Our Services

AudiGraphics for public radio mints the currency of intelligence about our programming, the public service it engenders, and the public support that increasingly sustains our industry.

Based on extensive research and thinking, these currencies include

concepts that inform the appropriate application of Arbitron listening data in service to public radio's non-commercial core values;
language that conveys these concepts intuitively, clearly, and accurately;
analyses that embody these concepts and use this language to inform decision-making at all levels of public broadcasting;
systems that convert raw data into practical tools quickly, accurately, and affordably.

In partnerships spanning more than two decades, ARA has worked closely with CPB, NPR, PRI, stations, and the industry's leading thinkers, managers, and doers to develop the most appropriate and useful decision-making tools. ARA's AudiGraphics® services are the culmination this this investment.

Consultation Guides that help distributors and producers match the right programs to the right stations at the right times at the right price.

Audience response to a station's programming is shown through the lenses of loyalty and power.

Audience Sensitive Economics link listening to listener-sensitive support.

Loyalty assesses the actual ability of a station's own programming to serve its own listeners by half-hour throughout the broadcast week.
- Loyalty to the Core tracks the ability of a station's programming to serve its most important listeners.
- Loyalty to the Fringe tracks the ability of a station's programming to attract listeners away from the stations they prefer.
Power Perspectives identify the settings in which a given program works best.
Affinity suggests the likely ability of a program or format to serve a station's audience.
Appeal tracks listeners' age, sex, and race by half-hour throughout the week.

The demographic and geographic characteristics of a station's audience show who is served by its programming and where its audience lives.

The underlying dynamics of listening decompose time spent listening into actionable information.

Understanding competition begins with the appeal mapping of competing stations.
- It continues with a study of the demographic and geographic strengths of competitors.
- The underlying dynamics of competition illustrate the behaviors of listeners shared with each competitor, and the value of reclaiming their listening.
- And competitive crossover follows listeners as they switch from one station to another, by half-hour throughout the week.

Several years ago a $1.1 million, 18-month partnership with CPB brought Strategic AudiGraphics to public broadcasting.

Strategic Impact AudiGraphics sample analysis

identifies the immediate downside risk of making a programming change in both public service and public support terms;
identifies the public service and financial contributions of any program or format;
identifies segments of a station's audience most and least affected by programming, and outlines who these people are and how they use the station across the entire week.

Strategic Pledge AudiGraphics sample analysis

reveals the hidden costs of on-air drives (staff effort and audience exposure) and shows how to make drives more efficient.

Strategic Underwriting AudiGraphics sample analysis user's guide

shows how to reapportion spot loads and rates for more profitable underwriting packages.

Strategic Financial AudiGraphics sample analysis user's guide

incorporates the ultimate output of the enterprise (public service) into the calculus of traditional financial accounting;
links public service to public support, places budgeting decisions into the context; of public service outcomes and limitations, brings the thinking of key departments to bear in planning and decision-making, and focuses the enterprise on public service outcomes.

Finally, the importance of systems such as those embodied in public radio's AudiGraphics websites cannot be over emphasized.

Public broadcasters can access all of this information from any computer, any time, with the highest degree of security.
They can draw on a complete archive of historic analyses.
They can specify new analyses to be run and receive them within seconds.
They can securely store and retrieve strategic audience, financial, pledge, and underwriting "data of record" for their stations or groups.
They can share any of this information – or not – with selected peers for best practice comparisons and benchmarking.