2008 Annual Report

2) The music we play is virtually always by Christian artists (99%), whether in the mainstream, independent or in the so called Christian industry. We regularly receive feedback from listeners as to the value of the positive lyrics to their lives. Having been running for 6 years now, since the original pilot scheme we have established many programmes including 11 specialist shows that we produce and syndicate to other stations worldwide, shows such as The Rock & Hard Place (Rock), Soulcure (Urban), Street Flava (Hip Hop), Shekinah Reggae Show (Reggae), Independents Day (Indie Artists), Profile Special (Interview based music profile), CR Top Ten (chart show), CR Experience (flagship programme), and three youth targeted music and Christian teaching shows: Audacious, RockNations and Theshowwithnoname. We hafve maintained these throughout the year and seen 26 different stations worldwide pick them up. 8 of these shows are produced/presenters by volunteers who also promote their shows through their own networks/databases/events. We continue to supply specifically worship music for one and a half hours each day and in April 2008 we launched a brand new weekly 2 hour worship and prayer programme (Tues 10pm to midnight) called Breakthrough Nights. This programme is produced in partnershipwith certain local churches, the Beacon House Of Prayer, City Vision Ministries and The Saltbox. Additionally the first Friday of each month we run a live 3 hour prayer programme from Midnight to 3am called Britain Prays. In addition to these programmes we run the daily ‘staple diet’ of traditional breakfast, morning, drive and early evening shows, all of which carry a variety of styles of Christian music – rock, pop, hip hop, R&B, urban, soul, rap etc.

3) Our speech output is predominantly interviews which come up in pretty much all our programmes. These interviews cover information and relevance for the local Christian community and for the wider community. We run IRN news on the hour, plus we produce a local news slot every hour between 7:30am and 5:30pm. We present travel updates during breakfast and drive, and weather forecasts each hour. We run hourly social and spiritual comments (1 minute features). Audience interaction comes through emails, text messages, phone calls and through our online Live Radio Chatroom.

4) We still broadcast in English. Our exploration into doing a French language programme has not materialised as yet.

5) We have maintained 13 hours live programming for weekdays, plus 4 hours live on a Saturday. With the addition of the Breakthrough Nights weekly 2 hour show we now do 15 hours on a Tuesday and our goal is develop programming to hit our 15 hour target for each weekday. The average number of live hours each month, based on a 30 day month, is 315. This excludes the recent addition of Breakthrough Nights and any outside broadcasts we have run during weekends or late evenings. As mentioned in last year’s report we no longer take the sustaining service from our former satellite radio service.

1) Our continuous Christian music output.

2) Hourly social and spiritual 1 minute thoughts

3) Daily short morning feature sharing individual life stories of faith

4) A re-run of our Silverliners feature with interviews with local older Christians over 75

5) Each weekday we ran a ‘Thought For the Day’ with local church leaders. This slot we ‘rested’ at the end of 2007

6) Our Verticality worship programmes provide contemporary worship music connect with younger Christians as well as old

7) Our evening programmes in particular are more specifically geared for Christian listeners (the daytime is when we feature most of the interviews and features on and with the wider community). In the evenings we run Christian lifestyle and teaching programmes such as Audacious, Realtime, RockNations, Theshowwithnoname, Koinocopia (one hour teaching using seminars from Christian festivals) and Close Encounters (one hour life stories).

8) The new Breakthrough Nights programme brings worship and prayer focus from church leaders to the city.

9) Daily we profile local events relevant to Christians in our Event Guide

10) We also attend some local events to run interviews, such as at the Community Fun Day in Silverdale

11) We partnered with a ‘churches together’ worship day called Embrace, and ran relevant worship music throughout the day along with interviews and prayers

12) We partnered with a ‘churches together’ month of prayer providing daily updates of churches participating. A second period lasted 40 days.

13) We run daily interviews with relevant Christian artists, leaders, individuals, organisations and events, both local and wider afield, examples include artists such as Rick Wakeman, Jars Of Clay, Jaci Velasquez, Cross Movement, Burn Band, Johnny Parks and hundreds more; leaders such as Mal Fletcher, Mike Pilivacci, Lloyd Cooke, Robert Mountford and loads more; organisations such as Soul In The City, Shakedown Dance and events such as Chris Tomlin at the Victoria Hall, Resolution New Year’s Eve and numerous others.

