So You Wanna Start A Podcast with Emily Shaw and Bridget Conley – Transcript
Kirk: [00:00:00] Welcome to Let’s Hear It. Let’s Hear It is a podcast for and about the field of foundation and nonprofit communications, produced by its two co-hosts, Eric Brown and Kirk Brown, no relation. Well said, Eric. And I’m Kirk.
Eric: And I’m Eric. Let’s Hear It is sponsored by the Prebys Foundation, a foundation creating an inclusive, equitable, and dynamic future for all San Diegans.
Check out their amazingly good podcast, Stop and Talk, hosted by Grant Oliphant and Crystal Page. You can find them at stopandtalkpodcast.com.
Kirk: You can find Let’s Hear It on any podcast subscription platform.
Eric: You can find us online at letshearitcast.com.
Kirk: And if you like the show, please, please, please rate us on Apple Podcasts so that more people can find us. Let’s get onto the show. Okay, so as you know, I love you very much.
Eric: No, you don’t. If you loved me, you wouldn’t make me do a podcast.
Kirk: I was gonna say, what I love best about you—
Eric: Don’t love me.
Kirk: Hate me. …is how much you hate this podcast. It just comes [00:01:00] dripping off of you when you start this introduction. It’s just unbelievable.
Eric: This podcast is a labor of hate. I’ve said it. I’ve been saying it for seven years, and I’ve never hated it more.
Kirk: Yeah, and then this conversation just speaks to why this is so great. You’re doing such good work here. You should be so thankful.
Eric: No, no, no, no, no. What they’re doing is great.
Kirk: It’s true. It’s true.
Eric: What we’re doing is stupid.
Kirk: I disagree. There’s so much stuff to talk about here. This is so good. Let’s talk about it. You do your thing. Do your thing. Tell us what’s happening, and then we’ll come right back.
Eric: What’s my thing? I have no thing.
Kirk: You’re gonna say what’s about to happen. This is such a good conversation. You know what I am? And by the way, nice to finally talk to somebody who knows what the hell they’re doing too on this podcast.
Eric: Good point. I know, exactly. What I am is a vessel for your hopes and dreams, Tom Sawyer.
Kirk: Yes, thank you.
Eric: I am nothing.
Kirk: Thank you. You’re—
Eric: —very welcome. Today… I [00:02:00] spoke with Bridget Conley—
Kirk: Yes…
Eric: —who’s the research director at the World Peace Foundation, and Emily Shaw, who is, heaven forefend—
Kirk: Uh…
Eric: —a podcast producer.
Kirk: Yes, indeed.
Eric: And together, they created the podcast Disrupting Peace.
Kirk: How good of a title is that, by the way? Disrupting Peace? Come on. This is so good. Go, go ahead.
Eric: It’s a good title, unlike—
Kirk: Go ahead. No, come on. This is great. Okay, go.
Eric: —another title I can think of.
Kirk: Keep going. Keep going. It’s good. This is really good. Anyway.
Eric: These are people who work together. They like to do podcasts.
Kirk: And they like each other.
Eric: And they’ve got—
Kirk: —good rapport—
Eric: —and they like each other.
Kirk: Exactly. It’s a really good interview. Anyway, sorry, go ahead.
Eric: It’s like yin yang.
Kirk: Yes. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly.
Eric: I talk to them about their podcast, what it is to create it, what they wanna achieve, their hopes and dreams, all that other stuff, and I thought it was a really interesting conversation, and I think it’s really nice to present to the world people who enjoy doing a podcast [00:03:00] together.
Kirk: Finally. For a change. For a change. For a change. So go find these folks. So Emily Shaw, you’ll find Emily at @emilyshawcreates, and Emily has a very long and luminary pedigree of having done a lot of really cool, great work. And then—
Eric: A luminary pedigree.
Kirk: Right? I don’t know. Is that right?
Eric: I’m impressed.
