How Much Should I Pledge?

It's all up to you.

WCPE is listener-supported, so keep that in mind when you're deciding on how much to pledge.

Consider these figures:

Transmitter maintenance:

Just to keep the transmitter running with replacement parts, upgrades, etc. WCPE faces a cost of $67,000 a year.

The cost of broadcasting equipment is very expensive. Just one of our 50,000 watt transmitters costs more than many homes... and we operate two of these big transmitters simultaneously to give you your 100,000 watt signal.

Electricity:

It costs roughly $4,000 a month to run WCPE's 2 transmitters. Add to that the electricity to run our CD players, the lights and the satellite transmission equipment, and that's a hefty electric bill!

Internet Audio:

If you listen to WCPE's Real Audio or Windows Media streams 8 hours a day, your connection incurs a cost of roughly 15 cents a day.

That may not sound like much initially, but multiply that figure by 30 days a month ($4.30) and then 12 months a year ($52) and you begin to see how each of WCPE's hundreds of thousands of internet listeners begin to affect our annual budget. (And these figures represent only bandwidth costs... don't forget the additional expenses of electricty and satellite costs to get our signal to our streaming providers.)

Your favorite WCPE programs:

• Live broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera cost WCPE $22,500 each season.
• It costs about $32,000 a year to bring you the weekly WCPE Opera House.
• The annual budget for Great Sacred Music is $37,000
• The Saturday Evening Request Program costs $64,500 a year.

Is WCPE free?

From the figures above, you can see the answer is "NO!"

Sure, it doesn't cost anything for you to tune in, but sustaining a quality, 24-hour broadcast of Great Classical Music results in very real expenses.

Adding up all of our bills, it costs about five cents a second to run WCPE. That doesn't sound like much at first, but it comes out to about $3 a minute. And that adds up to over $170 an hour. Over the course of one day our broadcasting expenses comes to over $4,900.

The final costs of broadcasting Great Classical Music on WCPE adds up to $1.9 million a year.

A penny for your thoughts...

When you're considering how much to pledge, and what amount may fit in your budget, maybe these figures would help:

A yearly gift of $50 amounts to less than a penny an hour.

A $100 gift = 28 cents a day for Great Classical Music.

Is WCPE worth 3 cents an hour to you? That's a yearly gift of $250.

Think about it... where else do you get so much enjoyment for just a few pennies a day?

Thank you for doing your part!

Make your pledge online!

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