Community Engagement Podcasts

What is a community engagement podcast?

A community engagement podcast is an audio or video series designed to connect you with an existing community and then grow the community through the combination of a regular podcast with other forms of social media outreach.

It’s their show.

You’re not going to talk about yourself or what you do very much, at least not at first.

You’re going to talk about your community, to your community, with your community.

Your first listeners are your fans, and the ones who come back for a third or fourth episode are your superfans, and the objective is to convert more fans into superfans.

They will want to engage with the show because it’s you talking about them.

They’re your followers already, you don’t need to sell them anything, but you need to make them your cheerleaders. They are why your brand or organization exists. It’s their show, and you’re the facilitator. You bring them things they care about and demonstrate that you understand them, and they’re going to tell the world how wonderful you are.

Take care of your listeners and they’ll take care of you.

Launch event? They’ll show up. Volunteer drive? They’ll organize it for you. New product drop? They’ll wait in line before the stores open. Not sure how a change is going to play in the community? They’re your focus group. It’s an interesting relationship you can develop. To most of them, you speak directly into their ears every week. It’s quite intimate really. And in our disconnected world, personal is extremely powerful.

So, when do you hype? When do you get to promote?

When do you get to talk about your organization, mission, products, or services? You talk about them when your community starts asking questions about them.

You’re going to have open communication channels to these listeners, responding diligently but selectively to authentic questions with authentic answers, good humor, and great care.

That’s how you solidify and grow an audience base, and that’s how you win hearts, minds, and larger credit card transactions.

Utilizing a multi-platform strategy

Ideally, a community engagement series, or any podcast really, should be part of a multi-platform strategy involving using written blog content for SEO, reinforcing with imagery, an email newsletter, direct engagement over social media utilizing video content, and integrated analytics.

An audio podcast is a part of a system that is proven to drive personal engagement from aligned customers and value-sharing supporters, yielding significant measurable increases in community support and brand loyalty. If all of that sounds a bit too complicated, don’t worry, we can help.

Do community engagement podcasts work differently for commercial brands and nonprofits?

They’re surprisingly similar. Both can use promises of exclusive bonus content to drive revenue, for instance. A non-profit might offer its members an extra episode per month as an incentive to start or retain membership. A brand can charge a fee for bonus content to subscribers or simply require that the followers sign up for a mailing list to access it.

Engagement Podcasts For Brands

A brand can use a podcast to connect with top customers and avid fans. If you know what excites your most loyal customers, you know what to make a podcast about if you want to strengthen those relationships and give your most loyal fans a way to share with their friends and colleagues what they love most about your brand.

Due to the time and resource investment involved in launching these sorts of projects, we don’t usually recommend them for independent consultants, startups, or small businesses, you would use a community engagement podcast to drive some product or service at a larger scale, like a chain or established CPG or service brand.

If you’re a consultant, startup, or small business, look more toward our [Branded Podcast] and [Sponsored Content] services for the best ROI at a lower budget.

Engagement Podcasts For Nonprofits

A podcast can be the anchor of your entire fundraising campaign for a charity or foundation. And it’s not tied to a location or time of year, it’s versatile and mobile. You can use a podcast to engage with your supporters all year round.

When you host an event and are looking for entertainment, take 15 minutes and interview someone on-stage. Use the recording of your own podcast as part of the show, promoting the podcast and allowing everyone present to feel more connected to it.

Using transcripts and audiograms, the podcast not only allows you to engage with leaders in the community, but you can then repurpose excerpts of the content generated for blogs, newsletters, advertising, and social media messaging. Your problem will no longer be finding content to promote every week, but figuring out which content to promote because you have so much.

In the final analysis, to stay on mission, you know your nonprofit needs to thrive and grow like any business, so it needs to be run like one. A great podcast, with the kind of strategic business advice we bring to the table, can help your members and donors feel exponentially more connected to your organization and mission.

High-End Podcast Production Services

MouthMedia Network makes podcasts for businesses. Our priority is your business development. We employ veteran podcast producers, talented audio engineers, and state-of-the-art platforms and equipment to ensure that your brand and community are protected, celebrated, and well-served through every episode of your podcast.

What is the key consideration when podcasting to a community?

Patience.

Creating a podcast for your organization or brand can be part of an extremely powerful and effective overall engagement strategy, but it does take time. Like any serious public relations plan, you’re looking at a commitment of 6 months at minimum to see measurable returns on the work we will have to put in to connect with and grow the audience, and a year or more to start to see the full benefits.

The return is usually worth the investment, but you really get out of these sorts of projects what you put into them, and the podcast usually cannot do the job alone. It requires a larger public relations strategy to connect with listeners interactively. We can help you with that.

Drop your email address in the box below and we can give you some examples of how this thinking has worked out in the past, both for our niche podcasts and some of the biggest podcasts of all time.