Service
Strategy & Assessment
Strategy work for public media, sized for the smallest joint-licensee in a rural market and the largest network in the country. We bring the same partners, the same method, and the same standard of evidence to each.
What we do
Strategic Planning
Three- to five-year plans that move from environmental scan and stakeholder input to a board-ratified roadmap, with measurable goals and a built-in cadence for review. The process typically includes community listening sessions, staff and board surveys, audience and revenue analysis, and a planning committee that we facilitate but your people lead. The result is a plan specific enough to govern budgets and staffing decisions, not a document that sits on a shelf. Typical engagement: four to six months.
Organizational Development
Org-design and culture work for stations moving through a transition, such as a merger of broadcast assets, a leadership succession, a new strategic plan that demands a different shape on the org chart, or a culture that is no longer serving the mission. Engagements produce concrete artifacts: structure options with the tradeoffs stated plainly, role definitions, reporting-line changes, and a sequenced transition plan that respects the people affected by it.
Board Development
Governance audits, trustee recruitment, board retreats, new-trustee onboarding, and chair-and-vice-chair coaching, designed for community-licensee, state-network, and university-licensee boards. We help boards draw a clear line between governance and management, build trustee pipelines that reflect the community of license, and turn the annual retreat into a working session with decisions attached.
Compensation Reports
Compensation benchmarking grounded in public-media-specific data, not generic nonprofit surveys, so that boards can defend the package and managers can attract the candidate. Reports cover the roles you specify, benchmarked against stations of comparable market and license type, and arrive with a written methodology your board can cite when the package is approved.
How we work
Livingston Associates sees strategy work as asking the right question more than giving the right answer. Every engagement is built on structured listening: surveys, one-on-one interviews, and facilitated sessions that bring staff, board, and community voices into the room before any recommendation is written.
We work this way on principle and on evidence. When the people who must carry out a plan help shape it, the plan gets carried out. Participation is not a courtesy in our method; it is the mechanism of adoption.
And every recommendation is grounded in data: audience and revenue trends, benchmarking against comparable stations, and the patterns we have observed across more than 25 strategy engagements since 1997.
When stations engage us
Most strategy engagements begin at a moment of change: a general manager arriving or departing, a board asking questions the current plan cannot answer, a revenue model that has stopped growing, or two licensees exploring what they could do together.
Some of the field's defining studies began exactly this way. Livingston Associates has led foundational work on joint-licensee operations, cross-platform promotion, and the financial sustainability of mid-market stations, and that research continues to inform the advice we give individual clients.
If your organization is approaching one of these moments, an early conversation is often the most useful step, whether or not it leads to an engagement.
Begin a conversation.
We respond to every inquiry within two business days.