Kirk: But then go find the World Peace Foundation, Bridget Conley, and I love the fact that the research director at the World Peace Foundation said, “Hey, let’s do a podcast.” You talk about this in the interview. So this is Emily and Bridget from Disrupting Peace on Let’s Hear It. Let’s listen to this conversation, and then we will come back, and we have a lot to talk about.
Eric: I have nothing to say to you.
Kirk: Let’s hear from Disrupting Peace on Let’s Hear It.
Eric: This podcast exists because my friend Kirk Brown had a very, very stupid idea, that he and I would start a podcast about foundation and nonprofit communications, and that anyone would care. I would do all the work, and he would rest on [00:04:00] his laurels. That’s how we divided the time. Seven years later, this is still an incredibly stupid idea, but whatever. Here we are.
Now, my guests today, Emily Shaw and Bridget Conley, started the podcast Disrupting Peace because Bridget had a good idea: take on the question of why peace hasn’t worked, and find ways to address those challenges.
Bridget is the research director at the World Peace Foundation. Emily is the crack producer who helped her build the show. Now, organizations are always looking for new ways to use communications to advance their mission, and sooner or later the question comes up, “Should we start a podcast?” So this episode is for every foundation and nonprofit and consultant and whatever out there sitting on a podcast idea wondering if it’s worth doing.
Emily and Bridget will get into it about what it actually takes to go from idea to launch, the costs, the formats, the decisions, the strategies, all that kind of stuff, and what they’ve learned along the way. Emily Shaw and Bridget Conley, thank you [00:05:00] so much for coming on the show.
Bridget: We are so happy to be here.
Emily: Thanks for having us. And we’re usually on the other side.
Eric: I know, it’s a leg. So this is twisting my brain. Well, here we go. We’re gonna dive right in. So the folks get a chance to know a little bit about you, Bridget, just tell me about the World Peace Foundation.
Bridget: Okay. So the World Peace Foundation was created in 1910. So it is an old organization. It’s been independent, it has its own money. A very wealthy publisher of educational text was the man who founded it, Edwin Ginn. And it was a distributor of League of Nations materials. It’s been at different universities, and over the years, since 2011, we’ve been located at the Fletcher School, which is at Tufts University.
And our programming all comes from that original endowment, and then we hire up when we have big projects and pull in other resources.
Eric: Okay. Emily, let’s learn a little bit about you. You’ve been producing podcasts [00:06:00] for almost a decade, so you’re like in whatever.
Emily: Over a decade.
Eric: Over a decade. Over a decade now. Okay, I’m sorry, so OG. How did you get into that work? That seems like kind of a, I don’t know, it’s an interesting profession.
Emily: I’m probably the only person that has this story, which is that I was studying Vietnamese intensively, and I had studied abroad there and just really fell in love with learning the language, and I went back to Vietnam to do an oral history project.
And really, the purpose of that was just to improve my language skills. So I was like, “Oh, if I record people actually telling their stories, it would be really cool to capture their stories. But also I’ll just have a recording of someone actually speaking real Vietnamese, and I can listen back to that and get better at Vietnamese.”
But there was just something so powerful about recording people’s stories, especially in audio, because people really forget that the recorder is there. Like, I totally fell in love with it, but I didn’t have any idea what that could look like as a career. So a few years passed, and I talked to a friend of mine who had a recording studio. We had gone to school [00:07:00] together. And he had the idea of me making a podcast interviewing musicians who record at the recording studio. And it’s a very quirky studio, so it has this inflatable boat filled with pillows and twinkly lights.
Eric: Oh, I have one of those.
Emily: And one of the musicians that I was gonna interview, the first person, actually decided to record her album in the boat. It was a very intimate album. This is Justine Lucas. We can share the episode in the show notes if you’d like. But anyway, from that I had the idea. I was like, “Oh, what if I interviewed the musicians in the boat?” And so it ended up being just this very intimate look at the creative process. So I would record an hour and a half conversation and cut it down to eight minutes.
Eric: Whoa, okay.
Emily: And I would use their music as sound design and just create this audio portrait of the band. And so that was my first personal project. And I had various day jobs. Like, I was the first employee at a tiny mobile app startup, and was always making audio on the side. And then ever since 2018, I’ve only been doing audio as my full-time job.
