Annual Report
Of the Trustees
2020
1
Overview.
The Trustees of Bedrock Radio have compiled a report of the station activities over the last 12-month period.
The annual accounts are included and verified external audit. Our account period ran from 31.1.2020 to 31.1.2021.
Our Organisation
Bedrock Radio is a Charitable Incorporated Organisation (CIO). Registered with the Charity Commission of England & Wales No: 1180476.
The CIO is run entirely by volunteers, who pay an annual membership subscription. It is governed by the CIO Constitution and managed by a board of Trustees that are elected by the membership at the Annual General Meeting. The Trustees oversee the daily operations, acting in best interest of the CIO to further the charitable objectives.
Charitable Objective of the CIO
1) The relief of sickness, poor health and old age amongst people living in The London Boroughs of Havering, Barking and Dagenham, and Redbridge by providing a local broadcasting service for hospitals, residential homes and similar institutions, and for patients receiving community care; and
2) The advancement of health and prevention or relief of sickness for the public benefit through the promotion of the benefits of living a healthy lifestyle, and the importance of maintaining good personal mental and physical health by (mainly, but not exclusively) the means of broadcasting health education messages to people living in The London Boroughs of Havering, Barking and Dagenham, and Redbridge.
2
Trustee Report
Mathew Watson (Station Manager) | Chris Deighton (Secretary) | Lee Howe (Engineering) Beverley Stroud (Fundraising & Finance) | Gill Rowley (Admin)
2020 had started off with much promise for growth of our CIO & our charity. However, the pandemic has temporally setback our ambitions, we would like to thank all members for your patience and for sticking by Bedrock Radio, we made some difficult decisions to ask you all to keep away from the studio during the height of lockdown one (at the expense of running our service), then only allowing a limited number of members onsite during further lockdowns & tiers.
We hope with the roll out of the vaccine that we can welcome you all back to the Cornwall Suite, so we can commence training & return to our full radio service.
Community Engagement & Membership.
We’ve made some progress with our Community-based focus for the station.
The Bedrock Community News Bulletins have developed substantially. Chris, Gill & Mat are producing three news bulletins per week, along with a local sport & planned travel closures to aid staff. This has provided a great local focus to the station additionally at the end of every month a news roundup podcast is published online to provide a ‘listen again’ material on our website.
We’re hoping to expand on this great work so far, by encouraging presenters to host interviews on their programmes & potentially working on a weekend sports programme.
The delivery of our Hospital Radio Publications magazines late 2019 in readiness to distribute these around all three hospitals, local health centres & events as a way of promoting ourselves, the magazine also provides us with income from the advertisers. Volunteer Services / Patient Experience at Queen’s Hospital had kindly distributed some magazines for us during Lockdown to give patients something to read & also remind patients how to listen into Bedrock Radio.
As & when things have some normality, it’s important we start distributing these magazines, as the advertisers support its creation, once our stocks get low, we can look at making the next edition of the magazine.
We had a couple of enquires asking us if we served Barking (Upney) Hospital, at present we do not, but it’s believed that NELFT run the site & BHRUT also provide services from there.
It’s a potential discussion Trustees need to have with the relevant Trusts about broadcasting into the hospital. Furthermore, a similar conversation & information finding exercise needs to take place in regards to Brentwood Community Hospital & the proposed health centre for the St George’s former Hospital Site, Hornchurch.
We have not recruited any new members in the last year as it would have been difficult to interview applicants safely. And with the cessation of fundraising activities and the need to keep activities in the studio to a minimum there would have been little that we could offer that would have engaged or maintained interest for new members. We thought it more important to concentrate on maintaining and supporting the existing membership.
3
Publicity & Promotion
We have not paid for any publicity in the last year, as we are trying to keep our costs to a minimum due to the lack of income. Furthermore, we have not found any of the paid for publicity that we have used in the Recorder and on Facebook particularly fruitful, neither has extended our listenership or enquiries to join the station. That said we would very much welcome members continuing to push us on their own social media pages, as these appear to get more engagements / interactions than any previous paid campaigns. We want to have bigger discussion around advertising once income levels start to go up again.
