CDP Celebrates 5 Years; Board Names Michal Heiplik President and CEO

as CONTRIBUTOR DEVELOPMENT PARTNERSHIP (CDP) MARKS 5TH ANNIVERSARY  
AS AN INDEPENDENT, PUBLIC BENEFIT CORPORATION

[BOSTON, MA] The Contributor Development Partnership (CDP) Board announces the promotion of Michal Heiplik to the position of President and CEO.  Celebrating the 5th anniversary as an independent public benefit corporation, CDP works on behalf of more than 230 public radio and television stations to develop and share data-driven insights and provide fundraising services to maximize net revenue for partner stations. 

“We are excited to announce Michal’s promotion to President and CEO,” said Jonathan Abbott, CDP Chairman. “At a time when the fundamentals of local media and journalism are facing transformation, Michal will advance CDP’s leadership supporting public media across the nation with innovative solutions that support stability and growth.  Michal cares deeply for our mission and has been essential to CDP’s success.  He will continue to advance the use of data, analytics, contributor programs and systems to fuel growth and scale innovation.”   

CDP was conceived by the Public Television Major Market Group, initially funded through a seed grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, with Heiplik serving as CDP’s President since 2020.  

Heiplik expressed his commitment to the new role, stating, “CDP is uniquely positioned to bring public media organizations together through data-driven learning we will leverage to boost fundraising performance, donor analytics and content engagement. It’s that kind of innovation and scale that will benefit our common good and strengthen public media in communities across the nation.” 

Since its founding, CDP’s mission and purpose have been rooted in driving actionable analytics and insights, and ultimately, sustainable support for public media. CDP’s National Reference File (NRF) now includes over 200 stations, making it the single largest repository of giving data across public media, including some 19 million donor accounts, 200 million transactions, and close to 5 million active donors. That allows CDP to analyze high volume data sets, identify and share fundraising trends at both the national and local level, test emerging techniques and establish best practices, all with the goal of improving net revenue for clients. 

Key to CDP’s investment in technology is its ongoing partnership and collaboration with ROI Solutions, working together to build a next-gen tech ecosystem with Revolution CRM at its core. CDP recently completed the migration of the entire cohort of Member Services Bureau (MSB) Co-op stations, along with a number of additional stations making the transition to Revolution CRM, which now boasts the largest number of public media donors being managed on a single platform, providing greater opportunity to align on and leverage insights and innovation at scale.  

CDP’s future vision for serving public media through innovation is twofold – both to address fundraising challenges and opportunities across the system, as well as to reduce risks and other barriers for stations in exploring new tools and services. To date, this has included bringing more than 500,000 new donors to public media through CDP digital services and other programs – largely younger, sustaining donors, with greater lifetime value. 

The MSB Co-op is the most comprehensive offering of fundraising services, providing full strategic planning, management, execution, and analysis of a station’s membership program. It is designed to grow net revenue for stations through both expense savings and operational efficiencies as well as increasing contributions and growing donor files – a commitment that CDP has met on behalf of every MSB partner within the first year of joining the Co-op. This translates to more than $300M in new net revenue to stations. 

This spring, CDP will host their second MSB Co-op Strategic Summit in Denver, in cooperation with Rocky Mountain Public Media. The event will bring together executives and senior leaders from CDP partner stations for strategic exploration and discussion to inform and shape the future of public media contributor insights, new initiatives, and revenue opportunities. 

“No one can tackle the future in a vacuum – it will take collaboration, teamwork, and scale, as well as an eagerness to research and implement new strategies,” said Heiplik. “As CDP continues growing and evolving to best serve our partners, we are making it a priority to bring public media organizations together to ensure we are working collectively to identify both challenges and opportunities, and to take meaningful action to meet them head-on.”