The Listener Survey Toolkit
Chapter 2
The average percentage of listeners who are members of their public radio station is 10%

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Overview
Why Conduct a Listener or Member Survey
Research Myths and Misconceptions
Building the Survey
Survey Methodology
Survey Questions
Processing the Data
Data Analysis and Reporting
Applying the Survey Results
Station Service and Support for the Listener Survey Toolkit
Sample Questions
No one is sure where this idea got started, but the 10% figure is often quoted in conversations between development directors and at conferences. It may have been a misinterpretation of the "Cheap 90" research study on membership from the 1980s. The truth is, no one really knows what the national average percentage of listeners who are members is, and this figure is different from station to station.

In order to get an accurate total of listeners that are members, several calculations would have to be made. It is more complex than simply dividing the cume by the number of members.

First, identify your station's weekly cume audience.

Second, the average number of persons that a single membership represents must be determined. It is unusual for more than one person in the same household to contribute to a station. So many memberships "represent" the listening of two more listeners in that same household. This is where a survey can be helpful. A survey question can determine how many regular listeners there are in each member household. This figure can then be converted into an average, which becomes the average number of individuals that each membership represents; in previous station surveys this was usually between 1.4 and 2.1. Once this average is determined for a station, one can then multiply the total number of members by this number and compare it with the cume.

Here is an example:
  • One week cume: 87,500 persons
  • Total number of members: 6,371
  • Average number of listeners in each member household: 1.64
  • Multiply 6,371 x 1.64 = 10,448.44
  • 10,448 members divided by 87,500 listeners= 11.94% of the cume are represented as members
(if only the 6,371 members were divided by the cume, the station would think that it only had 7.28% of its cume as members, a difference of 64%! In membership, a 4.66 percentage point difference in members is significant!)

This provides a much more accurate answer to the question "what percentage of my listeners are actually members?" than the simple dividing of the cume by the total number of members.

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