We have sent press releases to local media outlets with mixed success. The Recorder and Yellow Advertiser don’t seem interested unless you are a big charity (who may have the budget to advertise in print regularly). However, the Brentwood Gazette and BHRUT website did publish our Christmas schedule press releases. We will continue to send press releases to these organisations and once things open up again it might be worth trustees having a conversation to see if local media or other outlets can offer any professional advice as to how we could promote or publicise the station more cost effectively.
Finances:
Financially it’s been a ‘penny pinching’ year, apart from running costs, all other expenditure was stopped temporally as our income streams had been decimated due to the pandemic. Trustees also took the decision to waiver annual subscriptions for 2020 as members were being asked not to come in. This has highlighted that we should consider other forms of income, perhaps online or through sponsorships.
That being said Chris & Beverley where fortunate enough to secure for us a couple of grants. Chris applied for the “Havering Funding Programme”, The FORE (a local seed funding organisation for charities & non-profits) awarded Bedrock Radio an Emergency COVID-19 response grant - to keep us onair during the pandemic.
Beverley managed to secure another grant from the National Lottery Community Fund and the Government to support the creation of our WiFi Radio project. (More on this later)
This year has shown our pure running costs – The things that keep us on air; Broadband, music licences, fees, insurances to be approximately £3800 a year. Bedrock is currently in a comfortable financial position for the time being.
Trustees remain prudent to seeking income streams and minimising expenditure, especially with a number of projects we would like to progress.
Due to COVID-19 Bedrock Books & The Foyer Stall is currently suspended until further notice, Beverley will be liaising with the volunteers when it is deemed safe for these to restart. With social distancing expected to be in place for quite a while & temporary changes made to the entrance of Queen’s Hospital it’s looking unlikely the foyer stall will restart this year.
That being said, we have the option to run the ‘Foyer Stall’ an online store via Sum-Up[* ] (The card reader), furthermore we may also have potential to external stalls at future events.
With a list of potential projects to work on, we ask members to help on finding & securing avenues of income for Bedrock Radio – Remember all monies raised, is put straight back into improving the service!
*Sum-up online store fee of 2.50% for each sale. (approx. 25p) – Correct as of Feb 2021
4
Engineering:
The Bedrock Radio mobile app received a much-needed upgrade, Mat tried to contact AudioSpace a few times over a number of small issues with the App especially regarding newer software & devices. However, these where not resolved & it’s very likely we lost a few listeners from the Android version not loading properly. Mat contacted a few companies for quotes; from £500 for ‘just a single station player’ to £2000 for ‘a fully bespoke app, for Apple only’ before settling with Aiir (who specialise in radio apps) to create our app (£700PA). The New app offers a better interface, with a clear change when swapping between Bedrock Radio & Bedrock Gold.
A key difference between the apps is that ‘Bedrock Radio’ is listed as a developer with Apple & Google meaning we could have other apps (including paid apps) developed under our own name in the future.
Lee has upgraded the servers to improve speed and capacity and reinstalled windows to ensure we had fresh devices to work from, once this work was complete, we began upgrading to Myriad 5. As part of the upgrade, the Studio Machine had a fresh re-install of windows 10 along with a new soundcard, however, the soundcard proved to cause more problems with Myriad 5 & Windows 10 resulting in the previous sound card being re-installed. – The old sound card has worked fault free (so far).
Bedrock GOLD was the first of our stations to move fully onto Myriad V5, allowing us to learn more about how it worked & iron out any problems, a few minor issues were resolved and the main station playout moved across, again with very little issue. Mat produced a couple of introductory (training) videos onto Office 365 & a socially distanced number of presenters have received V5 Training.
By January 2021 we upgraded our scheduling licences to take advantage of the new Myriad 5 Schedule Plus, this brings majority of the functionality from AutoTrack Scheduler, but is fully integrated into Myriad 5. Bedrock GOLD was again the first to use Schedule Plus and proved to work very well. Testing of Bedrock Radio on Myriad Schedule Plus commenced in February & again is so far working well. AutoTrack will be kept updated at the same time, in case we need or want to switch back to it.
With the introduction of V5, we opened up Remote Voice Tracking (RVT) to more users which has helped keep some presenters on-air during lockdown, I’m pleased to say Geoff, Gill, Scott, Arron & Mat have taken advantage of RVT during the lockdowns.
