Part One | Part Two | Part Three: Funding Drive
Introduction
For this years Funding Drive, CJSW has put together a couple of fancy and lovely pie charts to help you better understand how CJSW runs our daily operations and to show you where your Funding Drive donations go. In short, every Funding Drive dollar goes into programming – paying for new equipment, repairing and maintaining turntables and CD players, allowing us to build new offices and state-of-the-art studios, investing in a new transmitter that will bring more “wattage to the cottage” (or better yet, making CJSW easier to find on the FM dial with a stronger local signal), better web streams and more bandwidth on-line for Internet listeners and much more.
Revenue
CJSW collects revenue from three main sources: funding drive donations (35% of CJSW’s revenue), student levy contributions (39%) and government programs and grants (18%, grants include funding for CJSW to hire seven summer students to gain experience in radio and in the media broadcasting industry). Only eight percent of our revenues are collected from advertising. Our mandate at CJSW is to run a very limited number of ads, typically reserving advertising spots for events, concerts, festivals and community awareness projects.
Expenditures
While donations help us establish a reserve to pay for big projects like expansion and the upcoming tower relocation and wattage increase, Funding Drive donations cover all of the costs associated with making radio on a day-to-day basis: engineering costs, new equipment for the studios, repairing and maintaining that same equipment and allowing us to expand our on-line presence.
This next series of pie charts will illustrate where CJSW invests all of our revenue. The first pie chart shows how much Funding Drive money was invested into the expansion project. This project allowed CJSW to relocate our offices and studios to the third floor of MacEwan Hall. Over $850,000 was spent on the “bricks and mortar” of the expansion project and approximately $90,000 was invested into the equipment and wiring of the new space. Most of this money was saved up from Funding Drive donations over the past ten years. It should be noted that CJSW successfully managed this expansion project and was only $3000 over-budget (less than 0.36%!)!
When expansion-related costs are removed from the equation, a clearer picture of how CJSW allocated all of its revenue over a two-year period can be seen. CJSW’s Administration is made up of five full-time staff (Station Manager, Program Director, Music Director, News Director and a Volunteer/Office Coordinator), seven seasonal summer students and a couple of Funding Drive Coordinators to help us out during this busy time. Comparatively, local commercial stations will have more people on their sales team than CJSW hires year-round.
Questions?
As Calgary’s campus and community radio station, CJSW strives to be transparent and open about how we operate this 200+ volunteer, non-profit organization. If you have any questions about how CJSW operates, please fell free to drop CJSW Station Manager Chad Saunders an email or phone call. Thanks for taking the time to check-out this information and please click on over to our Funding Drive page to find out more about this year’s Funding Drive.
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