There are hundreds of millions of podcast listeners. Chances are some are in your non profits audience. Beyond tweeting and Facebook posting, your non profit should have some long-form ways of reaching your audience. You can have an audience who will listen to you and just you for 30 minutes (versus watching a 3 minute video or spending 5 minutes reading a blog article). There is a renaissance of sorts in the podcast world and though it may seem a bit crowded, there is certainly opportunity for a non profit with good content to break in.
It doesn’t have to take much effort to launch. It may even be a good project to give to a volunteer or intern, one that takes a lot of initiative and commitment, but with a bit of oversight and passion, it is certainly possible.
This is not a comprehensive guide, but here are the steps you need to launch, with tips along the way:
- Define your target audience and decide on a compelling topic. It could be tips for others in your non profit space, evaluating new technology, industry news or just interviews of volunteers. Put a lot of thought into it and sketch out a few episodes. Search for similar topics to get ideas.
- Order a microphone. Audio quality is key and if you only make one investment, get a microphone (or borrow one – perhaps the local tv station could let you borrow one). I use the Blue Snowball (about 50$) and it is great, but there are others for more or less. Check out Amazon for your price range.
- Decide on how to brand it. You will need cover art (1400 by 1400 which you can use canva to create) to get onto iTunes. Make sure you optimize the description – you want to get on new and noteworthy on iTunes (possible in the first 8 weeks).
- Record your first two episodes (also record a 3 minute introduction to the show). Record it into garageband if you have a mac (or a free program called audacity). You can search royalty free music and find some to add to the outro or intro (and/or having a soft song playing while you are speaking). It is great to have another voice on there to introduce you, but not needed.
- Submit it to iTunes. If you are on WordPress, the Seriously Simple Podcasting makes life ridiculously easy for podcasts. They have an excellent guide for submitting it to iTunes (it will take a day or two to approve). If you are not on wordpress, Apple has a great podcast guide. Keep in mind you want to put it on stitcher eventually as well.
- Itunes does not give analytics, but you can get a free account at blubrry. Not if you are getting a lot of downloads, you do not want to have it hosted on your site and should move it elsewhere and blubrry can also host it for you.
- Promote it like crazy over all your channels. Make sure to ask supporters for reviews and subscribes and it will show up much better in iTunes.
That’s all. See, it’s easy. And very much worth it. Once you get it going, you may even get enough listeners to get advertisers and create another revenue stream for your non profit. you enjoy talking about your non profit.
Pro tip – If you are very serious about launching like an expert, consider giving this podcast a listen: how to start a podcast from Entrepreneur on Fire.