What Public Media Can Learn From SaaS About Building Recurring Revenue
The recent announcement that PMDMC is now the Public Media Growth Conference presents a new mandate: bring together revenue, content, marketing, and station leadership under a single strategic tent, and start talking about growth as a unified organizational objective rather than a departmental one.
But if you've read our Insights previously, this framing will sound familiar. We've been making this argument for years — in these posts, on the PMDMC stage last summer, and in our October webinar with PMI. The industry is now catching up, which is good. But what it means for your station is worth thinking through carefully.
The rebrand isn't just about a conference name. Greater Public is acknowledging, formally and publicly, that the siloed team structure that defined public media fundraising for decades — marketing over here, membership over there, development in a different building, content in another — can no longer produce the kind of growth the industry needs. That's a meaningful statement from the most influential organization in the space. It's also a useful opening to discuss what that organizational integration actually requires in practice, starting with digital fundraising as its foundation.
Here are five things development-focused leaders should understand about what "growth" actually demands.
1. Growth begins with the donor relationship — and that relationship starts long before a drive
Most stations have a fundraising calendar. What fewer stations have is a donor relationship strategy that operates between fundraising events.
The default model — build audience through programming, activate that audience during drives, repeat — made sense when broadcast was your primary distribution channel and seasonal campaigns were your primary conversion mechanism. It no longer reflects how donors actually behave. Your next sustaining member isn't waiting for your fall drive to discover they care about your mission. They're already listening. They're already on your email list, or your website, or following your social accounts. The question is whether you're maintaining any kind of meaningful contact with them in the 300 days a year when you're not actively fundraising.
Always-on digital outreach isn't a nice-to-have — it's what keeps your station present in the lives of people who are increasingly making decisions about where to give based on which organizations they feel most connected to. Between drives, that means sustained, targeted campaigns that reach your warmest audiences (donors, lapsed donors, email subscribers, engaged content consumers) across the digital platforms where they actually spend time. Not with a pledge ask necessarily, but with your mission, your journalism, your programming — building the case continuously so that when your drive does open, you're converting an audience that's been in a conversation with you, not a cold list.
The stations that outperform during drives are almost universally the stations that were running intentional digital outreach in the months before them. It's not complicated — it just requires a different mental model about when fundraising actually starts.
2. Your sustaining membership base is your ARR — manage it like one
Here's a frame that may reorient how you think about the growth problem.
The software industry spent the better part of a decade figuring out how to build and scale subscription revenue. The model — Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), powered by low churn, systematic upgrades, and long-term relationship management — became the foundation of the most valuable companies in the world. To manage it effectively, they built Revenue Operations: a function that unified marketing, sales, and customer success around shared data, shared metrics, and shared accountability for the full customer lifecycle.
RevOps emerged in SaaS because those companies realized that treating acquisition, retention, and expansion as separate functions was destroying lifetime value. When marketing handed off to sales who handed off to customer success, and each team measured itself independently, nobody owned the relationship. Customers churned. Upgrades didn't happen. The numbers looked fine quarter to quarter until they didn't.
Sound familiar?
Your sustaining membership base is your ARR. It is, quite literally, the recurring revenue your station depends on to operate. You have a donor acquisition function (marketing), a retention and conversion function (membership), and a major and planned gift function (development) — and in most stations, these teams share donors but not data, share goals but not budgets, and measure themselves in ways that make cross-functional accountability nearly impossible. Marketing is graded on reach and engagement. Membership is graded on dollars raised during drives. Development is graded on major gift totals. None of those metrics, on their own, capture what actually matters: the health and growth of the full donor relationship over a lifetime.
This is the structural problem the PMGC rebrand is pointing at, and it's the same problem RevOps solved in SaaS. The revenue model is nearly identical. The solution architecture is, too.
3. Development Ops: The full donor arc, from first click to final legacy
What does integration actually look like at the donor level?
We've been calling this Development Ops — DevOps applied not to software, but to the full spectrum of donor development. The concept is straightforward: every touchpoint in the donor relationship, from the first time someone clicks on a promoted post to the moment they name your station in their estate plan, should be part of a coordinated system rather than a series of handoffs between disconnected teams.
The arc looks like this:
Digital acquisition — Paid and organic campaigns reach prospective donors where they already are: searching for your content on Google, scrolling their feeds, listening to your podcast. This is the top of the funnel, and for most stations it's either underfunded, sporadic, or both.