Eric: Fun.
Emily: Yeah.
Eric: [00:08:00] So you like doing podcasts?
Emily: Yes.
Eric: All right. So that’s where you and I differ. But okay. So all right. Let’s get into the nominal purpose of this episode about why you would wanna start a podcast. Bridget, let me turn to you first. First of all, you’re not a comms person per se, you’re a research director.
Bridget: Exactly. Right? Yep.
Eric: Okay. So that seems kinda odd ’cause it’s usually the comms people who’s like, “Well, let’s do a podcast. Let’s do tactics.” But you’re a researcher. A, did you wanna start a podcast, and if so, why?
Bridget: Okay. Yes, I did wanna start a podcast. I used to host one at my previous job. I worked at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in DC and I hosted one called Voices on Genocide Prevention. But the reason that we wanted to start one at World Peace Foundation is because, in the first instance, we’re very small.
So there are three permanent staff with a mandate to do [00:09:00] research that supports world peace. A little bit of a misalignment of resources and challenges. We haven’t succeeded yet, so we wanted a way where we could address more issues than we do with our in-depth research projects. Like a proper research project can take two to three years or even more to build up new research and then to go through the process of writing and editing.
And so we wanted to be able to address a wider range of issues. The other one is that the policy landscape is changing, right? There’s a qualitative need, I think and we thought, to shift who we’re talking to. And so for a long time, especially around issues around peace and conflict post-1990, you get this big shift.
There’s this peace dividend at the end of the Cold War and there were real investments in peace, all sorts of new policy offices opening, efforts to create international legal tribunals, more money for research, more [00:10:00] money for development across the board. So the policy model was: do your research, go to the office or the key people who are working on those topics, and then you give them policy guidance and hopefully that shifts policy one way or another.
Obviously that’s very, very simplified, but that’s roughly what it was like. What we’re seeing, and it’s not only in the Trump administration, but in previous ones as well, we’re seeing a big shift in how people think about the ways that we bring about peace. And one of the challenges is that model that was much more expert-to-policymaker left the general public behind in a lot of ways.
And so when cuts came, there’s no strong constituency to support, and you can’t go to the office, right? There’s not an office anymore that you go knock on the door and say like, “Hey, I’ve got ideas for peace.” So there’s a lot of people in my industry, my field, [00:11:00] who are rethinking their theories of change, and one of them is to try to help the general public better understand what’s been done and what still needs to be done to advance the cause of ending conflicts, but also building sustainable peace.
Emily: Why peace hasn’t worked and how it still could.
Bridget: Which is the show’s—
Emily: —one-liner for the show.
Bridget: Exactly. Exactly.
Eric: Okay, so let’s just stipulate that this is a good tactic, right?
Emily: Uh-oh.
Eric: That this is a good way—
Bridget: You’ll give us that leap.
Emily: Jared, don’t talk Bridget out of doing the podcast.
Eric: Okay, so we’ve decided that this is a useful way to get out into the marketplace of ideas beyond the fairly circumscribed walls of policy. So you’re gonna start this podcast. What did you do? How did you think about creating it, what its format would be, who you were going to work with? When did you bring Emily in? Walk us through this [00:12:00] process of thinking.
Bridget: Yeah, so because I’d done a podcast before at a bigger institution where we had incredible tech expertise, I knew that we could not do it at high quality on our own.
Eric: Hmm.
Bridget: So I knew we would need help, and then I did a scan of who’s already out there doing work in the foreign policy arena and around peace, and there are a few really good podcasts, but there are also a lot that were using sort of found audio, and so the quality was not super.
There are also a lot of bros talking about foreign policy the same way they talk about everything else on these types of platforms. So as we started thinking about, okay, what’s the tone? What’s the approach? And then I started looking for a partner who had expertise in podcast production, and I just started Googling. I mean, literally just started Googling, looking for podcast producers. And we talked with a couple different [00:13:00] people, and some of them had really strong expertise on policy issues, but one of the reasons that we ended up working with Emily is that she—
Emily: —is because I don’t.
