Fort Collins Youth Broadcasting

Fort Collins, CO: June 5, 2008 – Today, Do Something, the national not-for-profit that makes it possible for young people to change the world, named Jacob Wood a 2008 Plum Grant Winner.

Fed up with the lack of accuracy and representation youth were given through existing media outlets in Fort Collins, Jacob decided to start his own radio station. The radio station, completely run by high school students, has grown from just a home-based internet music station to a studio-based station hosting original youth created programs. FCYB’s ultimate goal is to increase communication between local high schools, students and the community.

Every week of the year, Do Something identifies a promising young leader who is taking the lead in effecting change in his/her community or a community abroad. The winners, age 25 and under, from the US and Canada, will be chosen based on the potential of their projects to grow and impact many more lives. Do Something and Plum will give each winner $500 to make it happen.

“Young people possess the energy, creativity and motivation to rock the world. The Plum Grants will help them do it!” says Nancy Lublin, CEO of Do Something, Inc.

“We pride ourselves on being an integral part of local communities and could not be more psyched to be able to help young people who are integral parts of their own communities and strive to positively impact the places they live,” says Tom Scott, CEO of Plum TV.

Each Plum Grant winner receives a $500 community grant and resources from Do Something to help their program grow. For more information about Plum Grants, go to www.dosomething.org.

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About Do Something

Do Something is a trusted resource for teenagers who want to make a difference. By leveraging communications technologies, we enable teens to convert their energy and ideas into positive action. You want to make a difference? We can help. www.dosomething.org.

About Plum

Plum is a new type of media company. Produced in, for and about some of America’s most dynamic communities, Plum programming is honest, authentic and optimistic. It celebrates the natural beauty and character of its communities and spirit and intellect of the people who live and visit there. Plum currently operates television channels and websites in Aspen, the Hamptons, Martha’s Vineyard, Miami Beach, Nantucket, Sun Valley, Telluride and Vail. While the towns may be small, the reach and influence is not.

Plum’s markets are destinations of choice for over 14 million of the nation’s most interesting and influential people each year. They are people who define the culture in the media, business, arts and politics. They are Plum’s audience as well as its content. Increasingly, Plum is available to a broader audience beyond its communities through video on demand and the Internet.

It’s been awhile since I’ve commented on a factual aspect of FCYB. So here goes!

Anyone who has paid any attention to the organizational structure of FCYB will notice that Marketing and Sales are two different divisions. In a normal company, both for-profit and non-profit, they are generally one in the same. Many are going, “I don’t get it! Why is FCYB different?” The simple answer: our age.

We have to adapt to our age in a lot of different ways. This is one of them. Being a salesperson generally means that you have to have a cell phone, be accessible, and chances are you have to have a car. That runs. And a license. Believe it or not, finding teenagers that are good salespeople and have access to their own transportation isn’t as easy as it sounds.

If you’re asking “Why do you need a car?” It’s simple. Business owners do not respond to e-mails or paper mail, any many of them barely pick up the phone. They do, however, respond to a personal visit. Thus, the need for a car.

Now, Marketing people do not necessarily need to be able to drive to successfully market the station. Many just do marketing within the schools, which they often get to by school bus, public bus, parent, or some other form of transportation. Some also do marketing on community bulletin boards and, of course, our fairly effective Old Town chalk spree.

Photo by Justina Cline

So…with all this in mind, it made sense to us to break up the Marketing and Sales groups. They still work very closely together (sort of, at least they should if anyone did anything :P)

Welp…that’s it for me for now 🙂 Hopefully our check came…and if Vic reads this…your check is in the mail as well.

See text of the original press release.

Import Specialists officially is our second sponsor! They will be specifically sponsoring David Hodson’s show on Tuesdays from 4:30 to 5:30, as well as Power Hour on Fridays from 5:30 to 6:30. Congrats to those shows for picking up a sponsor! You will also hear some plugs for them throughout the day as well.

You can find Import Specialists at 2829 LaPorte Ave., just west of Poudre High School. Give them a call, 482-5774.

Yay for money!  According to our contact with Wren, our check should be in the mail (if not already in our possession), and we’ve successfully obtained our first grant!  More on that once we get the text of our blog approved.

No news other than that. 🙂

We’ve got a few things to show you that we’re pretty proud of:

Yeah, our traffic yesterday SKYROCKETED.  That’s like a week’s worth of traffic in one day.  Which makes us very happy.

And, secondly, the Coloradoan article was released today about us!  Woo!  You can find it here for probably a week or two, and we’ll be sure to scan the article or otherwise save it so you can read it in the future.

A representative of the Lyric Cinema Cafe contacted us about advertising.  Eeek!  Let’s hope they do!  Durrie is also trying to get in touch with Import Specialists about advertising.  Someone also contacted us about buying our mixer, so hopefully that’ll go through as well.  :)  That’s $280 potential dollars that could be made, which is enough to pay our bare minimum contracted expenses.

