Passion is always the currency in which community media endeavors trade. But it never pays the bills.

Prudent planning and careful considerations, therefore, are at the heart of the recently published Community Media Sustainability Guide. The 80-page manual draws on the experiences of community media outlets in Haiti, Nepal, Rwanda, London, Peru, Afghanistan and the United States.

It is divided into two halves. Both will have readers highlighting and taking notes.

The first half (pages 11-37, to help limit your reading) is a must-read for anyone working at a community media organisation or trying to start one. This section is for sure mechanical and not a leisurely read. But it clearly defines and gives guidelines regarding models of sustainable funding, business models and plans, how and what to research and tips for writing grant proposals.

Per the title, everything is discussed with sustainability in mind. For an organisation to be sustainable, the Guide says, it must maintain some kind of balance between social, institutional and financial sustainability. This definition is borrowed from a UNESCO guide.

Best practices and telling anecdotes are cited throughout.

There is also information for donors who seek to strengthen the climate for community media. Most of the outlets discussed in the Guide are radio stations, but the lessons and planning suggestions are applicable to any medium. For these outlets to survive, the right political, legal and economic climates are needed. Interestingly, in a section on The Need for an Enabling Environment, licensing fees are discussed. In Mali and Columbia, the Guide says, the license fee is 20 USD. In Ghana, fees run around 2,900 USD.

A change in this situation would obviously help Ghanaian radio startups.

In London, it’s a Punjabi radio station that would benefit from a change the rules: The station wants British regulating agency Ofcom to stop capping at 50 percent the income community radio stations may earn from advertising.

But like all the radio stations discussed, Radio Desi has a hybrid business models – a good thing, the Guide notes, because depending on one source for revenue does not further sustainability.

“… Radio Desi’s management say that even if they are allowed to bring in more money from advertising, they’ll keep up their community fundraising efforts…. They believe that community fundraising – especially the wedding dancing – is what really markets the station and generates the community support…”

The latter half of this well-researched Guide, published in February, 2009, is dedicated to vignettes about community projects around the world – like Radio Desi. These stories are more narrative and easy to read, but lessons still abound. You’ll want to have a highlighter.

Published by the American NGO Internews Network, the report ends with a look forward.

The final chapter is dedicated to online community media endeavors. The sites mentioned are (happily) not the usual suspects, but several of the funding sources – Google Ads, the Knight Foundation – are. The author manages to give an outlook on the future of these sites that is both realistic and optimistic, though, calling them “fragile” but likely to spread.

Published: March 15, 2009