Bridget: —is because she doesn’t. I’m gonna…
Eric: There’s something to be said for the Buddhist’s beginner’s mind, I think. But sure, go on.
Bridget: Actually, there is. But the other thing is, we would like this podcast to speak to people who are generally smart, read the news, but they don’t consider themselves experts on these areas. And so Emily’s not just a producer, she’s also an audience advocate.
Eric: Mm.
Bridget: Right? Someone who can listen to a podcast episode where experts are going on and on, and have, I would call it the courage, Emily, you might say something else, but to ask the simple questions. And oftentimes the simple questions like, “Hey, why didn’t that work?” Or, you know, like, “What was that supposed to change?” Those questions are often [00:14:00] brilliant, and they change the conversation. So she does that. And then the second thing is that—
Emily: —but my voice isn’t in the podcast, so it’s a secret. So at the end—
Bridget: A secret voice.
Emily: —we’re asking pickups, or I’m asking Bridget to ask the question, just to clarify.
Eric: Jiminy Cricket on your shoulder.
Bridget: Yeah. We spend a lot of time working together before and during the interviews, and then after. But the other really important thing that Emily does is she just says, “So let’s say I’m listening. What should I do?” Podcast ends. Great. You guys are really smart. You know your stuff. Bravo to you. But what does this mean for me as a listener? And that’s been a really important part of the show, and it’s one that I didn’t bring, ’cause we’ll often, when you understand complexity—
Eric: Mm…
Bridget: —a lot of times you’re like, “It’s very complicated.”
Eric: That’s the way to make your audience feel really smart, right?
Bridget: Yeah.
Eric: It’s really complicated. You’re not gonna understand.
Bridget: You’re not gonna understand. Or there’s nothing you can do because it’s all so complicated. Right. And it’s like, okay, fine, all of that aside, let’s do something.
Emily: Mm-hmm.
Eric: Yeah.
Bridget: Emily, does that sound about [00:15:00] right to you?
Emily: Yeah. And that’s actually a need that I hope the show is filling, is that there is a lot of media out there and there is a lot of coverage of a lot of challenging issues related to conflict and peace in the world, but they leave you feeling really depressed a lot of the time. And so something in the show that we’re trying to do is to include some of the difficult information, of course, but also give people really clear steps of what they can do.
And then every episode ends with collective dreaming. And so that’s a part of the show where it’s like painting a picture of what it actually would look like to bring things closer to peace. In season one we said, “It’s the year X, we’ve achieved world peace. How did we get there?” Since then we’ve gotten a little bit more modest. But we’re still trying to, I think it is really important to actually imagine what it would look like to make things better.
Eric: So I’m gonna go back a little bit to you, Emily. When an organization comes to you, particularly an organization… our audience are nonprofit foundations [00:16:00] and the world around them. But let’s say an organization comes to you and is like, “Ooh, we wanna start a podcast,” what are the questions that you ask first? How do you figure out how to help them think through whether it’s a good idea, and if so, how they should do it?
Emily: I mean, I think one question is, why do you wanna make a podcast? It’s a simple question, but it’s actually really important. So if we’re talking about nonprofits, the organization is achieving their mission or working towards their mission through a podcast. So usually their mission has something to do with educating and informing people, and using storytelling to help people feel inspired, more knowledgeable about the issues, and take action.
Eric: What were those early stages of creating this podcast like? What were the questions that you asked Bridget, and how did she answer them? And Bridget, how did you work with Emily to come up with what you landed on? Just help me understand what that process was like.
Emily: So I asked them, why do you wanna make a show? [00:17:00] Do you have any ideas for the show? What is unique about the DNA of your organization? Tell me about your competitors. How do you wanna differentiate yourself from them? What are other podcasts, like competitive podcasts, in the space? What do you feel is missing? Who are potential hosts for the show? What is the secret sauce that they would bring to this?
