I’ve done a little bit of updating to our main web page.  We put on a link to the Columbus Arts Council’s  The Big Read project.

And I added a graphic from abcfundraising.com which shows our current financial need.

Our mailing to the Chamber of Commerce members is still going on.  I have another stack to go out today.

Here’s a shout out to our fellow members of the Columbus-Lowndes Chamber of Commerce.

You may receive in the mail a letter asking you to make a financial contribution toward getting WMFH-LP on the air.  I hope you will give that some thought.

I really appreciate the businesses in our community and the C-LCofC, the Link and other business development organizations.  It is nice to live in an active and growing area.  Thanks for making our community great.

We want to add our piece to the mosaic of life in Columbus.  It’s not a new factory, a new hotel, a retail shop or an office.  It’s a little radio station.    Our expenses are “front loaded”.  The transmitter and other technical equipment have to be in place before we can do our thing.  After that the fun part starts.

It has been an interesting year.

Early in the year we received notification that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had approved our application for a low power FM (LPFM) radio station.

We did some brain storming and came up with a few preferred choices for our call letters.  We applied for and received WMFH-LP.

We ran a crowd funding campaign on indiegogo.com, bringing in about a thousand dollars.  As a “perk” for that campaign we worked with a t-shirt company to design a shirt and get some printed up.

We put together  this web site, humble though it may be.

We continued working on our station automation system with the Rivendell software, downloading and cataloging content from the librivox.org website.

We went to a local-charities intro event at the Columbus Lowndes County Library.

We joined the Columbus Chamber of Commerce and attended a few of their events.

We expanded our board of directors to include more voices from the community.

We applied for  and received non-profit status 501(c)3 from the IRS  (so contributions are tax deductible!).

We put together an initial offering plan for underwriting and presented that opportunity to a dozen or more local businesses by email, postal mail and in person.

We searched the world for grant-making foundations and government organizations, seeking start up funds to buy our transmitter and EAS/CAP machine.  We have contacted over a dozen potential grant sources.

We designed and built an antenna (yet to be tested).

We toured non-commercial radio station operations at Mississippi State University (WMSV) and Mississippi University for Women (WMUW).

We have acquired some donated equipment:  computer system, microphones, telephone interface box.

We also have been in contact with experts in the fields of literacy education, radio reading service for the sight impaired, and radio station construction.

We had a great board meeting on the Monday before Thanksgiving. It was a refreshing time of looking over the last few months, reviewing our progress. We have come a long way since a year ago when our application with the FCC had us on pins and needles! We have our station construction permit, our 501(c)3 status, and a growing pile of equipment and content.

Looking forward, our big hurdle is to locate funding to buy a transmitter and related equipment and get our station on the air. Our “Get On The Air” project goal is $12,000. (Other LPFM stations starting from ground zero will have a budget roughly twice that. Having a radio tower and some studio/operating space, we are halfway there!)

From September through November we have applied for grants with over a dozen private and corporate foundations. Most of them have yet to reply, a couple have declined outright and one replied that they would consider our case in an upcoming board meeting. Whew!

Oh! I should also mention that we have signed up for Amazon Smile, a version of amazon.com shopping site which can be used to donate 0.5% of your purchases to charity. If you buy a $100.00 item on smile.amazon.com, 50 cents will go to charity. That’s not a whole lot, but every little bit counts. Please make Classic Book Radio your Amazon Smile charity!

For those of you thinking so far ahead that you are considering your end-of-year tax picture, contributions to Classic Book Radio are completely tax deductible.

—
Chris Howard