So, in short, things are starting to pick up!  Very rapidly, too!  Don is also trying to get a new web site for klikradio.org up and running this weekend, look forward to that as well.  Ed and Nick and friends are working away at marketing into other schools, and Programming….is lazy.  However, I expect them to work away at a finished format for school days and be done with it by May 5th.

Further, we signed up 5 new shows!  While all are from Poudre, it adds great variety to the line-up, including a new jazz show, a heavy metal-focused show, a new general talk show, and a few other things.  Look forward to these and more coming in the near future!

Technical Update!

Done So Far
The technical department how been working on the website mostly but also we’ve also finished editing the Power Hour episodes and will soon be releasing for podcast! Just waiting for the descriptions to be sent to us!

To-Do List
The technical is going to finish up our beta sites and in the end we’ll choose whichever one seems better. After that we will work with that basic idea and create a brand new site in which will be the official KlikRadio site. So basically also to edit the future shows. Klik-a-thon is coming up and we also have to prepare for that!

Finished
NOTHING! (Sorry!) 🙁

…a whole lot of other things.  We recently ran a survey of all the high school teachers in the district (minus Rocky, there was a problem e-mailing them, but we hope to get the survey out to them ASAP).  Overall, we’ve found there to be a decent number of teachers willing to support the station by playing it in their rooms during work days.

We’ll post the results of the survey once we figure out how to get it to the Rocky teachers.

Today at lunch we have a meeting to talk about a few problematic things.  Mostly the same problems we’ve been having: communication, enthusiasm, etcetera.  In my entrepreneurship class, we just started a section/project addressing policies and evaluation forms.  Maybe if I start evaluating people things will improve.

Also, a recent dedicated server purchase will increase our listener capacity from the measley 12 to approximately 200.  Should we need further upgrades, we’ll probably use a VPS as the “last resort” and buy dedicated servers when needed.

I’m also giving Programming something to do with their time by programming daytimes on KLIK.  Technical has set the web site deadline for Saturday, so that’s good.  Marketing…I’m not sure what they’re doing, and I’m going to figure that out at the meeting.  And Sales, well, heh, they haven’t made any.

So…it will be an interesting meeting!

…and as I find myself trying to do my AP Chemistry homework, I feel more and more inclined to write something about the ongoing mess that is FCYB.

Fortunately, though, things are starting to get together organizationally speaking.  I’ve required all groups (Marketing, Sales, Technical, and Programming) to come up with a manager / “leader,” who will report to me and start being the other bloggers you’ll see.  I’m going to require leaders to post at least one blog a week as a way to report to me.

I predict that there will be one FCYB event per week: a board meeting, a general members meeting, a managers’ meeting, and a get-together for members to work and collaborate.  While all groups will have to do work outside of these 4 days a month, these are just some thoughts that I have on what will go down event and meeting-speaking.

So…as things go on, hopefully you’ll see more and more updates come in from the different managers, and a few will be coming from me as well.  So, until next week, keep listening!

If FCYB started its operations on the same day as our first blog post, then we turn 1 year old in 2 days!  Exciting!

Well I’ve been so busy with running the station now I haven’t posted in like three weeks.  So I figured it’s time that we update the general public on what’s been going on.

Sometime in mid-February, we came up with a name for the station: KLIKradio.  Yes, it only took us 11 months to figure out what we would call the station.  It’s pronounced Click Radio, but we hope to market the brand heavily enough that people remember how to spell it (at least until we can get our hands on the domain that was taken by the greedy people who own it now, stupid link farms).

On March 3, three incredible volunteers at FCYB put on a fantastic 2-hour radio show, our first live broadcast involving a microphone ever!  Talley, Stephanie, and Alex all deserve a huge thumbs up, even though there were some mistakes made along the way.  I would love to give you a link to the recording we have of their show, but because of copyright issues with the songs played….can’t exactly do that.

Since then, we’ve added a couple shows to the line up and are hoping to add more in the months to come.  I’m also hoping to work with Laura to create a “KLIK in the Classroom” program, per se, an initiative to get teachers playing the station in their classes whenever there’s music on.  Just earlier today we had the Little Green Paperclip,our only pre-recorded show that went from 11 to 1, and yesterday we had Power Hour with Philip and Rick.

Anyways, other than that, meetings have gone well and we hope to get Tim Wirth on our board of directors as soon as we can.  We also need to figure out where to find about $400 to fix the ventilation in our stupid studio.  When you get even 3 or 4 people in there at once, it starts to get kind of stuffy.

Other than these few things, not a whole lot has happened here in the great world of FCYB.  Happy birthday to us!