Maybe the most important thing is who is your target audience? And so primary audience, describe them in as much detail as you can. Secondary audience. What’s the rough sense of your budget for the show? And who are your internal resources? Internal and external resources. Like who are the people on your team? How much time do they have that they could work on this? What are other resources to be aware of maybe outside of your organization that could support the show, too? So those are some of the things we look at.
One thing that was great about Bridget is that she had really strong opinions about podcasts. She clearly had listened to a lot of podcasts, really didn’t like things about a lot of podcasts in the space. Like she felt like they were just [00:18:00] talking heads. She felt like they were boring. She felt like the audio quality was low. And she already had a lot of great ideas, and so it’s been a very, very, very collaborative process. It’s basically like a writer’s room when we’re working together.
Eric: That’s fun.
Emily: Yeah, so that’s something that’s really fun about this project.
Eric: All right. Right before we go to the break, Bridget, I’ll give you like just a minute or two to give us the 10-cent tour of those early days of thinking about the podcast.
Bridget: Yeah. I remember Emily asked me for examples of podcasts that I like, and all of them were super long-form. Like hour-and-a-half interviews with people. But some of the ones I like, I think tone was what we got right first.
Emily: Mm-hmm.
Bridget: And then Emily and I started brainstorming. We had a long session, and then we came up with like, “Okay, we want two voices. We want researchers and we want activists,” because we wanna both say, “What have we learned and how do we keep doing things? How do we keep this ball moving?” And I think that and the [00:19:00] tone were probably the hardest things to pin down. But once we had those, and I’ll say we’ve learned a lot, too. So over the years it’s changed a bit.
But I think those were the two big keys. One other key for us is that we are small.
Emily: Yes.
Bridget: Right? I mentioned that already, but we’re a small organization, but that also means we have a lot more freedom. And so one of the great parts of working with Emily, who has a broader background of commercial but also creative, is when you bring on someone, for me, if you bring on any contractor and you’re paying them to do work, figure out why you’re bringing them on and then lean into it, you know?
Emily: Mm-hmm.
Bridget: Like, if you’re bringing someone on because they understand a general audience, then let them guide you on that. In the same way, if you bring on a website designer and they’re a brilliant designer, tell them what you need and then back off. Right?
Eric: So you’re saying you should listen to your consultants?
Bridget: Yeah, I know. It’s crazy.
Eric: Oh my God. While I recover from that, we’re gonna take a very quick break. We’ll be back with Bridget Conley and Emily Shaw right [00:20:00] after this.
Kirk: You’re listening to Let’s Hear It, a podcast about foundation and nonprofit communications hosted by Eric—
Eric: —Brown and Kirk Brown. If you’re enjoying this episode, you may just be a rule breaker. Check out season three of Break Fake Rules with Glen Galaich, CEO of the Stupski Foundation, as he chats with inspiring leaders in philanthropy, government, media, and more about breaking the fake rules that don’t work so that we can build a future that does. Check them out wherever you get your podcasts.
And now, back to the show.
And we are back with Bridget Conley and Emily Shaw. So you wanna start a podcast, huh? Well, these folks actually did it, and they have a fabulous podcast called Disrupting Peace. Let’s get deeper into this. For you, Bridget, was there a moment when you realized that this thing was working and that you were getting back at least what you put into it?
Bridget: The model that we came up with, the very first episode that we did, [00:21:00] I was like, “Ah, this might work.” And that one, we had a researcher, a guy named Sam Moyn, who’s done fantastic work. You know, he’s done work on what’s happened since the 1990s and political change, and then we had an activist—
Emily: Well, didn’t he work for an administration, like a presidential administration?
Bridget: He might have worked with Clinton at one point.
Emily: And he was, like, the bombing, bombing for peace.
Bridget: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, ’cause he was talking about Kosovo. And then he’s like, “And then I stopped drinking the Kool-Aid.” And then we had on a woman who was very young, South African, in 1994, when it stopped being an apartheid state, so that was the year Nelson Mandela was elected.
