February Volunteering - Take 2

I am an avid listener/watching of public radio and television. One of the most exciting moments of my life was when a friend of mine asked me if I had been watching Masterpiece recently. No one had ever STARTED a discussion about a PBS show with me before. (For the record, that was about Sherlock, which aired last spring. A second season will air this spring. I highly recommend it.) Today, I decided to give back and volunteer at a phone bank for WXPN, a public radio station out of the University of Pennsylvania.

In college, I worked at Phonathon, which meant I was one of those college students who called and asked parents and alumni for donations to the school. After college, I managed a Phonathon at another school. I will say, waiting for the phone to ring was much easier than making a phone call, and 100% of the people I talked to today gave. It was awesome.

I had assumed that it would be kind of like the pledge drive rooms you see on PBS, only with the DJs up front, and everyone else behind them taking calls. No, this was set up in a conference rooms. Two DJs on one side, with their stuff set up on an old desk, then phones in a horseshoe around the rest of the room. When they break to encourage people to pledge, calls start coming in. When it goes to music it trickles and just stops until they come back to ask people to give again. I found this really interesting. I guess I had always assumed people called kind of throughout, but it picked up in the breaks, but it was almost completely silent when music was playing.

For the record, I'm going back on Monday to help out again. I probably won't post again unless something really exciting happens.