 Good morning, everybody. Hi, Gail. I was just talking about you, so you're connected. Gail, would you introduce yourself, everybody? Hi, guys, Elaine and Tina. My name's Gail Carpenter. I am the Chief Business Development Officer here at TechSoup. I've had the privilege of being here since 2001. So if there's anything on the site, I am definitely, or companies at least, the people that have dropped them in there. So just delighted to get a chance to meet you. Unfortunately, Arita, I have to jump off. I have a standing call at 10.30. But I didn't want to tell you guys, I am actively looking at, because I was inspired by this session, to start building together a suite of things that will support people in creating podcasts. And so, Arita, can I share something real fast with this? Please. OK. I'll share screen here real fast before you get started. This is something I found on, I forget which website it is, but essentially it was an Essentials Podcast Checklist. So the things you need to have, USB microphone accessories. Now, I can't show much of the hardware may be coming our way shortly. But these are all things. And Arita, I'm going to send this to you. And then you guys can tell me if there are particular solutions that you like, or things that you would highly recommend. And if there's anything missing on this list, that would be very much appreciated. So I will stop sharing, because I know you're going to have people showing up pretty soon. And other than that, my whole role is to go out and find new and interesting things for our nonprofits to benefit from. So that is what I'm all about. So any questions for you guys before we get started? Yeah. Gail, thank you so much. See, this is why you have to come to our free webinars. You never know who you're going to meet, what you're going to learn. And again, our goal is to help you be the best in your community that you can be by using technology. Gail, that's just made my heart so happy. Thank you. Hi, everybody. Thank you for joining Executive Directors Chat. We call this ED Chat here at TechSoup. I hope you're ready to take notes and ask lots of questions in the chat room. We have plenty of support to help you. Today, our topic is, should your nonprofit launch a podcast in 2022? I thought this was going to be a good topic because several of you have already put in our follow-up emails or you contact me and say, hey, I have a podcast. You sent me something on LinkedIn sharing your podcast. So I'm excited that we have somebody here to share more about podcasts. My name is Aretha Simons. I'm the webinar producer here at TechSoup. This is being recorded, and you will get the recording within 40 hours with all the slide presentations. When you get the recording, please subscribe to our YouTube channel and make sure you hit the Like button. I greatly appreciate it. So I want to show you how you can be engaged today. Everybody's not on mute. This is not a webinar, so you're on the Zoom platform. But I would love if you would just remain on mute for the quality of the recording. At the end, Elaine is going to open up the floor. If you have a question, please use the Raise Your Hand option, and we'll ask you to unmute yourself and then you can ask your question. Also, feel free to ask questions in the chat room because she has help here today. Tina's here to support her. So here in Eating Chat, I would love for you to become a featured speaker. It is so important that we hear from you. We love when we have featured speakers like Elaine and so many others. If you're interested in becoming a featured speaker, email me at acymons at TechSoup.org. Again, that's acymons at TechSoup.org. If you are having an event or conference coming up, please email Stephen Jackson at sjackson at TechSoup.org. I'll be putting that in the chat room, but we would love to be at any of your events. If you have an event, we'd love to share about TechSoup. So I'm going to move out of way and introduce our speaker. I'm so excited that Elaine Grant is here. She is the CEO of Podcast Allies. It's a training, consulting, and podcast production company devoted to helping mission-driven organizations to produce high-quality podcasts. Elaine is a lifelong journalist. She reported, produced, and hosts shows for three different NPR affiliations. And today, her work revolves around strategic storytelling. This is the powerful way individuals and organizations can use well-crafted stories to reach their objectives. Elaine is here to tell us more. So welcome, Elaine. Thank you for being here. Oh, it's just a delight to be here. Thank you so much, Aretha, and to all the other people at TechSoup who I've been working with, Susan Tenby and Steven Jackson and Eli. And it's great to see all of you. I know I'll be sharing my screen in just a minute, Aretha. But Aretha just put up a poll, which I asked these questions and she said, oh, I can do a poll. So I'd love for you to answer, are you here because you want to launch a podcast? Someone else is advising or even pushing you to launch a podcast? Or you've already launched a podcast? Love to see the answers to that as I share my screen. But first, I just do want to acknowledge that we're not doing this webinar in a normal week. And my heart goes out to everybody in Ukraine. And I know all of you are in the helping professions. And you may be working with people or be in Europe or have family or friends or colleagues there. And I appreciate you taking the time to be here during a really painful and difficult time. Okay, I'm going to share my screen. I'll just take a second. Okay, I need to just move where I'm seeing all of you so I can see my notes. Now, we're gonna talk about the pros and cons of podcasting today, of producing a podcast. I believe there are an awful lot of benefits for nonprofits to produce podcasts, but I also believe that it's not the right solution for every single nonprofit because it's work, it's money, it takes resources. And so I'm gonna speak as candidly as I can about the pros and cons. So what I'd like to do is start with the challenges that are facing you in 2022 in terms of reaching your audiences, your existing and new audiences. It's obviously harder and harder to get people's attention. There are three big shifts in social media that are affecting your ability to capture the attention of your audiences. This year, we're going to more and more of a sort of cookie-less world, 60% of the data that we used to be able to track on Google Analytics has disappeared since the beginning of the year because as consumers, we can opt out of much of that tracking. So it's harder for you to reach your target audiences organically and with social media advertising. So that's one reason. Second is the competition for attention just keeps increasing. I hardly need to say anything about that. It seems like every day there's a new channel to pay attention to and more and more people on it. And third, people really want more control over what they consume than they used to. We're all burned out. We're tired of being fed stuff that doesn't, isn't relevant to us, stuff that we don't like. And we really want to be able to choose for ourselves what kind of content we bring into our minds and our hearts. Now, obviously podcasts are a good solution to these problems because