The day this story hits stands, King County Executive Dow Constantine and Pearl Jam lead guitarist Mike McCready will figuratively stick a big ol’ shovel in the dirt, maybe cut a fancy ribbon, and proclaim the ground for KEXP’s future headquarters in Seattle Center “Officially Broken!” They’ll throw their top hats in the air and everyone will cheer as Rose Windows and Bass Drum of Death play a free show out in the courtyard alongside a bunch of food trucks. Woo-hoo!
KEXP’s new location is certainly worth celebrating: Housed inside the soon-to-be-renovated Seattle Center’s Northwest Rooms, the public radio station will be even more public in its new space, which will feature a cafe, a record store, a communal gathering space, and a viewing area where up to 75 people can check out the station’s popular live studio sessions as they happen. It’ll be a far cry from KEXP’s current digs: a cramped, overstuffed office on Dexter that barely accommodates the current staff. The new HQ will be more artist-friendly, too.
“We talked to a lot of artists and they told us how important having clean socks on tour is,” KEXP executive director Tom Mara says. “So we’ll have a washer and dryer for them.”
The price tag for this new venture is no small sum for a listener-supported station: a whopping $15 million. KEXP will need all the experience gathered in its 34-year fundraising history for the campaign, its biggest yet. Which raises the question: How do you go about raising that kind of capital?
Being listener-powered, KEXP is pulling double duty at the moment. “You know, it’s interesting—there’s the question of the relationship between the community support of our normal year-in, year-out operations, and then the other fundraising for construction of the new home,” Mara says. “Our teams have to strategize for that and make some assumptions.”
Since broaching the public phase of the campaign last July, some of those assumptions have been challenged. For instance, the makeup of KEXP’s individual donor base. “Your typical capital-campaign donor is older,” Mara says, “but we’ve found our donor base is trending much, much younger, [like] the 19-year-old donating $100 for the first time in their lives. We’ve had the real interesting position of watching younger folks develop their philanthropic philosophy. It’s really interesting; you get kind of humbled by it.”
KEXP held its first on-air campaign for the new headquarters a month ago and raised $670,000 in a week, exceeding its goal by $100,000. “We thought $570,000 was already ambitious,” Mara says. “We ended up exceeding our separate day-to-day operations fundraising goal, too.”
The effort is not all listener-sourced, however. Identifying what they call “superconductors,” the station has attracted big-name local entrepreneurs, foundations, and corporations that donated $10,000 or more—like Linda Derschang, Microsoft, the Sasquatch! Music Festival, and the Chihuly family. The station has also garnered support from every level of regional government. Governor Jay Inslee just personally recommended that the state legislature allot $1.8 million from the Department of Commerce’s Building for the Arts program for KEXP’s campaign. On a county level, KEXP has received big boosts from 4Culture; on a city level, the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture is also happily helping foot the bill.
“Folks have really just rallied around the station and upheld it as a valuable public resource,” Mara says. “We take that commitment really seriously.”
To date, KEXP has raised a little over half of its goal, a hefty $8.1 million—which doesn’t include some of the money floating around that’s “not yet in the can,” Mara says, like Inslee’s. But, with help from US Bank that will finance construction fees, it’s enough to front the $6 million required to start construction immediately.
That’s not to say there isn’t anxiety over achieving the $15 million goal. “We have to be out of our current home on December 31,” Mara laughs, “so that’s also certainly driving us.”
ksears@seattleweekly.com
KEXP GROUNDBREAKING CEREMONY With Rose Windows, Bass Drum of Death. Seattle Center Northwest Rooms, 305 Harrison St., kexp.org. Free. 10 a.m.–2 p.m. Wed., Jan. 28.
