Our Principles
ARA's business is public service. Through its collaborations with stations, networks, and national organizations, ARA encourages the highest standards of noncommercial radio service to the U.S. public.
ARA illuminates how and why listeners use public radio. ARA has led or co-authored nearly every seminal study of public radio’s listeners since 1977, tracking their characteristics, values, beliefs, and interests, along with their behaviors and attitudes toward programming and fundraising.
ARA provides a unified system for enhancing public radio's audience service and fiscal self-sufficiency. ARA’s principal product, AudiGraphics®, is an advanced analytical system, based on rigorously tested research, that examines radio listening through a public service lens and shows how it connects to fundraising and finances.
ARA creates concepts that keep public radio focused on serving listeners and preserving their support. ARA defines public service as the product of significant programming (programming highly valued by its listeners) and significant audiences (audiences large enough to warrant use of the broadcast medium and able and willing to subsidize its operation).
ARA casts public radio's strategic planning in the context of audience. ARA's measures of programming economics are the standard in the field. ARA encourages the free flow of accurate and appropriately interpreted information about public radio and its listeners.
Through ARAPublic.com, we offer thousands of pages of books, reports, and articles of significant relevance to public broadcasters and students of the industry.