people choose podcasts and when they listen to them, they spend a lot more time listening to a podcast than basically any other medium for work. I mean, obviously we spend more time watching TV or movies or something at night, but for work, it is a medium that we can capture people's attention for half an hour or more at a time. And so it really can make a significant difference in your world. And in fact, a friend of mine who is a nonprofit marketing consultant, as of 2022, she is now encouraging her clients to put the money they would have put into online advertising, social media advertising into podcasts instead. So instead of spending $10,000 on online ads, she's saying spend it on podcasts. So that said, I wanted to start with a little glimpse into my world and it's a world that I believe can be yours as well. So this is a picture of I-95 in Boston. Anybody who's ever driven in Boston traffic, you know how hideous it is. And I had a commute, an hour-long commute to work in Boston in the early 90s. I know some of you might not have been born yet, don't laugh, and it was just hellish. I hated it, I was going to a job that was really boring. And one day I'm sitting in the weather was just like that. I'm sitting there, I'm scrolling through the radio stations. And I happened on the station I hadn't been on before and I heard a story and I can't remember the story, but I was absolutely gripped, I was immersed. All of a sudden I was not aware of the miserable commute that I was on. I was like inside that story. And with that story then, I suddenly knew what I wanted to do with my career for the rest of my life. I wanted to do that very same thing and tell those stories, make those immersive worlds. And of course it was NPR and I was having what we in public radio call a driveway moment. A driveway moment is a great thing for anyone trying to really transform people one at a time relate to them. It's fairly obvious why. So science calls driveway moments something, it's called narrative transportation. And it is that feeling of when you're in the grip of a good story, it can be a novel or a film, it can be a podcast. And you feel like you're in that person's world and you have to know what happens next. And the reason we call it a driveway moment is because when we were all driving and listening to the radio, if you hadn't finished listening to that story and you got home, you're sitting in your driveway, you couldn't get out of the car until you finished the story. But scientists study this now and they found that when we're in the grip of a driveway moment, our palms might sweat, our heart rate might go up, our blood pressure might raise, say it's a cliffhanger, somebody James Bond is hanging by his fingernails. And we react almost as if it's the real world. And when we do that, we are really relating to what you are telling us or what the voices that you're bringing to us are telling us. That's the opportunity that I think you have is to create compelling interviews and stories that give the listener an opportunity to enter into your world, the world you wanna share. So I'm gonna come back to listener behavior in a minute but I wanna switch now and just show you a little tiny bit of data about podcast listening. And we all know this, they become much more popular, they're mainstream now. Well, the last time this basically flagship research organization, it's called Edison Research did their big yearly survey was last March. So this data's a little bit old. An estimated 80 million Americans over the age of 12 had listened to a podcast in the last week which was way up. I expect when that data comes out at the end of this month that it's gonna be even higher. And it's been fast growth. I think it will continue to be fast growth. And there's a tremendous amount of data that's available in this report and another one and we'll have the links for you later. But a couple of things I wanted to call out it's very fast growth among young people, 18 to 34. That's the fastest growing sector. And almost as fast growth but lower numbers overall among baby boomers just because they started out lower. So don't discount if your audience is 55 plus they're listening to podcast. And sorry, my computer decided to have a mind of its own. There's also fast growth ethnically among listenerships. So it is still majority white listenership but there's been tremendously fast growth particularly among the Latinx community and then the other community which is a melange of races and ethnicities and the black community is listening. It's a little bit flat for some reason but it's still up from years before. And I'm happy to say that the content is reflecting this. There's more and more content that is not just from the sort of white male perspective. Thank goodness. Gender is about equal and ethnically it's grown enough that it does now mirror the makeup of the American population at large. We don't have, I don't have data globally. I'm sorry. Okay. So that's why it's a really important medium obviously. Why do people listen so much? Well, the very first reason is no surprise. Multitasking productivity, we're not tethered to a screen. We can learn new things. We can be entertained while we do any number of other things. Another reason is new perspectives. That's sort of a subset of a reason why people have always been listening to podcasts something more than 70% say they listen to podcasts to learn new things which explains an awful lot. You know, why are history podcasts so popular? Why are wellness podcasts so popular and business and self-improvement? We're learning new things. But new perspectives is something that came up in an NPR Edison report that is also in the links where in particular that younger audience is looking to get out of their social media bubble and get perspectives from other kinds of people, cultures, places, points of view. And they say they get that from podcasts. That's a big deal for nonprofits trying to get their own perspectives out. Self-improvement, I mentioned that people, again, we're all feeling it. We want comfort, we want inspiration, we wanna feel better. People listen a lot for various kinds of self-improvement. Positivity is, I thought, very interesting and again, very big among the younger group. People say podcasts are more positive than social media overall and they're looking for that positivity. And finally, this is a pandemic thing but not just a pandemic thing globally. We know that there are epidemics of loneliness in England, Italy. There was a big story about Italy the other day. In particular, again, young people are saying, it's true overall, but young people especially are saying, I listen to feel less lonely, I have a companion. Okay, now what I wanna do, let's take one side, go back to the other, let's go back to your needs as nonprofit communicators. If you decide to use podcasts as a communications channel, you need to do something a little differently than I did. So public radio's mission is to inform and entertain. That's it, that was my mission at WBUR in Boston, at New Hampshire Public Radio, at Colorado Public Radio. As public service minded journalists, we are taught that ethically, we should comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable simply by airing the facts. But we