When we get back into the studio, everybody will receive studio re-training, this will ensure that all members have received the same information & have had a chance to familiarise themselves with Myriad, before commencing programmes.
Sadly, Lee never managed to order new Uninterpretable Power Supply (UPS / Batteries) partly due to the pandemic & the logistics required (The UPS for the server comes on a pallet due to its weight.) However, we will need to health check all our UPS units at to see if others require battery replacements, so it would make sense to order these all at once (i.e., reduce delivery costs etc)
At present, there haven’t been many power outages or tests in the hospitals, if there had been, 99% of our computers have rebooted themselves with very little human intervention.
As well as looking after our own systems;
In December, we sold our spare Sonifex S0 mixer that was in storage, this mixer was sold for £800 to community radio station Nomad 92FM located in Hammersmith & is now in use daily.
Lee & Mat have visited Harlow Hospital Radio to repair and upgrade their system, we hope Bedrock & Harlow will continue to work together, perhaps in the near future work on some sort of ‘linked up’ programming.
More Engineering items are covered in the ‘site specific’ part of the report.
5
Site Specific Updates
Queen’s:
Mat & Chris have kept in touch with volunteer services at BHRUT, we have worked with them to keep records updated we’ve attempt to update some volunteers DBS records, these have been due to the surge of urgent medical staff needing processing first. For some members we may find it easier & faster to start processing again rather than trying to muddle through outdated paperwork.
Telephone: During the lockdowns we’ve come across a unique problem – We can’t access the studio phone externally & due to not having many people onsite the voicemail system isn’t being checked regularly. We tried to forward this to a mobile number, but it needs Trust Telecoms to arrange it, which required a job ticket to be raised. Lee has come up with an idea of digitising our phone system using the 3CX phone system. If we can arrange for our main landline (01708 503 113) to be diverted into 3CX we could have an accessible digital voicemail system & potentially enable Trustees to answer calls directly from an app on their smartphones.
Office: Lee & Mat have been looking at tidying up the office further, some basic repairs are required caused by the natural movement of the building (expanding gaps) & a lick of paint. We’re looking to tidy up the production desk corner by installing with a wider desk to fit in the recess to give more room, which would be aided by a smaller mixing desk (cost depending).
In general, a tidy up of Office & Store room has been undertaken by Trustees to create more space.
WiFi Radio Project:
The start of 2020 this project had made some great strides, Bedrock Radio WiFi was available on MRU ward where the Radio Tablet trial was taking place. Then come march, the pandemic hit. We retrieved our two trial tablets & returned them to studio (One has been repurposed to become the ‘sign on’ system).
Lee has built a prototype WiFi radio device. The 3D printed device (Dubbed the ‘RockBox’) has 4 buttons to control volume & station, a small screen shows which station it’s connected to & a pair of small stereo speakers.
Beverley had managed to secure a Lottery Grant to help fund this project, sadly due the pandemic the prototype hasn’t been tested at the Hospital. Lee has had the radio working from initial building and testing at home.
Figure 1 - 'RockBox' Prototype
Lee has further identified design and build adjustments to improve the ‘RockBox’.
Once testing is underway with the prototypes, we’re looking to see a company (preferably local) can help us refine and produce the circuit boards needed to reduce the number of loose components. Using the Grand funds to develop the project further.
We have managed to use the grant to buy critical components of the WiFi Radio Project; The WiFi access points. These will eventually be deployed around Queen’s Hospital (One per ward initially), these are what our ‘RockBox’ will connect to;
Furthermore, the rollout of Bedrock WiFi will allow for a digital request collection form (The second trial tablet maybe used for this), It could also open up opportunities to broadcast ‘Live from the wards’ using our WiFi.
This is project we will be working on more when things ease.
6
Goodmayes:
At the end of 2019, we sadly had to vacate the Goodmayes Studio due the closure of the old hospital building, the studio equipment was temporally put in storage until being bought a local school (Beam Primary, Dagenham) of which Lee & Mat installed for the school early March.
Internet : Lee arranged for a new broadband line to be installed at Goodmayes to provide more reliability to our service & have arranged with NELFT that we have a small equipment rack placed in a server room (Where one of our amplifiers lives for the wards). This rack would tidy up existing equipment & provide us with more reliable internet in readiness for the speaker upgrade project.
