Radio evolution - ICS - Universidade do Minho

Measuring Community Radio AudiencesMainstream (Quantitative) Audience MeasurementIf audience research is deemed necessary, the first obvious question is why not make use of establishedindustry audience measurement services? In the United Kingdom today, the country's PSB radio provider, the BBC,already collaborates with the majority of commercial radio stations to obtain a single set of quantitative audiencedata, designed to provide information about who is listening, to which output, when, how often and for how long.Quarterly audience measurement surveys are carried out on behalf of the major industry players by RAJAR. If suchan approach to audience research works for PSB radio, might it also work for Community Radio services? MightRAJAR, or its equivalent, at least be a place to start, to get basic numerical information upon which to build by theaddition of further more focused research?Whilst it might indeed be possible for a Community Radio service to take part in a RAJAR or equivalentsurvey, there are a number of practical reasons why this is unlikely to be a sensible approach. Beyond the issueshighlighted above, there is the fundamental issue of scale. In most jurisdictions, and for perfectly sensible reasonsconcerning the nature of communities of place in particular, the vast majority of Community Radio services tendto broadcast to geographically small areas. Traditional audience measurement systems, such as RAJAR, aredesigned for mainstream stations with large coverage areas and are typically diary-based. As a result they have atendency towards reduced accuracy when it comes to measuring the listenership of stations providing smallerscalegeographical coverage. As RAJAR itself states:The sampling structure of RAJAR is designed to provide data for stations regardless of ownership, genre orregionality. However, it is unlikely to be able to provide sufficient sample for stations with TSAs (total surveyareas) below 30,000. (RAJAR web-site: FAQs).In practice, the smallest station being surveyed has a potential audience of 50,000 adults (RAJAR web-site:Key Facts) and for all smaller stations the number of diaries used is rather low, at a minimum of just 125 perquarter. Because of such sample size limitations, for smaller stations taking part in RAJAR, the company drawsupon four consecutive sets of quarterly survey data to produce its results:The smallest sample for a station on RAJAR is 500 adults over 12 months, for stations with a TSA (Total SurveyArea) under 300,000. (ibid.)Other Community Radio services which focus on communities of interest may serve larger geographicalareas and therefore broadcast to potential audiences of well above the RAJAR minimum size. However, becausethey are only interested in broadcasting to minority audiences within the wider population there, delivering nicherather than genre-based output, for example, to minority ethnic groups, there are still likely to be statisticaldifficulties with the placement of survey diaries.Because a combined listening diary for all participating stations in the survey is used, this annual samplesize for smaller stations is limited, particularly when compared to “a quarterly sample of approximately 26,000adults” (ibid.) from which national station listening figures are derived. For Community Radio services, and indeedfor small commercial radio stations, issues of limited sample size and the inevitable time-lag caused by takingmeasurements over four consecutive quarters are compounded by the costs involved and the lack of an obviousreturn on such operational investment.With its different funding model and focus on carefully targeted 'narrow-cast' outputs, which are rarely ofany interest to mainstream media buyers, Community Radio has only a limited interest in overall numerical dataand so, typically finds the recurrent cost of involvement in such surveys difficult to justify. From a CommunityRadio perspective, a further particular flaw with commercial audience measurement surveys is the fact that theyare not designed to capture listening to specific programmes. Whilst such output is typically central to effectivecommunity broadcasting, RAJAR describes its measurement as follows: "For most parties this was a nice-to-have …ECREA: ‘Radio Evolution: technology, content, audiences – conference 2011 | 371