Over the past couple weeks Georgia Public Radio ran their fall funding campaign for National Public Radio. (We get to go through this again in the spring.) These funding campaigns are the least I listen to GPB. And they actively discourage me from wanting to donate.

So when the campaigners lament about how so few people donate, my sense of why is these campaigns. They work like a guilt trip:

YOU are a freeloader. So now that you feel bad about yourself, you can feel better by sending us money.

My inclination to that is the opposite. Maybe a large portion of the 90% of people who listen but do not donate feel the same way?

The way I was able to donate was a couple weeks after a funding campaign, I happened to be on the web site and sent my contribution. Now they send me reminders before the funding campaigns. So I send in my contribution before they go on air making me regret having sent them anything.

GPB claims not to have commercials, but they have plenty of sponsorship advertisements. They mean, I think, that commercial radio has constant, overwhelming advertisements. So my discontent is the semantics of the difference between none and few.

Oh, and the gifts for contributing are the same cheap vendor swag items that cost them cents to a few dollars per item to have made. Yet they are valued at $25-50? Lame.

Outside of when these funding campaigns are active, I am really happy that I contributed. So, it is not that I want to be a freeloader. It really is guilt trips cause me to react the wrong way. And I really am not sure how they should address changing the funding campaigns so I would be attracted.