Strategic Plan Dashboard

If FY24 laid foundations and FY25 operationalized them, FY26 was the year HR's people infrastructure matured into something the whole organization could build on, with role redefinition, compliance, succession, and leadership development feeding directly into the next three-year strategic plan.

A Deliberate Shift in Station Staffing

Under the rescission, HR deliberately traded full-time hiring for contract staffing, a leaner approach that protects capacity while reducing fixed costs; the station is also exploring a shared-services model with partner stations, with early discussions underway around shared Finance and HR functions. Positions hired to support the strategic plan stepped down by design across the three years: five in FY24, four in FY25, and in FY26 one key strategic hire (the Sr. Director of Finance) plus a contract Director of the Rural News Initiative. Both were recruited and chosen from a deep and well-qualified candidate pool. Alongside the hires, the year’s structural work redefined job descriptions, realigned the Development department, and created a hybrid IT / Engineering / Facilities role. These moves worked to increase staff capacity and broaden professional-development opportunity under tighter resources.

Expanded Operational and Compliance Role

HR also took on a broader operational load this year, tightening processes and reducing risk. The team standardized contract reviews and routed all contractor agreements through HR for consistency and oversight, strengthened EEOC reporting, and worked with IT to build a centralized repository for contracts, licenses, and insurance documents, leaving the station better prepared for audits. Recurring processes such as FCC and EEOC reporting were documented so they are easier to manage year over year.

Activity Through the Year

HR’s tracked measures show steady activity across the year. Hiring centered on the year’s key strategic role; leadership-development opportunities continued throughout; and recurring staff celebrations ran monthly through the fall before being paused at staff request.

Connects to Technology & Infrastructure HR also owns the work that makes the station’s technical resilience durable: engineering succession, including the Dale → Almin hybrid role, FCC licensure, and the Engineering Toolkit that captures institutional knowledge. Infrastructure’s hardened systems are only as dependable as the small team that runs them, and that continuity work is tracked here.

When the rescission removed the paid-marketing budget, Brand & Marketing kept reaching audiences anyway, sustaining reach through collaboration and discoverability rather than spend.

Reach Sustained Without Paid Spend

FY26 was the first full year of a deliberate boost-free strategy: after the federal funding loss, the station stopped paying to boost its content and shifted to a celebrity- and collaboration-driven discoverability model. The volume metrics show that reach largely held. Online video views finished at 5.08M, essentially level with FY25 and 21% above the FY24 baseline. Social media impressions reached 4.92M, 18.5% above FY24, though below the FY25 peak that paid boosting had supported. The honest read is that audiences were sustained, not grown: video views held against a plan goal of +300K, a defensible outcome in a year without a marketing budget.

Social Media Impressions and Video Views

The quarterly shape tells the boost-free story in miniature. Both metrics climbed into a Q2 peak during the holiday campaign season, when audience attention is highest, then settled into a steady band through the back half of the year. That settling is the point: without paid boosting to spike individual quarters, reach found a consistent organic floor rather than collapsing. Video views, the more durable of the two, held that floor more tightly than impressions, which is what the station would expect from owned content versus reach that paid promotion once amplified.

Connects to Content & Platforms The Tennessee Crossroads engagement gain above is the audience-development story, owned here. The program itself, its broadcast distribution, series continuity, and digital spin-offs like Jaunts, lives in Content & Platforms, where its programming future is covered.

Content met the federal funding rescission with discipline: auditing local series for ROI, optimizing signature programming for digital reach, and adding to station revenue through production services and presenting-station work.

A Year of Deliberate Choices

The ROI audit drove consolidation: Arts Break and Tennessee Crossroads were integrated, the standalone Learning to Read was sunset in favor of co-funded literacy work, and production hours concentrated on signature series. Presenting-station work added to station revenue, bringing in about $41K while distributing Nashville PBS-presented productions to public-media audiences across the country. Content also began gearing up to deliver on the CPB-funded statewide digital-first program, with rural-news and partnership work that will extend the station’s reach well beyond Nashville.

Reading the Reach Numbers Honestly

Several core reach metrics declined in FY26. Local broadcast ratings continued a multi-year softening, and audience cume fell. Subscriber net-adds were about half of the prior year’s once paid promotion was removed, the same boost-free effect seen across Brand & Marketing. The genuine positive surprise sits alongside the decline: while local content softened as the FY24 digital-first pivot anticipated, the all-broadcast rating held steady rather than continuing to fall.

Presenting-Station Revenue: Baseline, Spike, Rebuild

Presenting-station work has become a consistent mission-driven, earned-revenue line. Its three-year arc runs from a $25,500 baseline in FY24 to a $97,725 spike in FY25 as pipeline projects were converted, to $41,119 in FY26 as the pipeline rebuilds. The FY26 figure is above the FY24 starting point and reflects a solid, replicable model capable of supporting another pipeline conversion spike in FY27.

