All Dressed Up

I wonder who’s wearing the red shirt these days.

Minnesota Public Radio put a bunch of red corduroy shirts into members’ closets during a fundraising drive last winter. It’s a nice enough shirt: bright red, pinwale corduroy, with the MPR logo (of course) embroidered on the chest. You can still get one if you pledge $180 a year. It’s pretty high-end for a public-radio premium, but not all that different from the usual coffee mugs and tote bags.

The thing that made the Red Shirt cool was the diary.

A few weeks before MPR started its membership drive — which may have been just a few days after they wrapped up the last drive, the way fundraising goes — they sent out e-mail missives from a fictitious woman on the hunt for the perfect red shirt. It unfolded like a little soap opera as she worked up this hankering for the shirt, then searched everywhere … only to find it on the radio. She was on-air for a few weeks too, this mysterious woman, and even though you knew it was made-up and just a teaser before the hard-sell fundraising began, it grabbed your attention. It made you think about the premium before it was even available. Heck, I wanted one and I already have a red corduroy shirt.

So MPR is gearing up (again) to raise money and I’m waiting to hear about the next great premium, and the saga that sells it. Will it be anywhere near as cool as the This American Life paint-by-number set? (“Artist depictions of two popular TAL stories, plus paints and a brush!” Yours for a pledge of $120.) They touted this one on-air with a documentary typical of This American Life, an artist’s side-by-side comparison between the paint brush in the set with one of her own brushes. Ten minutes on a rinky-dink paintbrush. It was the same droll kind of navel-gazing that won This American Life a Peabody Award, only this time it was also a tongue-in-cheek marriage between programming and fundraising.

I called MPR to find out what hole they hoped to fill in the closet this time around. There’s a new T-shirt they’re pretty excited about — it’s only offered on T-shirt Tuesday and it’s only for first-time members who pledge $60. There’s a picture of six people, five labeled “listener” and one labeled “member.” (Above the member, it says “Me.”)

“We wanted to highlight the fact that only one in six listeners are members — plus we wanted to celebrate new members,” says Senior Publicist Andrea Matthews. The T-shirt comes with a coupon for a free scoop at Izzy’s Ice Cream Café in St. Paul, where every cone comes with an “izzy,” an extra little scoop on top.

Personally, I think it’s kind of a gyp that only newbies can have this one. But it’s a classic marketing quandary — how to court new users without snubbing your loyal customers — and there’s got to be something special to persuade the chronically reluctant.

There’s also a national-travel package with a Rand McNally atlas and a public radio atlas that MPR produced to help travelers find public radio stations across the country. And there’s a sweepstakes giving away a Vespa scooter. National Public Radio has been doing fundraiser sweeps for a few years now, awarding cars and trips to Europe and scads of airline miles. (You don’t have to donate money to enter the sweeps, but all donors are automatically entered.)

But there are no diaries this time. The push is for “harder-hitting messages,” says Matthews, since that’s “the best approach for this drive.” Maybe there was less lead time, or the Red Shirt Diaries didn’t bump that one-out-of-six ratio enough to justify a repeat. But the diary sell felt like the right way to stage a premium offer — the difference between gift-wrapping and a brown paper bag. It was dressed up; it was “pretty please” instead of “thank you.” It brought a little intrigue to the request for cash.

Then it all makes me wonder: Would I rather have all my money go to the cause, rather than some fraction of it come back to me as a premium? Would I donate as much — or at all — without the carrot of a premium in the first place? How much of the $10-a-month, travel mug/CD/paint-by-number crowd can you upsell with an e-mail soap opera? Did the shirt seem better because another woman wanted it?

And does MPR still have one in my size?