allow you, the media consumer, to decide what to do with those facts. But you have one additional, very, very big need. So you need to inform, entertain and persuade, right? You are trying to get your audiences to do something while still telling stories ethically and honestly. You might need them to donate, volunteer, serve on a board, advocate, start a movement, appear in the media. You might be trying to get lawmakers to introduce bills or change policy. Maybe you're trying to reach people who could be potential clients and receive direct service. And I am sure that there are plenty of other things that are unique to your organizations. And if you wanna put those in the chat, I think that would be really interesting to know. Do you have a unique need that you would like to see if podcasts can fill for you? Or maybe if you already have a podcast, they're already filling for you. So I'm about to get to the challenges, but before I do that, I wanna just tell you a little story about Colorado Public Radio and the power of sharing stories with your target audience. And this was something that wasn't planned. I didn't expect it. I wasn't in fundraising. I was in the newsroom. So when I was at Colorado Public Radio, we started a live event series called Colorado Matters at the Tattered. And if any of you are from Colorado or the region, you know that we have basically a regional bookstore called The Tattered Cover, which is a very big deal here in the West. And so what we did, we always interviewed authors and people love those interviews. We took those author interviews to The Tattered Cover and invited an audience and we did what's called Radio in the Making. We made these radio shows live and our host interviewed authors in front of an audience and then they could ask questions and then we would take those and package them up and edit them for radio and air them later. And they were very popular. And when we started them, our major gifts officer went, oh, this is a nice opportunity. And so she would bring along her biggest donors to these things. And one day, the day after an event, she came to me and she said, one of our biggest donors had already given us $10,000 this year. He just wrote me a check for $25,000 because of the event last night. It's because we just as human beings, we just love to have an intimate connection to real stories and real storytellers. And this is an opportunity that podcasts can bring to you. Listeners do a lot of things. We know this from the data. You probably have done some things yourself if you're a podcast fan, you might have bought products or t-shirts. You might have gone to a live show, looked up a book you heard about, followed hosts, signed up for newsletter, shared shows with friends. You might have changed your behavior. You might have gotten an idea, oh, maybe I'll do yoga every day for a year. And also, this is so different than other media. Listeners consider brands more favorably because they heard about them on a podcast. So if you hear a mattress ad or a blue apron ad on a podcast, you actually feel more favorable about it than if they advertised on TV, for instance. It's very interesting. So all these benefits, but this is where we're gonna get candid, the big question here is, is the labor and time necessary to produce a good podcast worth it? It is not for the faint of heart. And here's why. Here's one of the reasons why. One of the most common questions that people ask me is, okay, Elaine, what's it gonna cost? How many people do I need? Do I have the time? But what's it going to cost? And I have to say, I cannot answer that question because it's like saying, how much did that movie cost to make? Well, an action film costs way more to make than say a small indie film that's about two people talking to each other. So I came up with this very non-mathematical equation for actually it was a conference of public radio news directors who are grappling with this issue. The complexity of your format plus the frequency of your episodes, plus the length of your episodes, plus the urgency of your deadline, that's when you plan to launch and then how quickly that frequency appears, all combines to add up to the resources that you need. And that's labor, experience, training, and money. And so just very briefly about complexity, what I'm talking about here is, is your podcast one person who is an expert at something just talking into a mic. I do a little five minute podcast every day about podcasting and you listen to it. I can do that and it costs me almost nothing except for the equipment and of course I've got some experience and so forth. Or am I producing something like Sounds Like Hate which is an investigative, serialized, highly produced series from the Southern Poverty Law Center. This year they've been investigating the January 6th insurrection. So you can imagine the resources going into that reporting. That's well over $100,000. I'm certain just for one mini series alone, probably more than that. It just depends on what you're creating. Here's the other big challenge. So I don't know if anybody remembers this movie or has seen it. Kevin Klossner in Younger and More Handsome Days, 1989. Field of Dreams in Field of Dreams. The whole idea was if you build it, you wanted to build a baseball field. If you build it, they will come. And in the movie, that's exactly what happened. That's not what happens in podcasting even though people think it does. It used to in the early days of podcasting because there weren't that many. Now, if you create a podcast, you have to market it. And you have to continue to market it. Some experts go so far as to say, you should spend as much time marketing your podcast as you do producing it. It is not an insignificant issue. However, before you get worried about it, decide, oh my gosh, right here, now this is not for me. Just think about this. You've probably made videos. You wouldn't make a video and then not market it. You wouldn't just put it up on your website and assume people are gonna come blocking to see it. And the same is true for any of your communications. You write a blog post, you do a webinar, you do an interview on Facebook Live or something. You're gonna market anything that you do. Podcasts are really no different. It's just that they're a continuous event. Okay. So those are some of the big challenges. I will say that there are a lot of free and inexpensive ways to market your podcast. Time is a consideration, but you don't have to pay for everything. Now what I wanna do is just show you some real life examples of nonprofits that are really being smart about how they're using podcasts. Or if you go back to the archive on the website, Aretha, they'll have the slide deck will be available. And there's sound in all of these slides. There's a little player button on the graphic. And so you'll be able to play them. I am not gonna play the sound on most of these because for time's sake. But I am gonna play this one. And let me just tell you the story of this one. This is a podcast that is actually made by teenage girls. And it's really interesting. I wrote a blog post for TechSoup on five podcasts that are helping their nonprofits grow. And I stumbled across this one and it surprised me because it has a very unusual mission, which it's using