Dana Edelstein ’13
My Experience
PBS and its over 350 member stations provide content that educates, informs and inspires Americans from every walk of life. PBS reaches 123 million people through television and more than 21 million people online each month. As a member of PBS's strategic planning team, I developed a digital distribution strategy to maximize reach and return on PBS content across multiple platforms and revenue streams. I analyzed data from sponsorship, membership, licensing and sales to determine their overall value to both revenues and mission. I worked with multiple internal stakeholders, researched competitive benchmarks, and presented a final recommendation on balancing free and fee digital distribution models to PBS senior staff.
Along with working on a meaningful and timely project, my goals for the summer were to strengthen the analytic skills I gained during the first year of business school and to serve in a strategy consulting role to help a nonprofit solve an important problem. I was able to both utilize and build upon the breadth of quantitative skills that I learned from my statistics and marketing classes, as well as my general work in Excel, to synthesize large amounts of data in a relatively short time frame and ultimately build a complex revenue model. I was also able to define priority revenue streams in revenue tradeoffs and identify the respective data I needed to perform my analysis. In meeting with both senior and mid-level members of various teams – including distribution, interactive, and ad sales – I referenced lessons from my strategy and consulting classes. I knew what questions to ask and what terminology to use in order to obtain the information I needed.
Learning the dynamics among different teams was a challenge. My project focused on a problem that spanned across several departments, but each department had slightly different goals and standard practices. In addition, PBS is comprised of multiple businesses, each with their own revenue and cost structure. Comparing apples to apples, as well as navigating PBS’s complex system after only a few weeks on the job, was difficult. Finally, the digital media sector is constantly evolving, so creating a strategy to harness advancements in digital media is like trying to hit a moving target.
At PBS, I learned a lot about the nonprofit world, namely the tension between achieving a mission and bringing in the revenues necessary to support that mission. While I think PBS does a fantastic job at always putting mission first, the fact that it is both a nonprofit and a media company further displayed this tension for me. I found that shared definitions and goals among teams are key to coming to a common ground solution that gives priority to an organization’s overarching objectives. To best understand tradeoffs within the digital distribution scenarios I was considering and ultimately arrive at an optimal strategy, I needed to be diligent about measuring each factor (ex. revenues from ad sales vs. revenues from iTunes sales) the same way. This isn’t always easy in a system as complex as PBS’s.
PBS also involves a variety of stakeholders who don’t always have the same depth of knowledge in the same areas. I learned that it is sometimes necessary to simplify a potential solution that affects multiple constituencies, like many of the challenges nonprofits face and/or seek to address. This is especially true when working on a problem involving many moving pieces and complex processes, such as digital media distribution. Of course, accuracy is important, but is also irrelevant if your audiences cannot understand how you arrived at your solution. In other words, ensuring that my work was both accurate and easy enough to understand was key to its usefulness. This is a fairly obvious rule in theory, but a much more difficult one in practice.
