Hi! My name's Lou and I'm the newest member of the Product Team here at Digital Services, specializing in online audio and programming.  Composer, our program schedule and playlist building tool, is currently being rebuilt from the ground up.  As the product manager for the Composer rebuild, I wanted to share with you some details about what we're doing, when you can see it and how you can help.

Join Bob Kempf, Stephanie Miller, Jenny Golden, and NPM’s Bryan Moffett on Thursday, June 21, 2012 at 2 p.m. ET for an overview of the various ways NPR Digital Services supports digital revenue generation for stations.

This webinar is recommended for station leadership including GMs, development, underwriting, and membership managers. We’ll cover:

Since 2009, NPR Digital Services (formerly Public Interactive) has served as the reporting agency for public broadcasters covered by the CPB-SoundExchange Webcasting Agreement.

Under the terms of the agreement, CPB pays the fees for the royalties, and public radio stations covered under the agreement report their streaming music usage. CPB will pay these royalties to SoundExchange until the current agreement expires on December 31, 2015.

I'm guessing that headline got your attention. Many stations have an informational web page that explains all the ways people can support your station. Our testing shows that you'll bring in more revenue during pledge drives if you skip over this support landing page and send users directly to the pledge form. And we have the data to show it.

The idea for this particular test came out of a proven rule of thumb from the for-profit world: If you're trying to get users to give you money, fewer steps in the process translates into a higher conversion rate. The fewer pages in the funnel, the more people end up finishing.

We wanted real data on whether this truth applies to our online pledge funnels as well. So we ran an A/B test to find out.

Humans have always wanted to share certain types of information with other humans. The social delivery of news — whether it's through e-mail, online communities or in person — is not anything new. 

What is new is the continued explosion of Facebook (it's closing in on a billion active users). Facebook has provided us with the power to share like never before, which is why stations need to think about social like they never have before.

We all want our stations to become as powerful online as they are on air. The hard part is figuring out how - and being able to measure progress. That's where business intelligence comes in.

What do I mean by business intelligence? In a nutshell, it's data and insights that help you answer key questions:

• Who exactly is my digital audience?
• What do they want?
• What are they doing online?
• Is my audience growing and engaged with my content?
• What's working (or not working) online?

DATE CHANGE! Due to a death in the family, we must postpone the June 14, 2012 webinar. Join us on Thursday, June 28 at 2 p.m. ET for a webinar tour through everything that Digital Services offers to stations around business intelligence. 

Join us on Thursday, June 7th at 2:00 p.m. ET for a Product & Technology Overview.  In addition to providing a host of great services, like Core Publisher, Analytics and Digital News Training, NPR DS offers a suite of new products and technologies available to stations.

In this webinar, you will learn about:

Looking for something new to like on Facebook? Or for a new Twitter account to follow? Or how about a newYouTube channel to subscribe to? Well, then, how’s about hooking up with our friends at SoundExchange viasocial media?

That’s right, everybody’s favorite performing rights organization is very active in the social media world. Here are some of the ways that you can interact with them: