If you listened at KRTU during the past week, chances are you caught one of the ubiquitous Membership Drive pitches, wherein one of our hosts asked the listeners to come on board as members of KRTU 91.7FM. No, don’t click away! This is not a blog post to convince you to become a member.
Although you definitely should, so go to join.krtu.org and become a member today!
Sorry, couldn’t help myself. But now that that’s out of the way, let me give you the behind the scenes of what happens at KRTU Christmas: the Spring Membership Drive.
The first thing that happens before the drive is that we completely relocate the KRTU broadcasting booth. That’s right. We move it all the way to (*drumroll*) upstairs, in Studio B. What this means is that the regular broadcasting desk goes offline for a week, and all the broadcasting is done from one of our other consoles, upstairs.
It might seem like a small relocation, but it’s one of the crucial elements of the drive, because it allows the hosts to broadcast mere feet away from where the staff makes and receives calls from our listeners. For a week, Studio B is transformed into a phone-a-thon station with telephones lining the walls.
Membership Drive Volunteers circa 2005
On the other side, there’s a bunch of chairs around tables, where our community hosts sit around looking cool, while the interns try to look invisible. Allow me to clarify. The KRTU interns are talented, hardworking students, but as millennials we don’t know how to use a landline, much less speak to someone through it. However, we always show up, and we go on and call out to our current members and ask them to come on for next year. Why, you ask?
Food. Oh my god. The food.
As poorly fed, malnourished, near-starving college students (I got a little carried away there) we cannot turn away when presented with the possibility of consuming real, edible food, and one of the awesomest things about KRTU is that we are sponsored by a series of amazing community partners. And some of them happen to make foods. Every single day at the drive, we have either tacos or sandwiches or pasta or some other delicious meal from a local eatery. I wish it would never end.
But my favorite thing about the drive has to be hanging out with the staff and our community hosts. Most of the year, the staff is hard at work and the hosts are busy being on air, but during the drive, everybody gets to be in the same room, eat amazing food, and make a competition out of answering phones.
A phone is ringing across the room at KRTU circa 2007
All things considered, KRTU is a pretty great place to be, especially during the membership drive. It’s nice to work at a place that proves, year after year, that people can still come together and support a radio station that plays what nobody else plays, and in the process create a vibrant community of jazz and indie aficionados.
Become a member today at join.krtu.org
I did it again, didn’t I?