Connects to Brand & Marketing Content optimized signature programming like Tennessee Crossroads for digital reach; Brand & Marketing drove the audience development that turned those optimizations into measurable engagement gains. The two pillars worked as one on the digital-first strategy.

FY26 was the year the department proved its learning ecosystem could simultaneously scale and deepen: digital and statewide reach climbed while the team consolidated a broad event calendar into fewer, more impactful, and more repeatable programs.

Local, Statewide, and National Reach

The metrics that measure durable reach all rose. PBS LearningMedia users nearly doubled, statewide advocacy and best-practice convening grew, and JA BizTown attendance held at a high plateau of 12,343. Resources distributed held near the prior-year high at 15,015, far above the FY24 baseline.

Fewer Events, Deeper Programs

Event volume settled back from the FY25 peak by design. Events moved from 108 to 86 and attendees from 9,027 to 6,281, reflecting a deliberate shift from many one-off gatherings toward recurring, scalable models. Two honest factors sit behind the attendee figure: fewer events, and a likely tightening of how participants are counted relative to FY25’s large festival crowds. Experiential Learning Hours fell to 473 from 794, a decline that traces directly to the Q1 loss of state Workplace-Learning funding, which the team rebuilt on MNPS and community footing over the rest of the year.

A note on June: most of these figures were reported before June 1 and do not include any June activity. Several events are scheduled for June, and the POWER Youth students and summer interns begin this month, which will raise the Experiential Learning Hours total notably once June is counted.

From Stabilizing to Scaling, Quarter by Quarter

The year’s rhythm moved from steadying the ground to building on it. In Q1, the team absorbed the loss of state Workplace-Learning funding and secured early grants. In Q2, it advanced the BizTown renovation, completed 32 early-literacy workshops, finished the PBS KIDS Community Van, and delivered 300-plus bilingual books to Casa Azafrán. In Q3, it completed and earned recognition for the TN250 youth podcast, renewed Dollar General literacy funding into FY27, and passed the Healthy Smiles goal. In Q4, it activated the JA BizTown PBS station with Fall-Hamilton students and placed POWER Youth and summer interns. Taken together, the quarters show the scale-and-deepen pattern in motion: each one converted a one-time effort into a repeatable program, turning a year of constraint into durable capacity. The one honest exception was the PBS KIDS communications plan, a cross-departmental capacity constraint that stalled through Q3 before pivoting to an intern-led approach in Q4.

A note on the Library of Congress digitization The E&E Department oversaw the digitization of 600 tapes to preserve Nashville PBS’s archive for future generations. This work is not currently counted among education resources distributed, but could become a factor in future E&E programming.

Three years of building a strategy-led Development operation paid off in the year it was tested most: in FY26, the department met the federal rescission from a position of new strength.

Membership: The Growth Engine

Development raised a record $5.47M in FY26, a 27.7% jump after two essentially flat years ($4.22M to $4.28M to $5.47M). Membership revenue rose to roughly $3.03M, the member base broke a multi-year plateau to reach 28,643 (up 27.5%), and sustainers grew to 14,321 (up 21%). Major Gifts continued a steady three-year climb. A significant strategic decision behind that growth was the FY26 investment in the CDP and Member Service Bureau (MSB), which strengthened member data, communications, and servicing; the individual-giving and sustainer gains would have been difficult to achieve without it. Because sustainers, who give automatically each month, now make up roughly half the member base, much of this growth is recurring rather than one-time, giving the station a more predictable revenue floor.

How the Deficit Closed

Finance tracked the gap between the budgeted loss and actual results throughout the year, revising the year-end forecast each month. The reforecast deficit narrowed across the year, from $(461K) in October to $(246K) by December and $(53K) by January, before settling at +$20,229 of actual operating income through May. The path was not perfectly smooth: the forecast ticked back up slightly in February and April as pledge-period costs and roughly $125K in CPB grant-related expenses were booked, then recovered. December was the strongest fundraising month, lifted by the year-end pledge drive, while the brief mid-year softening reflected expense timing rather than any drop in giving. What turned a projected seven-figure loss into break-even was this monthly cadence of reforecasting and adjustment, catching variances early and managing spending against them, rather than discovering the year-end position too late to act on it.

Technology & Infrastructure strengthened its foundation in FY24 and FY25, and FY26 demonstrated the payoff: a hardened, well-run system lets a lean station take on new things.

A Foundation That Creates Opportunity

FY24 stood up the core capabilities. FY25 landed the heavy build: the airchain refresh was completed, all channels moved to weather-resilient terrestrial feeds with satellite kept only as backup, and new automation came online to control the on-air schedule. FY25 also included testing live-streaming capabilities. FY26 was the year that foundation was put to work, taking on the Americana broadcast and absorbing a real equipment failure without losing service.

Connects to Human Resources The technical resilience above is only as durable as the small team that runs it. The engineering-succession work that protects it, the Dale-to-Almin hybrid role and the Engineering Toolkit, is owned and tracked under Human Resources.