promotional tools that our partners can use to distribute electronically for our community events. And most importantly, we take that content and we work together and show grassroots organizations how they can implement it and use it as a powerful outreach tool.

So, when we embarked on “On Watch,” one of the things that is extraordinary is that it allowed us to take our “Connecting Our Communities” initiatives to the next level. Each year as we plan our programming pipeline, we sit down and we talk with community partners about how we can potentially work together using media to serve the common good. Now, what makes these conversations so productive is that we listen.

We sincerely want to know what the most pressing issues and challenges are that our communities face. Our partners work in the trenches daily so we look to them to guide us. Last spring one of those meetings was with Michal Purcaro, the Executive Director of the Public Health Foundation of Connecticut. We discussed a multitude of critical issues that affected the health and well-being of our communities. And in the course of our conversation, Mike, who also happens to serve as the Emergency Management Director for the town of Vernon, Connecticut, asked us if we would ever consider doing a program about the need for emergency volunteer services. It was Mike’s vision that resulted in the program of  “On Watch.”

Mike Purcaro of the Public Health Foundation

I would like to thank Dr. Anderson and my fellow brother Knights for their outstanding support of the fire service community and firefighters and their families nationwide. To me this is a true demonstration of Neighbors Helping Neighbors.

Volunteerism is a call to action. As a 10-year public servant of local, state, and federal government, and as a healthcare provider, I believe that promoting and protecting the public’s health and safety is primarily, but not solely, a governmental responsibility. This was the genesis in creating the Public Health Foundation of Connecticut, a first of its kind state executive branch sponsored 501(c)(3) public charity organization designed to meet those needs in Connecticut where traditional funding from state and federal sources could not.

The same concept is especially true in the volunteer fire service, which constitutes the backbone of many emergency service provider organizations in local communities all across our nation. I would like to share with you a few interesting facts about volunteerism and the volunteer fire service to further illustrate this point. As Dr. Anderson stated earlier, about 68 million people or 26.4 percent of the population volunteered in some capacity for an organization at least once between September of ’07 and September of 2008.

Overall, 31.6 percent of married people volunteered while only 20.4 percent of single people volunteered. Lastly, the average volunteer volunteers approximately 52 hours per year. Now, in regard to the fire service, there are approximately 800,000 volunteer firefighters in the United States. And a volunteer fire department may be funded by taxes, which are typically not enough to support its operations, but in many cases supported or supplemented in support by corporate and other private donations and grants. But the volunteer fire service is threatened because of a shrinking number of volunteers. In these economic times some reasons for these shrinking numbers include the need for people to carry more than one job. Many people are no longer able to work the traditional nine to five and then devote their evenings to participate in volunteer fire department activities.

Other societal factors such as dual income homes, wherein childcare duties must be shared among parents demands more of a parent’s time. So the challenge we face is great, but so is the need for volunteers in the emergency services field. There’s much that we can do and that we must do to meet the needs of our communities and to recruit volunteers into our organizations. But we need to be especially creative in our approaches.

One creative example is that the Dale City Fire Department of Virginia. They reached out to the local mass transit organizations to advertise the need for volunteer firefighters. They used city buses. Their ads featured large pictures of fire trucks that give the impression that the bus is actually a fire truck.

Using slogans such as“picture yourself here” and “volunteer is needed” successfully allowed that fire department to reach out into the community and get the needed volunteers.

Our “On Watch” program demonstrates another excellent solution. This one bridges the gap between public and private sectors to achieve the goal of increasing volunteerism and ultimately improving quality of life for the residents of Connecticut.

 

Mary Harris of Connecticut Public Television

Mike Purcaro was so instrumental in helping to champion is the project in which he helped to identify other partners that were vital to the topic from both a funding and a content development point of view. Now, these partners included the State of Connecticut Department of Emergency Management and Homeland Services, Citizen Corps, the Commission on Fire Prevention and Control, the Connecticut Department of Public Health, and the Public Health Foundation of Connecticut. Now, while each of our Connecting Our Communities initiatives is different, the one thing they all have in common is that there’s always some kind of groundbreaking element.

With “On Watch” we married the “Connecting Our Communities”  model and the tried and true public television pledge model. Now, pledge drives are traditionally used to drive membership and to garner financial support for the station, but that night rather than pledging for dollars, On Watch became a volunteer-a-thon for emergency support services statewide. This past 9/11, CPTV proudly broadcast a live two-hour prime-time special that featured the one-hour “On Watch” documentary.

