Why you should donate

VU meter shows total amount raised so far

WMBR is noncommercial radio, offering many hours of programming that cannot be found on any other radio station anywhere. We are 100% volunteer, with no paid staff. This is rare ‐ even among other local college and public stations. Our volunteers are MIT students, alumnus, staff and members of the local community.

Our primary source of revenue is listener donations. MIT provides the space and a small stipend, but over 99% of our operating costs are covered by your individual donations. We rely on your support to bring you our diverse programming!

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Where the money goes

The COVID-19 crisis has caused major changes in the way we operate. When MIT shut down non-essential buildings in March 2020, we lost the ability to broadcast live from our campus home in Walker Memorial. Luckily, thanks to your previous donations, we were able to set up remotely controlled broadcasting capabilities. Read more about how our tech staff made that happen here!

This year, we successfully moved our FM transmitter, antenna, and tower from the Eastgate building to the new E37 building in Kendall Square, in collaboration with MIT's Kendall Square Initiative. This major undertaking not only required significant expenses for FCC engineering and licensing, construction, and infrastructure, but also gave us an opportunity to modernize our broadcast systems to make them more reliable for many years to come. A fully redundant transmitter system, among other improvements, was directly supported by your contributions.

Your donations continue to pay for our webcasting and artist licensing fees, which continues to be our biggest expense. But you're also supporting whatever else we need to make all this possible, from providing remote broadcasting equipment to new recruits, to paying for increased server space and redundancy for our remote show library.

And as we move toward resuming our in-studio operations at Walker Memorial, we'll lean on your donations to buy the equipment and software we need to successfully run a "hybrid" schedule between remote, pre-recorded, and in-studio shows.​​

Premiums

A variety of premiums were available as our way of saying thank you for your support. They are tokens of appreciation for your tax-deductible donation to WMBR. This year we offered T-shirts, tote bags, rubber jar openers, pot holders, pullover hoodies, pencils and a holographic sticker!

Here's a sneak peek at what the premiums look like:

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