Kids are back to school and anyone who logged time at a college has a ton of roommate stories. Great phone topic there. Kick it up a level by the entire show moving in together for one week. Becoming roommates should generate some great content and terrific character development on each of your shows that week.
Halloween may be two months away, but if you want to work on something that shows your humanity, approach your local children’s hospital to see if you can trick-or-treat with the kids dressed as super heroes. The thing that adds to this is what you’ll do in the few days prior to the holiday by asking the audience to choose (on-air and online) what super heroes each of you should be.
Go grab 500 pencils and one pencil sharpener. With everyone headed back to school, challenge one cast member to sharpen all the pencils during one program. With the sharpener properly mic’d, this could be a fun narrative to follow over the course of the show to see how many they can do. Thanks to the Big Dave Show, B105, Cincinnati for sharing this idea.
What might be fun is to find your market’s biggest cover band and ask them to come in to play their version of Weezer doing their version of Toto’s “Africa”.
The world is immensely stressful and there’s lots of bad news. So, good news features work to position you as a positive outlet. Either through soliciting for them online or asking listeners to call and contribute them, highlight the good things happening in people’s lives and call it Happy Endings.
Promotion time with everyone headed back to school in the next several weeks. Partner up with a local chef and have some sort of competition amongst grammar schools to find one school (or one classroom) that will receive a gourmet breakfast with all the fixings from you and your chef.
Summer brings broken air conditioners. And then emergency calls to HVAC companies begging for someone to come that day to fix them. HVAC repairmen (it’s never a woman, right?) see everything. These folks go into neighborhoods and homes they’ve never been in before. And see stuff as a result! They have stories – so find some to tell you the best throughout the summer.
If something bad (but not awful) happens to you, open the phones and let listeners guess what it is. The first person to correctly guess what happened wins a prize in a new feature called My Pain is Your Gain. Thanks to Sherman and Tingle, WDRV, Chicago, who share this idea. You are looking for something silly here – for instance, Sherman got back from vacation and discovered his air conditioning unit and furnace went out and that it would cost $14,000 to replace. So he asked listeners to guess why he unexpectedly spent $14,000 at the end of his vacation – that hook got the calls and made everyone else wonder what happened before he shared the story – a really smart way of telling a character story.
With parents and kids on vacation now, ask the kids of co-workers who are out to leave you a voicemail each night before they go to bed listing the things they did that day with their families. With some editing and a production value, this might make for a fun summer feature on the show.
Looking for something to do with all the weekend festivals in town? How about “Food Porn” where you get audio of an attendee eating a fair food and then you (or them) giving listeners three risque clues as to what it is, with the first correct guess winning something.