the podcast to actually provide direct service to their clients, which are girls eight to nine, here you go, sorry. A very, very sensitive desktop. It likes to just do things without me. And so the girls themselves learn audio skills and they build confidence. They get career training. They get to tell their own stories and ask their own questions. They're picking the agenda. And so it's all for the girls. And but having this podcast out for years, by the way, also creates, I'm so sorry, brand awareness for the organization and these guests who often are celebrities or very well known people become ambassadors. They become friends of the organization, which obviously can lead to all kinds of good things, funding and publicity. The story behind this clip is short is the girls rotate hosts. So there are four or five girls, they went on a field trip to Montgomery, Alabama and the girls interviewed Martha Hawkins, owner of a roadside restaurant called Martha's Place, which is like home cooking and civil rights. You'll hear it in the clip. As a teenager, Martha and her brother marched with Martin Luther King. And this girl, she was probably about 14, asked Martha how old she was when she first thought of starting her restaurant. And in the course of answering that, she talked about the woman she wanted to model herself after her role model. Georgia Gilmour was a lady in Montgomery that worked with the bus bar cart. And she used to always have articles and stuff in the newspaper. And I wanted to be like her, you know, Dr. King used to be at her house and Robert Kennedy and all, anybody that came to town, they went to her little place and she had a restaurant in her house, which was unheard of, you know, but they allowed her to do that. So she was my motivating force. When I hear that clip, I think, what was that experience like for those girls? What an inspiring and amazing opportunity for those teenagers to hear this about this young woman who wanted to do that. And she wound up doing exactly that. And firsthand, it had to be life changing. So think about what making the podcast can do for you. Hard Call is a podcast that I co-produced and co-hosted a few years ago for the University of Colorado. And this is so an educational institution. And I tried to show different kinds of institutions and how they use them. I'm not gonna play the clip. Basically, it was a dramatic, highly produced, serialized narrative set of stories that really brought the toughest choices about our health to life. And the outcome was it took academic research about ethics, bioethics, these kind of hard concepts to grasp and made it part of the public conversation. And it put none too soon because of course that's what the pandemic has all made us talk about and need to know more about. It also elevated the brand, the authority and the attention that that university department gets. And it also changed the way and is continuing to professors educate and doctors learn because this is the department that provides ethics education to upcoming doctors, nurses, healthcare professionals and all kinds. It's obligatory, they have to take it. This became so much more interesting and so people started to adopt it as part of their curriculum. Wouldn't we all like our doctors to understand how to treat us as human beings? Would that change the healthcare system in a way that would be transformative around the world? Oh, I didn't intend to play that. Hang on a second. It doesn't wanna stop either. Jeff came to us, we were doing about 10. Sorry about that. You'll just have to go to the archive to play it yourself. Okay, here's a museum and it's a new museum and they describe themselves as a pop-up museum. So it's headquartered in Boston but it can show up anywhere in the country. And this is a very simple interview show that the founder uses to connect with, happens to be about design with prominent designers and other creators around the country to talk about the way design affects like 12 different arenas of our lives, healthcare, business, culture, all kinds of science and really elevate not just what he's interested in but elevate the museum so that people know about it. It's brand awareness, it's perspective shifting but back to what listeners are looking for and every time he interviews somebody like this they become again friends of the museum and probably start talking about it. Maybe they formalize that relationship in some way to get more marketing and awareness across the country maybe across the globe, I don't really know. It's a really simple premise and it's so smart. Urban Roots is sort of a community nonprofit. It's started by a woman who is an architectural historian, preservationist looking at preservation through an anti-racist lens which is apparently very uncommon. Interesting about this one she and a journalist started the show Urban Roots which is great highly produced storytelling about hidden history that comes out of neighborhoods of color and just last year actually got a $10,000 grant from an arts organization to start it and they're teaching new things. They're building community advocacy. One little story, city councilor was listening or city council candidate was listening to the show, loved it, got elected and is now trying to preserve some historic buildings in neighborhoods that would have been completely ignored before and so budding up against peak developers and big money and so forth and then publicity. And so as a result of Urban Roots she started a nonprofit which is now doing these historic preservation projects in different places. The second season is going to go out from Cincinnati and go to places in New York and LA and across the country. So it's a really remarkable story of a lot of different kinds of transformation. This is a show that podcast allies produces for the Environmental Defense Fund and they started it because what it is it's a career show for young people who want to fight climate change in some way and wanna know what kind of jobs are out there who can be my role model and so forth. So they wanted to spark a movement. They wanted to serve EDF's overall mission of fighting climate change. They need to attract a new and younger audience and what it did do, I'm not sure that this was really planned is to help sort of shift the goals of the entire organization toward the generation climate. Is it working? Well, is it doing what we hoped it would do? This is a tweet from a listener to our host and she said, I just wanted to share with you the impact your work and voice has been having on me. Like many people, I was changed by the pandemic and it led me to the decision to quit my job and pursue a drastic career pivot from HR and tech into environmentalism and your podcast is exactly what I needed. So we think that it is doing what we intended it to do and we're working on season four now. So isn't this ultimately why you all, why we all went into purpose driven work in the first place is to change the world or change our corner in it? Well, in order to change the world, we need our work to change one person at a time to inspire them to action. It's to give hope. And we do that through storytelling. One person at a time, one year at a time. So I've got one more clip and this one I am gonna play before I end. This is from