As TVO CEO Lisa de Wilde sits for an interview in the boardroom of the educaster’s midtown Toronto office, it is the first day of her fiscal year. It also happens to be April Fool’s Day, but the organization’s budgetary situation is no laughing matter: in February de Wilde told the Economic Club of Canada her station was looking to Ontarians for $10 million to meet its financial status quo and allow the channel to innovate further. It is now two months into TVO’s ‘Go Public’ fundraising drive, and so far she’s happy with the response.

‘We hit our targets in terms of revenues, which in this climate is an awesome achievement,’ says de Wilde. ‘It also starts to shift the relationship we want to have with the community. We are saying, ‘If you value us, speak up – tell us, tell your friends, join our community.”

These are precarious times for OTA broadcasters – and public ones especially. Last month the Saskatchewan government pulled the plug on SCN, but de Wilde sees that situation as particular to that province. ‘I feel badly for the folks there, because in the crowded, fragmented media market, it’s really important to have a public broadcaster,’ she says.

De Wilde, a former topper at Astral Media, took over the reins at TVO more than four years ago, bringing the notion that aggressively embracing the digital domain would set a bright path for the station, which will this year celebrate its 40th anniversary.

‘We wanted to look at where TVO was and figure out what were the conditions necessary so that we could continue to be relevant, and in fact be more relevant,’ she recalls. ‘Digital was the perfect engine that allows a small organization with a unique mandate to do things and to be impactful in ways that we probably never even thought.’

TVO sees itself as running five content ‘channels’: kids programming on TV and at TVOKids.com; TVOParents.com (which also supplies parenting advice videos and articles to the Yahoo! Canada Lifestyle page); and adult programs on TV and at TVO.org. The websites will soon be relaunched with more robust content and simplified navigation. The kids site, which averages 315,000 unique visitors and 5.3 million page views per month, will be the first redesign out of the gate in late April, which speaks to the emphasis on that area of programming.

TVOKids.com bursts at the seams with content, including more than 150 games and activities – often focused on reading – and streaming video of in-house and third-party programming. There will be plenty on the new site about Dino Dan, the hit TVO series from Sinking Ship Entertainment about a boy paleontologist who sees dinosaurs no one else can. A microsite offers games, including one in which kids can dig for dinosaur bones.

TVO will also soon be available on the tube 24/7 for little eyeballs provided the CRTC okays its application for a digital kids channel, a hearing for which is planned in early May. The new station would bring in subscription revenue, yet likely not much at first since it would be a discretionary service at the mercy of BDU negotiations. More importantly to de Wilde, the channel would address TVO’s mission.

‘It really is the clearest manifestation of our educational mandate,’ she says, pointing to the diligence the caster brings to creating kids content, which is linked to school curriculums and developed with input from educators.

‘We approach it with rigor and seriousness – we also have fun,’ she adds. ‘It is about leaving kids with the sense that learning is fundamental to their lives, but it can be fun as well.’

For grownups, TVO’s feature attraction is The Agenda with Steve Paikin, the daily interview show that tackles issues commercial casters would tend to run from screaming, such as its recent ‘Our changing relationship with death’ series. But filling the void of serious discourse has proven beneficial: last month, New York Times environmental writer Andrew Revkin appeared on the show in a five-parter on climate change, and subsequently posted clips from it in his blog, reaching a whole new audience. The Agenda is also the most-watched show on TVO’s YouTube channel, which has had 335,000 videos streamed since launching one year ago.

What the digital world also offers is audience participation. When The Agenda goes on the road to examine local issues in various towns and cities, it holds warm-up ‘AgendaCamp’ events in which citizens can have their say. An interactive wiki becomes the record of the event, open for comments and where registered participants can keep the conversation going through Tweets and upload videos and photos. Some of that content is rolled into the TV broadcasts.

‘If you can actually engage citizens in helping you create the story you’re going to have for the next day, it becomes so much more powerful and people realize that they’re part of something that is big and important,’ de Wilde says.

As with The Agenda, episodes from lecture series Big Ideas have been made available as free podcasts. According to TVO, there were 5.2 million podcast downloads of its current-affairs shows last season, and Big Ideas is the top podcast in iTunes’ ‘higher education’ category in Canada, and number two in the U.S. It has even found followers as far afield as Australia, which is all fine and dandy, but it doesn’t solve the current budget shortfall.

‘It’s more about impact,’ de Wilde insists. ‘I was convinced from the get-go that partnerships with people like YouTube and Yahoo! and iTunes are fundamental ways for a small organization like ours to increase our reach. If you don’t play in those new models, you certainly won’t learn and figure out what the emerging business models will be.’