What We Want

Our key objectives are to commission new material that:

  • Is ‘public service’
  • Really engages with our core audiences
  • Can be re-formulated to work in on-demand/podcast form
  • Can generate PR opportunities for Fun Kids

As a commercial radio station, we want to encourage people to tune-in each day and so are positive about long-running features/series that can really connect with audiences daily. We’re also interested in commissioning material that has podcasting potential.

Children’s Lives

We want to reflect children’s lives all across the UK. We’re keen to see ideas for a weekly hour-long programme that follows/is authored by a junior-school aged child where we find out about their lives alongside the music they like/reflects their culture.

This could be a 10 year old on a council-estate in Belfast, an 11 year old who’s started boarding school in Leeds or a migrant starting school in Coventry. We’re interested in stories that really show the diverse range of children’s lives.

As well as the hour-long show, the speech elements would exist as part of a podcast, and short-form excerpts would be used around the Fun Kids schedule.

We’re open to what form this would take, and how long the run would be, but would like a format that would be suitable for multiple series.

Open Ideas

We’re also open for any other ideas. This could be in any genre or topic – drama, comedy, science, arts, entertainment, factual, quizzes, documentary etc.

Short-form

Generally these should be:

  • Around 5 to 10 mins
  • Have at least 10 episodes and ideally more
  • Be suitable for podcasting
  • Be targeted at 6 to 11s

Longer-form

We’re happy to have ideas for traditional programmes, we would expect these to be:

  • At least an hour in duration
  • Have a decent run length – 13 episodes would be a whole RAJAR quarter
  • Be a mixture of music and speech (up to a maximum of 50% speech)

Scheduling

We’re open-minded about scheduling of programmes.

During weekdays, the core 6 to 11 times are 6am to 9am, 3pm to 8pm. We would likely schedule 5-10min duration features during this programming, particularly during the 4pm to 7pm block.

On weekends there’s 6 to 11 aged content between 6am and 8pm. It’s likely that any longer form, hour-long programmes would go during the weekends. Weekends would also host 5min short-form content too.

Working Together

We take a relatively hands-on approach at the ideas stage, working with you to make something that works for Fun Kids. We also have had a good amount of success with the ACF scheme and so can share much of this learning.

If we take forward an idea, we work collectively on a Google Doc to answer the ACF’s questions, the Indie then submits it through the ACF system.

After it’s been commissioned, we tend to be relatively hands-off, providing delivery meets are pre-agreed discussions. With all the content that Indies make for Fun Kids we expect to have rights to repeat the material at no extra cost, make it available in perpetuity in a Fun Kids podcast channel and have the option to re-commission it at similar rates. Submitting an idea through to us, assumes you agree with this.

If we’re not going to do anything more with an idea, we’ll say so swiftly, so the Indie is then able to explore further series with other broadcaster/models etc.