Degrees. Michelle Romero is the head of Green for All, which is a jobs program for green jobs to go to people with low incomes. And yes, our host asked her, when did you become an environmentalist? And she said, oh, I was never environmentalist. I didn't think of myself that way. I was a policy advocate. I was a political person. And then she told the story of going to Flint, Michigan, where the lead crisis was and interviewing some young mothers. And this is what made her realize she is an environmentalist. She bathes him in the water just to rinse him off real quick and he starts screaming, mommy, it's hurting, it's burning. And she pulls him out of the water and she sees that his skin is cracking and bleeding. And at the time I had a three-year-old back home and I just, I couldn't imagine, you know, what it's like for that mom every day, not to be able to do basic things and to not be able to protect your kid. I'm a little speechless, honestly. Your story about these families and these people that you're meeting, it would transform anyone. And that's the opportunity that you have to create change, to transform your listeners into people who act. So thank you for listening. Oh, I'm so sorry. I'm sorry just to rinse him off real quick. And before we go to questions, I just wanna show you that you can download a workbook at our website, How to Tell Stories That Matter. It's some ways to sort of amp up your storytelling. It doesn't cost anything. There's the link and I think Tina, can you put that link into the chat? And, or you can hold up your phone to the QR code. I'll leave this up just for a second and it will take you to that. It's also will be in a follow-up email that Aretha has said that she will share with you all. And when you go to that link, you will also get a code for $50 off of any of our online courses. Okay, I'm just gonna leave that there for just a second. I know that's probably not long enough. And now we can go to questions and there are links on that last page to two reports that I drew some statistics from that I mentioned before. And, you know, it's not long enough now to put those links in the chat. But when you go to the TechSoup website later to get the slide deck, you'll be able to click on those links. And that is the end of this show. And I'm gonna stop sharing my screen. So thank you. Wow, can we put some snaps, some thank yous in the chat room? That was off. I'm just taking it all in. I felt like I was listening to a podcast because you have such a great voice. So thank you, Elaine. You do, you do. So what I'm gonna do is allow you to ask your questions directly to Elaine. I mean, there was some questions in the comment. I hope you caught that one, Tina. If you wanna unmute yourself, that was from SBC. It says, hi there, there's a more big question for Elaine and anyone who has a nonprofit podcast experience. How and where would you host or would we host, not you, would we host our podcast if we have limited capacity at our org? And should we just post it on our website or is it more important to get it on Spotify, iTunes, et cetera? And should we concentrate our efforts on just getting it in front of the network we already have? So I hope you caught up that, Elaine. I can repeat it if you want. It's a lot of questions. The hosting question is the easiest one. And that is what this person is asking about is the hosting platform, not the host person. So the hosting platform is what allows you to distribute your podcast so that listeners can hear it. I would not waste your time making a podcast and putting it on your website and not putting it anywhere else. No one will listen. No one will find it. It really needs to be out there on Apple podcasts, Spotify, although we all have sort of controversial, mixed emotions about Spotify probably right now. And there are many, many other podcast apps, Google Play. Android is very, very popular beyond the borders of the US. So we tend to be kind of apple-centric here, but outside of the US it's more Android platforms. The good news is that there are hosting platforms that are free or low-cost and I am guessing that Gail maybe will be helping. I know that all of you get some breaks on technology and this is a break that maybe TechSoup might be able to help you get, but that's super, super important. What were the other... I think that was kind of your answer was wrapped up in all those questions. So that was good. Okay, good. Can I just say one thing before I forget? Did people do the poll? I didn't see the answers. Yes, they did the poll and I'll go over it in just a moment. I'm gonna pull it up because I screenshot it. We moved on, but Zacchia, you wanna ask her questions then I'll give you the poll results. Hi, thank you so much for this information. So I'm just, I have recorded and disseminated five podcasts, but I'm not collecting any data. I did it, well, I did it on a radio show and I wanna turn it into a podcast so I can reach more people and not just in a central area because I need the data of, and can you get that from a podcast who's tuning in so I can use that to make sure I'm having an impact. You absolutely kind of answer a fantastic question. Zacchia, what's your organization and where are you? I am in Des Moines, Iowa and my organization name is Grace Fitness and my, our mission is to eliminate health disparities in the African-American community. So I do just a lot of talking about it, but I need to reach people like you said, you have to be persuasive to call them to do something. Exactly, exactly. So that's the other reason why you don't wanna just make a podcast and put it on your website because you don't get any data. And so you're gonna choose one of many hosting platforms, simplecast, podbean, buzzsprout, we, there are lists out there. All you have to do is just search for hosting platforms. We have a tip sheet somewhere, Tina, on hosting platforms, I think in the course. And there's new ones coming up every day. Well, those hosting platforms, what happens is you publish to your hosting platform and after some initial setup, they distribute your podcast to all the listening apps. So you're not taking an episode and having to manually put it on every single listening app every time. That's not what happens. So it's much simpler than that. And that hosting platform provides data to you. Where are people listening from? Are they listening on a desktop? Are they listening on mobile phones? Are they listening on Android or Apple? Some of them will do that. What's the growth? What's the download numbers per episode? What is the engagement? Engagement is how long is someone listening to an episode? Did they drop off after the first 30 seconds because your opening was really boring or do they hang on for 95% of it because it's so compelling? So there are more and more stats coming out every day and they're really valuable actually. But I would urge you not to get hung up on downloads because we're comparing ourselves. It's sort of like if you, your child goes out and plays football in your small town and they compare themselves to Tom Brady, they're always gonna feel less than and like they're not doing anything, right? But a hundred people go to that football game. Those hundred people matter. They're the ones you actually wanna reach. So