There are numerous one off guests. Some examples include: Chris Sims (the new Chief Constable for Staffs Police), City Music School, Stoke On Trent Primary Care Trust, Potteries Housing Association, Safer Cities Partnership, North Staffs Youth For Christ, AXiS Mentoring, Age Concern, Youth Offending Services Stoke on Trent College, St Teresa’s School Choir, Airspace contemporary art gallery, Creative Partnership, Cool Stoke, Stoke-on-Trent Gospel Choir, Fire Cadets, Spitfire Day, Heritage Country Park, Operation Good Guy, Parking Changes, Park Improvements, Christmas Lights Switch On with City Centre manager, Continental market, Gladstone Pottery workshops, Keele University poetry, Joan Ruddock MP on Carbon Footprints, Beat The Cold, Free School Meals project. Plus lots of local businesses come on like Vesuvius, Platinum Healthcare, Radical Press, Hosting Systems, Aquila Way and others. We try to help small to medium size businesses with some profile.

Specifically, starting in January 2008 we ran a series of themed months under the heading City Focus. The themes for the first 6 months are/were Older People, Homelessness, Mental Health & Wellbeing, Younger People, Drug & Alcohol Addiction, Crime. Every weekday for each month we ran a new interview with an individual, organisation or group working in that specific theme. For example in Homelessness month we worked with these organisations: YMCA, Arch North Staffs, Salvation Army, Local Authority, Blue Mountain, CAB, VIP, Gingerbread, Brighter Futures, Chaplains Project.

Future partnerships we are now organising include: ‘Creative Communities’ - lecturers from Staffordshire University Creative Communities Unit have agreed to provide a monthly slot promoting community engagement, empowerment, partnership working etc and the short courses they offer in equipping people in these skills. And, ‘Connexions’ - Partnership with Connexions sharing a weekly slot of different career opportunities and tips on CV writing, interviews, presentation skills etc so that young people and adults can engage in training, education and employment.

2) Much of the specifically Christian content is covered under point 2.3, but other output includes regular interviews with groups such as 2C7 (local network of Church leaders), City Vision Ministries, VIP (organisation involved with marginalised young people), Saltbox (a networking organisation between the church and the wider community), and local church leaders. We look at how the local church should respond to local issues such as homelessness, mental health, asylum seekers, youth work, addictions, and engagement with the wider community. We were able to major on this during our City focus themed months too, bringing a mix of specifically Christian worldview to these topics alongside wider services and opinions. Often we offer local church leaders the opportunity to pray on air for these types of areas.

In addition, from wider afield we have run interviews with national groups such as Media Watch (Christian group concerned about values within the media). Each month we focus on Israel and the Middle East with a report from a youth worker based in Jerusalem who works with Arab and Israeli young people. We also ran a piece looking at the troubles in Zimbabwe. We regularly interview aid organisations such as Christian Aid, Tear Fund and Christians In Action. We also discuss the more well known national moral or Christian interest stories such as the Human Tissues and Embryology, Euthanasia or Religious Hatred bills, giving interviews and feedback from the different positions of the debate.

2) We continue to work with local groups for training purposes. This year has included: a) Young People’s Drug Project feature – We partnered with the city council’s Young People’s Drug Project. They work to educate youngsters about the dangers and drugs and support people experiencing drug and alcohol problems. We trained two of the young people to record a feature about drugs and alcohol. It involved them recording vox pops on the streets of the city centre. We worked with them to edit the feature together; b) VIP - from October 1st 2007 a monthly radio show called VIP was launched. VIP is a local organisation who work with marginalised young people, particularly the homeless. They hold special dinner events specifically for these young people, bring in quality guests and bands (such as Shane Lynch of Boyzone), they give the girls hair do’s, do their nails and make up etc and get the guys engaged in things like Play Station etc. They give them vouchers to buy clothes, toiletries etc. The VIP radio show gives a voice for the marginalised and homeless in the city. Each show has young marginalised people sharing from their experiences and raising awareness of their lifestyle and pressures etc – something that would be rarely heard from these young people themselves; c) Safeguarding Children – We partnered with the council’s Children’s and Young People’s Services, working with six of their team to produce audio presentations about the plight of vulnerable children; d) Media Action Group For Mental Health – we supported them in their Talkback Training Course, offering on air experience and seminar training about the use of local media.

Every day on the Breakfast Show and on City Drive (drive time) we do the Event Guide feature. This profiles any local Christian events taking place. We also profile many of the events taking place in the whole community. In addition of course we run interviews with specific local events both Christian and wider community.

Events where the station has been used as a focal point for the Christian community include:

1) Month Of Prayer and 40 Days of Prayer & Fasting – On two occasions in the last year local churches have held 24 hour continuous prayer for the city and the region, doing one day each over a full month. Every day in breakfast and drive the station has done updates and reports from the churches. For the second period we launched a new worship and prayer programme to go alongside it called Breakthrough Nights.

2) Live OB’s from youth events in Sheffield (Audacious) and Bradford (RockNations) have been of particular interest to local young Christians.

3) Resolution – A New Year’s Eve event we partnered with

4) YFriday & Chris Tomlin – We support and partner with various music events in the city. The two artists mentioned in this point being the most significant. Each event saw about 400-500 people at them.

