A Community Radio Toolkit 2013

Wits Radio Academy’s Prof Franz Kruger, Mike Smurthwaite and Dr Monji partnered with OSISA in 2013 to develop a toolkit for Community Radio, that could help stations, boards and stakeholders assess the overall health of any Community station. The toolkit was developed to have both qualitative and quantitative outputs. While stations can use the tool to assess their overall health and identify areas to improve or work on, the best method of implementation is to use an external expert to conduct the assessment, particularly the first one. The team identified five core areas that are critical to the overall health of the station: 1. Mission and Governance, 2. Management and Staff, 3. Infrastructure and Finance, 4. Programming, 5. Community Involvement. While there may be room to tweak the toolkit for future use, the results for stations that have used it have been very good. It yields results that surprise even compliant stations and helps them to grow and maintain standard across the board within their organization.