we're not in a, we gotta be careful about keeping score, being in a numbers game when we have small nonprofits or even large nonprofits. It's who are you reaching and how engaged are they and who are you trying to reach that matters the most? That's awesome. That was a great example too. So the podcast, I'm sorry. Can I ask one last question? How do you know if they're engaged because they keep coming back? That's one way they keep coming back, but you know if they're engaged because the statistics now will show you, basically you can even see some line graphs of drop off. So you can see where people started listening and then stop listening. And you don't want that really steep curve. A lot of people stop listening after the first 30 seconds or minute because either the podcast isn't what they thought it was. I'll give you a great example here, which shocked me. So I love listening to podcasts about public speaking because I'm very interested in it. And I wanna get tips on how to be a great public speaker and so forth. So there was a podcast I used to listen to and they did two or three series by some people who are known for being very high-end public speaking trainers and that's what the podcast was about. Well, they had a hiatus over the pandemic. They just came back, I got it. I was like, oh, I'm so excited, I get to hear them again. And they decided to make this season about financial management, financial planning for public speakers. So they're interviewing like retirement experts. And I was like, this is not why I'm coming to you. I will get that information elsewhere if I want it. And I'm not getting what I do want. So I bailed really quickly. So your description of your show overall and of your episodes has to be accurate. You need to make sure that people know what they're getting. And that's one reason why people will leave. Another reason is because in the business, in the public radio business, we used to say you always start with your hottest tape, which means you always start with like the thing that's gonna grip you. And this is about knowing how to tell good stories. And I say stories, and I mean that very loosely, that can be an interview. That can be a solo hosted, I'm gonna give you some education. It's how do you grip people? Why do people stay? And then, what's the reflection? What's the meaning? There's a lot that goes into that as you know, because I'm sure all of you are storytellers in some fashion doing what you do. I hope that helped. That was great. So if you have a question, please use the raise your hand reaction at the bottom to raise your hand. There's a little happy face if you click on it, you can raise your hand. I know Tina's trying to answer a lot of the questions in the chat room as fast as you can, but we don't wanna miss your question. So Elaine, the results from the survey or the poll that was launched, are you here because 66% said they're here because they wanna launch a podcast. Wow. Yeah, and 23% says because someone else is advising them or pushing them to start a podcast, and 11% said they've already started a podcast. Wow, 11%. Yeah, so among those 11%, if you have not put the name of your podcast and your organization in the chat yet, then I would suggest you do because I'm sure everybody else would like to check out your podcast. And the other thing I would love to ask of the people who have started podcasts is, are you getting specific strategic outcomes from your podcast and what might they be? Like the ones that I was trying to give as examples of the podcast that I showed you. So 11%, that's pretty high. That's higher than I expected. The 23% of you who are being pushed or advised, that can be pretty uncomfortable. I've heard these stories. It's like, oh, my board says someone says, big donor says, my boss says, we have to have a podcast and I am a marketing department of one. In that instance, then there are smart ways to either get out of doing that, partner with other kinds of nonprofits that share your mission. Say, let's start with guesting on podcasts. Let's work on some podcast guest training for our thought leaders and come up with a strategy for that. Or maybe you're even gonna advertise, underwrite somewhere else. But if you are a marketing department of one, you're already overworked, then you really have to be pretty smart about how you're gonna do this in a way that's gonna be good enough to represent your organization well and not burn you out. I'm sorry. We have a few questions. People have their hands raised. I'll go to Jane first. Jane, you're free to unmute yourself. Thank you. Elaine, hi. I'm an old radio producer who's been doing documentary work and feature stories as a producer for many years. The nonprofit that I'm working with is starting a series called Voices of the Wild Earth. It's kind of grounded in the humanities. So we're trying to put out perspectives of nature and humans with the goal of needing a new relationship with nature. And I've done two documentaries. Well, I have done one documentary that was podcasted for Spokane Public Radio and working on a second one, working with the Nez Perce Tribe because our work has for 32 years has been with the tribes of the region and having to do with SAM which is a big issue in the Northwest. And your comment just now about don't do it just on your website. I mean, we are a volunteer run organization. I'm on contract to produce the, and I have a wonderful millennial who is my technical co-producer. But we wanna put it on our website. We're kind of redesigning it right now for that. And we have partners and a couple other cultural organizations who will be posting our link for that. But on a limited budget, is it possible not to have to do the other Apple or Spotify or whatever? I mean, we've got a lot of people who connect to our website through, well, emails. We have a great email list and these other cultural organizations do too. So it's different launching into a podcast than a radio documentary. Or I just wondered, what your thoughts were about that? And thank you, it's nice to listen. Oh, well, thank you, Jane. And it sounds wonderful. It's not that expensive to get a hosting platform. It really isn't. And some of, even if TechSoup isn't all set up yet to help reduce those costs, many of them will, they have free trials, they have discounts, they might have nonprofit discounts. You might be able to talk somebody into just giving it to you for a while. It's not that expensive and it will make it so much more possible for you to expand your audience. It's just a shame to do that much great work and not have it get out there. That is really a very overcomable obstacle. And I know people are hesitant, like, oh, hosting platform, that sounds really difficult and expensive. It's not that expensive. It really isn't. And also these people are set up to help independent podcasters grow their shows. So I would really urge everybody to use a hosting platform. And do you have one last question? Do you have a certain length that you think, I mean, I'm used to half hour documentaries or hour long documentaries. What do you think is a real listenable length and how many voices? I mean, the podcast we just produced had nine voices in addition to me as well, which was too much. Yeah, that sounds like too much