If you live in the local Forster-Tuncurry area in New South Wales, Australia, you would be familiar with Great Lakes FM 101.5. A music mix of Adult/Contemporary along with over 30 volunteer presenters curating 30+ shows every week. It’s safe to say Great Lakes FM 101.5 is the heart and soul of the local community.
Jason Oakley is a former presenter, and currently the stations tech at Great Lakes FM 101.5, but is also known to dabble in the IT world as an engineer. Aside from his passion in retro game development, he also hosted a weekly radio show called Retro Regeneration which was one of the most engaged shows at the station. He liked to interact with listeners during his radio show, taking requests and engaging in general chit-chat.
Jason wanted to transform Great Lakes FM 101.5’s listener communication flow by utilising Studiio.
The Challenge
Jason described their previous song request solution as a low-interaction phone system. A physical phone in-studio was the sole point of contact for listeners to reach their favourite presenters.
This distracted presenters whenever a phone call was received, especially when they were on-air, as the presenters attention would be balanced between talk breaks, cueing songs and maintaining phone calls.
“We were only taking requests via a physical phone in our studio, it was very time-consuming for our presenters.”
Great Lakes FM 101.5 needed a better solution with distraction-free, asynchronous methods to communicate with listeners. Their morning Twisted Tune segment and evening song request shows would greatly benefit from utilising an SMS line and other forms of communication.
The Solution
Jason had SMS messaging and Emails in mind as solutions, and Studiio was the answer.
According to Finder, 56% of Australian’s prefer SMS messaging, email and social media over phone calls to reach each other. This presented a unique opportunity for Jason to find a suitable solution.
Great Lakes FM 101.5 is a community radio station, so they operate with limited technical resources and a wide array of passionate volunteers to get things done. This aligned with Studiio’s hardware-free, instant-provisioning and low-cost model, making it a perfect fit for Great Lakes FM 101.5.
“Studiio had the features we wanted for the price we liked. It’s very easy to use and it just works.”
The volunteer presenters are the main users of Studiio, seeing it every day within their radio studio, ready to see a live feed of communications from their listeners.
Station staff can closely monitor listener communications from the dashboard and act to filter any unwanted interactions.
Results
Since Great Lakes FM 101.5 started using Studiio, over 1000+ listeners have contacted presenters through SMS and Email. Great Lakes FM 101.5 is now able to easily balance listener communication.
“The presenters who have audience participation really appreciated the ease of use and the value Studiio added to shows. We saw results within the first couple of weeks.”
They wanted their presenters to be able to respond to listeners’ SMS messages, Studiio offers SMS responses to assist presenters with replying to any incoming communication.
It’s difficult to avoid distractions in the radio studio, but Great Lakes FM 101.5 has found a way to combine multiple modes of communication into one central screen for radio presenters to use. Jason appreciates Studiio from both a presenter’s and volunteer’s perspective.
“Studiio greatly improved audience participation and made it easier to track responses from listeners. It gives more time to review requests, more people can request at a time. The same goes for our morning show Twisted Tune.”