2) We consistently have between 20 and 25 volunteers at any one time. In the last year we have had 38 different volunteers work with us.

3) We maintain connections with the organisations listed. We cannot respond to the level of interest in people joining us however. Our goal for school work experience students for example is to take on one young person at a time. For people with a longer commitment than a one week work experience as we build them into the team and they get trained up then we can take on extra people.

4) We run a radio advert for volunteers which goes out several times a day. Many of our volunteers enquire because of this. Additionally if we have room for more volunteers we use our monthly local email newsletter to mention it. We also work with larger groups of people to get involved with certain shows. For example schools and youth groups occasionally bring in their students to take part in live programmes.

5) We have not advertised any ‘Taster’ courses as yet. It might be that we do this when our Training Academy is stronger.

2) A number of our employees have spoken at their local churches, giving updates on the station and being available for feedback. The CEO continues to meet with many local church leaders in the city to get their specific feedback on how they see the station and effective partnership with it. The CEO speaks regularly at local church meetings. We also encourage email feedback through our website – responses to which are scrolled along the front page on our website. Every two months we send out a local email newsletter in which we regularly ask for response on topics. We also ask for feedback from those listening online and in our chatroom. Every quarter we write to any financial supporters with an update and offering them opportunity to make contact. We regularly ask for feedback on our monthly or bimonthly email newsletters (we have different versions).

3) We have not yet issued a specific audience questionnaire for this year, but will aim to do so in the next quarter.

4) We keep a record of all feedback both positive and negative. Primarily it comes through emails and E TXT (a facility on the front of our website where people can email directly to the live on air presenter in the studio, or the web editorial team or the web technical team).

5) We have 5 key local leaders as a loose ‘board of reference’, who we see through the monthly leaders meetings and on other occasions. As we work closely with them on many projects the accountability for our activity is very strong.

6) we are still members of CBC

Of those 38 the breakdown of their primary roles is as follows:

On Air Presenters 5
Off Air Production 8
Editorial Dept for website 7
Administration/Reception14
Cleaning/Odd jobs 2
Marketing 2

We tend to standardise that most volunteers work 2 days a week for six weeks. This gives opportunity for more people to get a ‘taste’ of media, and also if some find it particularly difficult to connect with the work environment then the short term nature is not too burdensome for themselves or us. We have several ongoing volunteers who do half a day or one day per week eg cleaning or reception. Occasionally when students join us they do so for a full time period, such as a summer holiday or a work placement. That then is 7 days a week, but generally their capability means they fit in well.

In terms of an average number of hours per volunteer per month we would estimate one day per week or 32 hours per month.

1) We continue to offer 11 of our weekly programmes to other stations for syndication. This has increased to 22 stations taking our programmes around the world.

2) In September we ran a fundraising challenge to climb Ben Nevis and to run a live broadcast from the summit. Remarkably we succeeded! We raised over £20,000 and the subsequent broadcast won a CBC radio award. We had 21 climbers who raised sponsorship. Was this the first Community radio programme from the summit?!

3) We also won a CBC radio award for Best Podcast for our Theshowwithnoname podcast.

4) We have continued our collaboration with Cross Rhythms Plymouth, Cross Rhythms Teesside and more recently Cross Rhythms Coventry. The launch of Cross Rhythms Teeside in April 2008 took some effort on our behalf to support them and was a significant achievement from our part to help them get started. The award of a licence to Coventry was a highlight.

5) In November 2007 we supported a team in Coventry for an RSL called Radio Hope. These guys are behind the CR Coventry licence.

6) After 6 years we produced a new station imaging package.

“As would be expected the main difficulties are all financial related. We have plenty of vision and feel we could be much more effective however we do all that we do with a very tight budget. We only have two full time employees who present shows – one who is also the CEO and the other who is the head of the production department.

We could better coordinate volunteers if we had the foundation of more employees to manage and develop them. Without them we are often playing catch up and spinning too many basic plates between us.

We have not been able to market the station in the last year at all due to lack of finance. The only marketing we can do would be through contra deals, going to events etc.

Having been one of the original pilot stations we have a perspective based on 5 years broadcasting in an area. We would feel that we now need to move up to a new level, because the expectations of listeners to the station grows. The original uniqueness and identity loses it’s originality after a while and listeners want more. To maintain listener connection we need to add more to what we have ie more presenters bringing more creativity, more awareness out in the wider community through participation in city initiatives etc. To do this properly, without running around like headless chickens, requires putting in solid management processes, requiring finance to do so.”

I would say this year we have inched forward a little from this position but the financial restrictions, inability to do much marketing, and a recognition that we need to keep developing our output, remain our greatest difficulties. Saying that we are hopeful!