work. It's too much work and it may be confusing. A single voice, a couple of voices, but what are your thoughts there? It's really whatever serves the story the best. And so that comes down to some real storytelling work in terms of improving your storytelling. And so it's not a one size fits all, but it's what serves the story the best in terms of voices. But nine sounds like kind of a lot and it sounds like a lot of work that way, a ton of work that way. Length, length, our attention spans are what I'm understanding, getting shorter and shorter, unfortunately. And so really the advice is 25, 30 minutes, you know, unless it's something that is so compelling, so noteworthy, people are just demanding it, you know, January 6th insurrection, I don't know. I think there are probably episodes or half an hour, but you might have a compelling reason to go to an hour, but I think I would have waited at this point. Thank you. Okay, Adriana, thank you. Adriana was not able to use the raise your hand option, so I told her she would go next and then Patricia. Go ahead, Adriana. Thanks so much. I'm Adriana with Better Because Collective and thank you so much for your talk. I am curious about like limited edition or limited series podcasts and what your thoughts are on the benefits of just doing a six series podcast or a six episode series or something along those lines. I think it can work really, really well. I think the marketing challenges are a little different when you don't have the momentum, you know, you don't have a long time to build up an audience. So marketing challenges are a little bit different, but on a webinar I did last week, there was a gentleman from a marine science organization in the Northwest who did one, seven episode limited series about saving whales and he said it was way better in terms of getting donations, getting sort of loyalty, people really loving the organization than they had done talks before and other kinds of communications channels and stuff. So I think that if you do it well, and you know, frankly, I am of the mind that any nonprofit, any organization that wants to do a podcast needs to make it of the quality of the other things that you're putting out through your communications channels or better or it's not worth it. If you're gonna, this is not too, I mean, interns are wonderful, but the easy way to say this is don't give it to the intern in the basement and just say go for it because you won't come out with a nice professional compelling show and you don't want that out there in the public because it can actually hurt your reputation. So if you do it well, which apparently this gentleman did, I haven't listened, he sent me the trailer, I haven't had time to listen to it yet. It can really, really work for you. There's no reason not to consider a limited series. Thank you so much, appreciate it. You're welcome. Yes, good afternoon. My name is Patricia Phillips. I'm with the New Jersey Center for Tourette Syndrome. Thank you so much, Ms. Grant, for that presentation, enjoyed that. We're looking to develop a podcast and my question is sort of along the lines of the previous Adriana said it was, what Adriana just said on frequency. Is there any data that shows that monthly podcasts do better than daily podcasts? Anything around that to see in terms of frequency, what works and builds up the most traction? I was wondering. Well, I don't have the data at hand, but in general, the feeling is the more frequently you publish, the more quickly you build an audience because when people subscribe, things are downloaded automatically, so it's fed to you. So I've got, you know, I'm a podcast producer. I love podcasts. I probably have 20 or 30 shows at least on my Apple podcast app. I forget, like, oh, I haven't listened to that for a while. It shows up in my next up queue and I go, oh, you know, I should listen to that podcast. That was good. Whereas, and so the more frequently you put out episodes, the more you're gonna not just generate new audience and grow it, but you're gonna keep your momentum going. I often recommend to people that they produce in seasons. So you do a season of, say, eight, 10, 12 episodes, whatever feels right to you, and then take a break, preferably for not too long because after 45 days there is, there are sort of engines out there that will count your podcast as, quote, unquote, idle, which is also sort of inactive, and you lose some of the audience you built up. So you don't really wanna be absent from the podcast airwaves for more than 45 days. But if you do stuff in seasons, it gives you a chance to catch your breath, plan a new season, maybe change the theme, and it's not so relentless. That doesn't really answer your question about frequency, except for that in general, a daily podcast is gonna do a whole lot better than a monthly podcast, and a weekly podcast is good, a limited series is good. I personally would not go longer than twice a month in between shows. I know a lot of people wanna do monthly podcasts, but it's kind of a tough go. Great advice. April and then Rebecca, and then we have Vanessa. Go ahead, April. Hi. I work with it since human trafficking in Latin America. And so we have a lot of firsthand stories, some of the, we never let the young girls, underage girls, they've never shown on camera, and their story's never given with a picture or their name. But the stories of the women are very compelling, but I'm wondering if this is the, I mean, a podcast, you don't know who's listening to it, you don't know what they're gonna do with it. So I'm thinking, some things we send out to our donors who have been visited our facilities overseas and know us and know the girls, and they would never do anything to hurt the girls. I'm wondering if you think a podcast is a safe place for stories about trafficking victims. And the other thing is, I travel out of the country all the time. So I get back to one country and then I'm going to another country. So I don't have a lot of time in country. And even if I'm not the person that does the podcast, I need to be involved in the, what the people that are here, adult travel, don't have the context with the boots on the ground people. They don't need to speak Spanish. And so I just, I'm wondering if you think in my situation, a podcast would be advisable or not. That's a wonderful question because, the ethics extends in many different ways to the people who are on our shows, whether they're guests or sources. And one of them is privacy and safety. There are a few different answers to that question. The first one is, and this is true for everybody, what are your goals? Like what is it you want to achieve by making this podcast in the first place? Are you trying to find more donors? Are you trying to find more volunteers? Are you trying to get more funding? Are you trying to get more publicity? You really need to identify, and you can have more than one goal, of course, but I find that if you don't know what your strategic goal is in the beginning, it's hard to know how, not just what to make, but how to market it. Now you all have, presumably, you all have a great benefit, which is your email list, your list of donors. You have people who already like your nonprofit. So that's the first place to market a show. In your case, there's