Sadly, activation date for our new broadband was the exact same time the first lockdown happened. Therefore, we’ve not been able to transfer equipment & connect to our new line.
Equipment: The small equipment rack that’s due to go back to Goodmayes after being re-fitted in the server room will also enable the ability for some localised content to be broadcast bespoke for Goodmayes Hospital / NEFLT utilising Remote Voice Tracking & Myriad Importer. It will also act as a backup if the broadband connection goes down.
This is an urgent job in 2021.
At present Goodmayes is still on-air, but is reliant on the existing unstable broadband line.
As all content broadcast is the same across Queen’s & Goodmayes and since the Goodmayes studio closure in 2019, “Bedrock Goodmayes” was dropped as a separate station in-app & on our website. The Goodmayes stream now provides the “Low Quality” feed and Queen’s Stream provides the “High Quality” feed. However, it is still possible for online & smart speakers (via services such as TuneIn & MyRadioStream) to find separate ‘Bedrock Radio & ‘Bedrock Goodmayes’ stations.
Even when our equipment rack is returned, it’s intended that ‘Bedrock Goodmayes’ remains in place, allowing allow us to potentially connect it to NEFLT sites to & more importantly monitor the Goodmayes output.
Requests: Geoff & Marj had made great progress with the request rounds at Goodmayes Hospital. It certainly was a struggle in 2020, Geoff did try to visit the wards in a COVID safe way, but this proved challenging, in the interest for his own and patient’s safety we stopped request rounds.
Trustees wanted to make more progress in working with NELFT in 2020. The Trust covers a vast area of which we’re very interested in tapping into and finding ways to work with NELFT to talk more about mental health and find ways to better support listeners and be more active within the Trust. We hope for this to resume soon.
7
& Finally
We’re Looking forward to 2021 & 2022, we’ve got cause to celebrate as a few individuals of our team mark key milestones in volunteering at Bedrock Radio.
Together we’ll get our community agenda well and truly underway making Bedrock a fantastic community & hospital radio station. Thank You for your patience and support. Especially to those who have gone the extra mile this year, to keep us operational & been able to provide content.
Members’ passion and help for Bedrock Radio is always greatly appreciated and has not gone unnoticed!
Trustees are looking forward to being involved with the challenges and projects ahead, working with you all in making our network of stations Bedrock RADIO & Bedrock GOLD fantastic community & hospital stations.
Bedrock Radio
Bedrock is the Community health and hospital radio station serving Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals Trust (Queen's & King George) and North East London Foundation Trust (Goodmayes).
We are a charity who is run entirely by volunteers, we pride ourselves on providing entertainment and promoting a healthy lifestyle to patients, staff and the local area.
On Bedrock Radio you'll hear local events listings, hourly news, hospital and health information, plus a mix of songs from 70’s, 80’s, 90’s, 00’s, 2010s and latest releases on Your Healthy Music Mix.
Over on Bedrock Gold we feature audiobooks, talk shows and play Great Memories, Classic Hits from the 40’s 50’s, 60’s and 70’s plus we feature Classical Music, Radio Dramas & More!
Don’t forget our listen again content - Bedrock Radio Podcasts available to download from our website.
Bedrock Books Visiting the wards at Queen’s Hospital, Romford throughout the week. We have a wide variety of soft-back books for all adults with a range of tastes. Books are handed out to patients, with a suggestion donation of 20p.
8
atro¢k Ra6lr- Rqg15teFd Chrftablo Inccrporntqd OryanIaatts ICIO) 11¢78
ywrErtde&Jl J8nuary2021
Rt¢sptsand P4ympnt
In¢ram
Donatkns
Mtyinè IrKofflg ofÈ8101
FU[alng
Foyer 51?118k$
3B4.79
9780
120(h)
SthoD1 d15C
Ass•tSalAs-Ihtsls& cATAL 11gfft
Olhor
815
Total Rocolpts
12799.JO
EAppndllur•
offi suples
PhorEIPosiaye
pOnnIS
Repalrs
FeesAndLlCenS.'
03 02.20 Musir Lir