Viewers affirm Hope Channel despite its lack of identity
Brenton Stacey
Public relations officer
Avondale College of Higher Education
Cooranbong, New South Wales, Australia
Viewers appreciate the Seventh-day Adventist Church’s Hope Channel but have no strong sense of its identity, research supported by Avondale College of Higher Education shows.
The survey of 326 Adventists is a first for Hope—the worldwide church’s satellite television channel—in the South Pacific. One of the researchers, Avondale College Seventh-day Adventist Church senior minister Dr Bruce Manners, describes his interest as one of curiosity. “I’ve coordinated surveys for print [Bruce is a former editor of the church in the South Pacific’s journal Record] and wondered what was happening in the visual media.”
He and his colleagues—lead researcher Associate Professor Daniel Reynaud, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Theology, and retired Seventh-day Adventist educator Dr Graeme Perry—wanted to better understand the purpose of Hope. “Does it have an evangelistic or a nurture focus, and has it followed the trend of most Adventist media, which begins with an evangelistic focus and ends with a nurture focus?” asks Bruce.
The respondents
Of those who responded to the survey, half are from the Hope Channel mailing list, the “Hope Group.” The others are from five Adventist churches in Australia, the “Church Group.” Most of the respondents in this group do not watch Hope—of these, almost 15 per cent had not even heard of Hope. Of all respondents who do view Hope, almost three quarters are more than 50 years of age. “We asked respondents to rate their theological leaning,” says Bruce, “and using data from previous surveys of Adventist print media, compared Hope viewers with Record readers. We found the viewers who responded to this survey as being more conservative than those who responded to the Record survey in 2004.”
The findings
Viewing of Hope is mostly during Sabbath hours—Friday evening and Saturday. Most viewers watch between three and five hours a week. Those in the Hope Group tend to watch more of Hope than those in the Church Group, although about 15 per cent of the latter also watch JCTV, a contemporary Christian music channel, and Smile of a Child, a children’s channel. Programming on these channels does not feature strongly on Hope.
The most popular programs on Hope, according to respondents in both groups, are the locally-produced teaching program It Is Written Oceania and the locally-produced news program Record InFocus. Both groups agree strongly on the top 10 programs, with the report describing the lack of interest in young adult and children’s programs as “noticeable.” An analysis of the data shows neither respondents in the Hope nor the Church Group rated any of the programs as excellent, “a challenge worth embracing,” reads the report.
A surprising finding: the tension between Hope and independent supporting ministry 3ABN. “Respondents seemed eager to compare Hope with 3ABN,” reads the report. However, while they affirmed Hope’s broader reach, they also affirmed 3ABN’s evangelistic and doctrinal content. “The irony of the perception of 3ABN as being more evangelistic but Hope as being better at reaching secular Australians seems to have escaped the respondents,” reads the report.
This confusion and other comments from the survey about the need for clearer branding and more inclusive content may stem partly from Hope’s lack of a strong identity. “Audiences for mass media are fragmenting,” says Bruce, “but Hope is trying to please a range of people.” He defends the channel, though. “Hope is appealing to a wide audience [viewers of 3ABN and Hope affirm the way in which the channels support their spiritual life], and it’s a much broader audience than 3ABN.”