Advice for expanding audience for learning disability radio show
Follow @mediaukdiscussI support a group of musicians and DJs with learning disabilities to produce a radio show exclusively featuring music and content produced by the learning disabled community.
At the moment, the show is broadcast in Brighton – but we are really keen to expand the audience and find other radio stations who might want to broadcast the show.
The show is supported by a charity, and we’ve secured funding to produce content for the next two years, so we have several hours of free content that we can offer stations to broadcast for free.
There’s a trailer for the show here if anyone’s interested.
We’ve not had many responses, a lot of stations only seem interested in broadcasting commercial content, or locally produced content. We play music from all around the UK, and other countries as well, so we try to focus on wider stories. We’ve found that a lot of people with learning disabilities listen to radio, so programme controllers are potentially missing out on quite a big audience – but it’s difficult to get this message across.
We’ve also had a lot of positive feedback from non-disabled listeners, who are interested to learn more about learning disabled music.
We’re working hard to produce a high-quality show, and we’ve had lots of advice from producers and other professionals who thought that we should expect lots of offers from stations who should be interested in the content.
Has anyone out there got any advice for trying to syndicate a special interest show like this? Or are there any good networks where we can contact programme controllers or station managers?
So far, we’ve been contacting community radio stations – as the general consensus is that commercial stations wouldn’t want to take on a special-interest radio show.
The show is called Shut up and Listen! Any feedback would be greatly appreciated – and I will pass it onto the presenters.
The obvious other potentials are hospital radio stations – some have good audience in terms of medical staff.
You should also get excellent promotion through podcasts, too (subject to the licensing terms for the music you play): indeed, it might be worth creating an edit of the programme without any copyright music for iTunes consumption.
You might also find that some stations in other English speaking countries might be interested, notably in Ireland and potentially in some parts of the US. The question is how “UK” your content is.
An interesting thought. You have some interesting, if niche, content; and I suspect you could benefit significantly from non-linear availability on podcasts and online radio services.
Hi Sam, try Able Radio. http://ableradio.com/about.html
I use this link to avoid the online player which opens by default on the front page.
Taken from the about page:
Able Radio was founded in 2006 by a group of volunteers passionate about improving the everyday lives of disabled people, many of whom you can read about on Able People.
Kind Regards Tony
Forgot to add, yes I’m one of the volunteers.
Thanks for all the advice. I will keep plugging away at some more Community Radio stations – and will add Hospital Radio to the list too.
And Tony – thank you for the information. I’ll contact Able Radio!
Your best bet is indeed community radio stations.
The reality is that such a programme is probably not appealing to commercial broadcasters. They’re advertising driven, and if you’re not playing JLS and Ed Sheeran, you’re already losing half of them in this country. An unfortunate reality.
Some community stations will not be interested in a programme from Brighton, but others do feature significant syndication. I seem to recall a regular Media UK poster not too long ago that produced a radio drama, which a number of community stations across England picked up. So it can be done, you just need to get in touch, see if there’s interest, and go from there.