I'm assuming that Planet Shaftesbury will have many interactions with the new radio station. More information about the station is included in this message from Keri Jones via the 'Nextdoor' network - anyone interested please get in touch with Keri directly or if anyone wants to offer a regular connection to Planet Shaftesbury activity, let's consider how we can support you at the meeting on 16th January. Message follows:

Ofcom has awarded Alfred the community radio licence for the Shaftesbury area. Now the fun starts! Alfred will be a not-for-profit, community-run initiative with no paid staff. If you would like to volunteer on a regular basis, making programmes and features about local issues, your passions or your areas of expertise for broadcast, please let us know. Perhaps you would like to be an announcer, a roving reporter or write and read stories or poems for broadcast? Please get in touch!

Alfred will be unique in that everything we do will be local in flavour. Our extensive research has revealed that people in our area already know where to find their favourite music on the airwaves and they are happy with their existing sources of national news. So, we're not going to try to compete with existing radio services.

Alfred will instead be tailor-made for Shaftesbury, with programmes made by Shaftesbury area people. We will broadcast local interviews, features, drama, news and conversation. We won’t be broadcasting pop music shows. The only music we will play will be local artists. That will reduce our costs significantly because the royalty fees for playing pop records would cost us thousands of pounds each year. That, in turn, means that our running costs will be low, so we won’t have to broadcast lots of adverts to generate income. Research has also revealed that people don’t like to hear ads. We’re mindful that not everyone can easily get to a studio at a prescribed time to participate in programme-making. So we’ll be enabling our volunteer contributors to record and submit interviews, articles and recordings using their phones, laptops or tablets from wherever they are in our area.

We’re really excited that we’re the first radio station in the UK to embrace the technology most people have at home or in their pockets, instead of being reliant on a complicated studio set-up. If you want to get involved, please let us know. If you have friends and relatives in Shaftesbury, Semley and The Donheads area who would like to take part, please encourage them to contact us too. We’ll arrange to meet you for a chat about your interests. We can then help you to start developing your radio programme-making skills or can help you achieve whatever you would like to do as part of our exciting project. If you have any questions or ideas, please get in touch at hello@ThisIsAlfred.com.