First-time donor conversion — The new donor who responds to a digital campaign is your most important relationship to steward. This is where the sustaining membership pipeline begins. How they're welcomed, retained, and recommunicated to in the first 90 days determines whether they become a long-term supporter or a one-time transaction.
Sustaining member cultivation — Sustainers are your recurring revenue base. They're also your most likely mid-level and major gift prospects. The stations that understand this invest in the digital infrastructure that tracks engagement signals — giving velocity, content affinity, email behavior — not because it's interesting data, but because it tells you who to call and when.
Mid-level and major gift identification — The most underutilized pipeline in public media is sitting in the digital donor file. Major gifts teams at most stations are still working primarily from wealth screening and personal networks. Meanwhile, the donor who upgraded from $10 to $25 to $100 over four years and opens every email about your investigative reporting is a major gift prospect — and your development team likely has no idea they exist.
Planned giving — The final leg of the relationship, and the one most stations treat as entirely separate from everything above. It isn't. As we've argued before, the digital relationship you build today is the foundation for the bequest conversation twenty years from now.
The through-line in all of this is data — specifically, the digital behavioral data that tells you where someone is in their giving journey and how to advance it. That data doesn't exist if your digital fundraising is limited to email and a drive-time Meta campaign twice a year. It exists when you're running always-on digital outreach, building audiences continuously, and capturing engagement signals year-round.
4. The campaigns are the infrastructure — if you build them that way
The gap between stations that are dabbling in digital fundraising and stations that are genuinely growing through it is less about campaign creativity or budget size than it is about how the campaigns are designed.
Dabbling looks like: a Google Grant account running year-round, a boosted post before the fall drive, an email to the list on Giving Tuesday. These aren't wrong, but they're episodic. They generate some revenue in the moment, but they don't generate the audience depth or behavioral data that compounds over time.
The reframe isn't "build infrastructure before you run campaigns." It's "run campaigns in a way that builds infrastructure as a byproduct." An always-on digital acquisition program doesn't just acquire donors — it continuously populates your warmest audience segments for the next drive. Paid search campaigns that run year-round don't just convert — they tell you exactly which messages and audiences are worth concentrating budget against when drive season opens. Automated outreach that maintains contact with warm audiences between campaigns isn't a separate project — it's what makes the next campaign's conversion rate higher than the last one's.
The shift in thinking is from "what do we need to run before our next drive?" to "what are we running right now that makes the next drive better?" Every campaign, designed well, is also a data and audience-building exercise. The stations getting this right aren't running more campaigns — they're running connected ones.
This is also where emerging tools — including AI-assisted audience targeting and campaign optimization — are beginning to meaningfully benefit lean teams. The promise isn't magic; it's scale. Sustaining consistent, personalized outreach across a donor file of thousands, adapting messaging based on where each person is in their relationship with your station, is something that previously required staffing most stations don't have. Increasingly, it doesn't.
5. The hard conversation most stations are avoiding
None of the above works if marketing, membership, and development are operating as separate cost centers with separate goals. This isn't a criticism of the teams — it's a leadership structure problem, and it's nearly universal across the industry.
The shift required isn't subtle. It means senior leadership deciding that shared revenue outcomes matter more than departmental autonomy — and then restructuring budgets, KPIs, and reporting lines accordingly. A small number of major market stations have already made this move. They've consolidated audience, digital, membership, and development functions under unified leadership, created shared metrics around the full donor pathway, and pooled budgets to fund integrated strategies rather than siloed campaigns. The results are evident in their fundraising performance.
For most stations, those conversations haven't happened yet. The more honest question to ask your leadership team isn't "are we doing digital fundraising?" — it's "do our teams share data, share goals, and share accountability for what happens to a donor between their first gift and their last one?" If the answer is no, that's where the growth problem actually lives.
The practical entry point for most stations is simpler than a full reorganization: start by getting the relevant teams in the same room with the same numbers. What does your digital donor acquisition look like? How many of last year's new digital donors are still giving? What does the path from first-time sustainer to mid-level donor look like, and who owns it? The answers to those questions will tell you more about your growth capacity than any conference session will.
The stakes are real — and so is the pathway
The fundraising surge that defined FY26 is normalizing. Federal support is unreliable in ways it hasn't been before. Teams are leaner. Donor expectations are higher. The stations that thrive in this environment won't be the ones that campaigned harder — they'll be the ones that built connected, always-on digital development systems that sustain donor relationships at scale, from first click to final gift, with fewer people and smarter tools.
That playbook exists. The private sector has been running it for years. Public media's moment to build it is now.