a couple different answers, as I said. One is that there are podcasts listening platforms that are designed to be private. They might be for employees only, or other private platforms, memberships and things like that. And we actually keep meaning to do the research because I've wanted to do actually one just for our course. And we've had other people who want to do employee-only podcasts. So you might want to consider that, depending on what your strategic goals are. Now, if you're trying to reach the public, then what I would do is, first of all, you want to get releases from these guests. I don't always, I don't counsel releases all the time, but when it's- Many of the women I work with don't read and write, and they have no idea what a podcast is. They're never going to leave the country that they live in. They have a house with a dirt floor. They may have a radio, but they certainly don't have a computer. So it's tricky. When we've made videos of the work before, and the guy producing the video wanted me to get signed releases, I said, well, she doesn't know how to read. She doesn't know how to write. How can she sign a release? I wouldn't worry about it then too much. Yeah, you asked them. I wouldn't worry about it too much. But in the cases where it's possible, it can be useful. I have almost never used a release form, but it's a situation. Obviously don't use their names. Don't give away their location. Do everything you can to keep them safe. And you might listen to a podcast called Seeking Peace. It comes from the Georgetown Institute of Women's Security. I can never repeat it. It's a really long name, but look up Seeking Peace. And that podcast is also in the TechSoup blog post that I wrote. Either Aretha or Tina, can you put that link into the chat? Can you find it? We will. Elaine, we have two more people. I promise them, because I called their name, then I would let them ask their question. So I'm gonna let you know. If you want to email me, Vanessa. Yeah. You can go ahead and meet yourself. Great. I'm sorry. Who is next? Vanessa? Rebecca. Rebecca and then Vanessa. Oh, Rebecca. Hello, thank you. I'm Rebecca from Telling Queer History. And I am the only employee. I have one more person who does like 10 hours a week for marketing. We have archives of first person stories from our queer community. So one question is, how do I fund it? Because creating a podcast is beyond the capacity that I have physically and mentally right now. Sonya said Justin's around that. And then if you have any tips around accessibility, we do have a few deaf community followers. So we have ways to translate that for folks. Excellent questions. Funding is an interesting one. There are probably way more funding sources out there than I am aware of. And I think they're growing all the time. I had an interesting conversation with, oh, so there's an association called the Association for Independence in Radio, or AIR. And I was speaking with the executive director the other day. And they get frequent inquiries from big foundations. I think Knight, Ford, I'm not sure who else, saying to AIR, do you have any resources for nonprofits, for my grantees? And so these foundations that already have grantees are looking for resources to help them start podcasts. That tells me that it's coming now from the top down and not just from the bottom up, like people like you looking for grants, but look for arts grants, look for humanities grants, look for history grants, look for grants that are specifically for your audience for the queer community. They're definitely out there because there's a huge push to get more diverse voices out. And the fact that you already have oral history tape is enormous, that is enormous. And so I would look for a decent-sized grant and find a podcast producer who is capable of doing this with your input. Did I answer that was your question? Is there a source of funding? Was there a second part to your question? Yeah, if you had any ideas about accessibility. Yeah, transcripts are very, very common. And I urge everybody to put transcripts on your website. By the way, I don't mean don't put your podcast on your website. You should put podcasts on your website. Just don't stop there. And make sure you publish a transcript. There's plenty of transcription technology out there like Trent and Rev and so forth that will do it in minutes. And then all you have to do is just clean up the errors that they don't get. All right, last question, Vanessa. Hello, my name is Vanessa Bright and my organization focuses on working with people coming out of a incarceration. You sort of answered my question, but do you work with for profit also or you just work with the nonprofit? No, we'll work with for profits. Okay, and I have a few different ideas of things that I wanted to do. And so do you think that will work with the seasons or I should have multiple podcasts? Well, those are a couple of different questions. We, and it's a little complicated to answer. If anybody has a burning question and we don't have time to answer it here, feel free to email us. It's allies at podcast allies.com. That's the easiest one to remember. It's also in the slide deck and Aretha will be sending you to our website where our contact information is as well. And I'll do my best to answer as many questions as I can. So seasons, themes, the simplest way for me to answer that is that you wanna go through a strategic editorial process before you start to produce anything. And we have a process for that. We call it vision casting. We do it in a couple of different ways. There's an online course. There's a team in-person or virtual thing that you can do and there's a workbook. And basically it takes you through why, what's the message that you are trying to get out? There's two whys, your own message and what's your strategic objective? What is this going to do for you or your organization? What do you want it to do? You're gonna get clear on that. You need to get clear on who exactly your target listener is or target listeners. Some of you may have several different kinds of stakeholders, but you wanna have a primary one. And it helps you then take some of this highly conceptual information and bring it down to the packaged level where you're saying, well, I want this format and I want this frequency and I want this length and it's gonna sound like this and we're gonna brainstorm some episode, some show titles and taglines and you're gonna get a blueprint of this before you ever go out and buy equipment or start recording. I urge you to do that. It's really how you get a solid and creative foundation for whatever you're gonna do going forward. And my last question was how did you do the polling questions? There's a poll link on Zoom. Oh, it's part of Zoom. Yeah, it's part of Zoom. Thank you everybody for, I mean, Elaine, we can listen to you all day. Can you tell? Because we've definitely gone over so we can listen to you all day. Thank you everybody for being here today. Elaine especially and Tina in the background. Wow, thank you so much, Elaine. I know you poured out your heart today and gave more than you expected. So please reach out to Elaine. Please reach out to Elaine, everybody and make sure you take care of yourself as you're taking care of everybody else. Bye-bye.