The documentary used storytelling techniques based on several real life emergency situations including a horrific car crash, a devastating apartment fire, the tragic drowning of a father and son, and a community search and rescue operation to examine the importance and need for Connecticut’s emergency service volunteers. It also drove home the point that emergency service volunteers are not 34

just about working on the frontline. During the broadcast, viewers became aware of little known non-traditional volunteers’ opportunities, as well. Now, prior to broadcast, in order to drive viewership and heighten awareness, we created some public service announcements that ran throughout the CPTV schedule and we also made these public service announcements available to our commercial counterparts.

We created an ad that ran in the “What’s On TV” section in Connecticut Magazine and those are turned into fliers and adapted for our partners to distribute both electronically and at community outreach events. The evening of the broadcast itself, we built into the two-hour broadcast four 15-minute pledge segments and each of these live segments featured telephone banks manned by uniformed volunteers from 15 different emergency groups.

A representative from each of the groups spoke on camera about the volunteer opportunities available, and we also setup a special toll-free number for viewers, 877-96-TOJOIN, and we did that with the idea that we might just be able to use that number again for similar initiatives. We also had a special pledge form designed for volunteers to use with callers and worked with Homeland Security and United Way’s 211 state information line to take overflow calls.

We were ready to go. However, while we knew that the traditional on-air request for support model works for public television, we had no idea if viewers would respond by volunteering their time, but all the partners were willing to give it a try.

We took the leap of faith and the response was amazing. It’s a project near and dear to my heart as you probably can tell. We had people who owned planes who wanted to part of civil air control, people who enjoyed hiking and wanted to join search and rescue, linguists who wanted to serve as translators, and much more. And there were many, many folks who told us that they can’t fight a fire and blood makes them squeamish, but they could certainly help out in an office or volunteer their time at a public event. We generated close to 500 volunteer leads, which I was told is more than what’s usually garnered over the course of a two-year period. The state Fire Commission collected those leads and then they distributed them to the appropriate organizations.

We also worked with MyTV9, which is the Connecticut affiliate, which agreed to air the two-hour On Watch pledge version in prime time the following Sunday. During weekly broadcasts calls were routed to 211 and the State Fire Commissions’ 1-800 fire line. Whenever there is a repeat broadcast of the documentary calls continue to spike. Beyond broadcasts, we provided a master DVD of the one-hour version of the “On Watch” program to the Connecticut Department of Emergency Management and Homeland Security enabling this state agency to provide each city and town in Connecticut with a copy to use for educational awareness, to recruit and retain volunteers, and to make available for use by cable television and local public access stations.

“On Watch”  has made quite an impact here in the state of Connecticut, but has also had a great impact beyond our borders. Other states including New York, New Jersey, and Ohio have contacted us for information and copies of the program. That is, in a nutshell, how we created “On Watch.”

Nancy Bauer of Connecticut Public Television

“On Watch” was a very good project and it was very time consuming, but probably in my nine years of working for public broadcasting this was the most rewarding project I have ever worked on. The wonderful part about it is when we air a program people call us and they tell us how the program has made a difference in their lives. It’s what my department calls the unseen impacts. For example, we did a series called “Able Lives, which focused on families with people living with disabilities. A parent had called us and said her son was always ashamed of his autistic brother.

After watching the program together, the son’s perception radically changed. He became proud of his brother and began to include him in his activities rather than ignore him. Another example was a program we did on foster and adoptive care services in Connecticut with the Village for Families and Children. Much to my surprise I got a call from my contact at the Village that the day following the broadcast the Village received a $50,000 check earmarked for foster and adoptive care services for their organization.

However, with “On Watch” there was an impact that became highly visible on a national scale. One of the families highlighted in the program was the Gerard family. They happen to live in a town called Voluntown, no less. They endured several tragedies including a devastating house fire, and the father and son died shortly thereafter, drowned. In June of 2008, the Gerard family had written the show “Extreme Home Makeover and didn’t get a response. Several months later the documentary that aired on MyTV9, which we had produced, was sent to an ABC affiliate in our market. They sent a copy of the program to the show’s producers and we’re happy to report the Gerard family was chosen for an episode of “Extreme Home Makeover”, which aired last month, so we know our programs make a difference and we’re extremely proud.

The response of “On Watch” was the inspiration for our new initiative called the “Power of Giving Volunteerism”. It’s our new “Connecting Our Communities” programming and outreach initiative that will promote opportunities, challenges, and the rewards of volunteering. It’s going to ask people to step forward and give up their time. We feel it’s our way of doing our part to make 2009 the year of the volunteer.