Introduction
In short, every Funding Drive dollar goes into programming. Funding drive donations are invested in new equipment, used to repair and maintain tower transmitters, turntables and CD players and cover all expenditures related to operating the broadcast side of CJSW operations. Funding Drive support is set aside in a “rainy day fund” to prepare for bigger capital projects such as increasing the tower wattage to better serve local listeners, improving our on-line presence through a more accessible website with more listening streams, more podcasts and increased capacity to allow more information to be uploaded onto cjsw.com.
Funding Drive donations helped us build the new offices and state-of-the-art studios we currently broadcast from (the new space turns two this coming November!). Funding Drive donations were used in 2003 to purchase and relocate our transmitter to Broadcast Hill, eliminating many problems we had in reaching Calgary and surrounding area listeners. Your support is very important to us and we thank all of you who have supported CJSW over the past 27 funding drives to make CJSW what it is today.
To help you better understand how CJSW invests your donations and how much money it takes to run a campus and community radio station, we have put together a couple of fancy and lovely pie charts below.
Revenue
CJSW collects revenue from three main sources: funding drive donations (35% of CJSW’s revenue), student levy contributions (45%) and government programs and grants (15% – including funding for CJSW to hire seven summer students to gain experience in radio and the media broadcasting industry). Only five 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 campaigns.
While the UofC students make up a majority of the support to cover office operations and salaries, Funding Drive support has increasingly become an important part of CJSW’s on-air operations.
Expenditures
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. The CJSW main tower site and stand-by tower site costs of rent and utilities are also covered by your donations.
CJSW’s Administration is made up of five full-time staff – a 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 “street-teams” than CJSW employs all year-round.
Advertising and promotion costs include all outreach initiatives that CJSW coordinates every year – our website, posters, festival booths, funding drive advertising and promotion, artist fees, professional fees (music rights fees like SOCAN) summer concerts and other CJSW-run events (Funding Drive events, New West Fest, Anniversary celebrations, etc.). Office operation expenses are the general costs you would expect when running an office – the phone, postage, accounting, insurance, the beast we call the photocopier, etc. Anything left over is set aside for a rainy day fund.
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 (saunderc@ucalgary.ca) or phone call (403-220-3904). 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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