And then over her lifetime, so the same period in which Sam and I, who now have a lot of gray, are working, doing research in the field, that’s the span of her life, and she talked about what it was like to become an activist in this new post-apartheid South Africa, and what are the justice issues and the economic issues and the rights issues that remain.
And so it was just super exciting to [00:22:00] have those two long perspectives from different generations, and I think that’s really important. I always try, we’ve tried, across all the episodes, to get in older, more established people and also younger voices. Episode one, I thought, captured the model, but what we’ve done since has shifted it.
Like, we’re not very far from it, but we have shifted, and I am super excited about the season that we’re in production for now, and I think this one is gonna really gel. Like, it’s a much more serious one, but I think we still keep that uplift. But we’re working with long-term partners of our organization, and I just think it’s really, really exciting.
Eric: It sounds to me like you actually learn stuff as you go. And I don’t mean to be flip, but the act of talking to people, you hear of new ideas and new voices and things like that. So this is not just your platform to tell the world about the World Peace Foundation, that it’s like this one-to-many [00:23:00] tool, that it is a way for you to bring other voices in and to learn from them as you go. Is that fair to say?
Bridget: Yes, you could say that. It’s absolutely clear. So it is not primarily a communications broadcast model. It’s actually a substantive project, right?
Eric: Got it.
Bridget: So it’s been super fun for me. It’s not icing on the cake. There’s real substance here, and I’m learning along the way.
Eric: Emily, can you walk us through the nuts and bolts of launching a podcast? Give us some ranges about what it might cost for different sized organizations, the kinds of resources that folks might need, the questions that they need to ask that are not just strategic, but are, I don’t know, instrumental.
Emily: So I would say that to start a show and have it be high quality and have an organization get value out of it, I recommend having a budget between, like, 50 to 100K for the first season.
And so that would include creative development, coming up with a concept for the show. That could include [00:24:00] marketing. You do need to invest something in marketing to promote the show and get it in front of people. So that’s kind of like a ballpark that I give people. If your budget is 15K, like it might not be worth it. You know what I mean? You might want to invest more in guesting on shows, which I think is actually a really great avenue for folks that want to get their message out there. That’s totally free.
And then in terms of the nuts and bolts and process, I think that creative development stage is really, really, really important. That’s where you get the North Star. You could say the North Star of our show is why peace hasn’t worked and how it still could. So any time we’re feeling confused about what to focus on, we come back to that. And then every episode has a North Star. And so I think just having that focus, why are we doing this, it’s really, really important to know what audience you’re trying to reach, right?
‘Cause there’s so many different types of people with different levels of expertise. So if you’re trying to reach a more general audience, you’re gonna want to explain things. If you know that everyone who’s listening is gonna be an expert, then you [00:25:00] don’t need to explain, right? One thing to look out for is when experts are talking to other experts, they tend to get really experty.
And they tend to use a lot of jargon. And so that’s why it can be really helpful to have a producer. Like, if you’re trying to reach a more general audience, maybe the host is not an expert in a particular thing, so they’re asking the guest, or maybe they’re co-hosts and one of them is an expert and one of them is not.
You know, ways to just naturally have people explain things. Also, having a producer that’s not as knowledgeable. People just change the way they talk depending on who they’re talking to. So that’s something to keep in mind. So you do creative development. You get that really clear one-liner for the show, title for the show, and then come up with that idea of the arc of the first season.
Who are the potential guests that you might wanna be talking to? What do you want each episode to contribute? And then you start researching the guests and creating questions for the interviews, do the interview, then post-production. Like, for this show, we have an hour and a half [00:26:00] for each interview. Ideally, we usually try to get the tech set up before that. So that’s, like, recording from the start. Bridget, we aim for her to ask questions for an hour, and then that last half hour is for me to ask Bridget to ask follow-up questions or for me to ask follow-up questions, but also to transfer the files and things like that.
And so usually we’re cutting down maybe, like, an hour and 15 minutes down to, like, a 25 to 35-minute episode. Longest episode ever I think was 48 minutes. So there’s a lot of editing also that goes into it, and I think that’s actually really important if you want the most compelling show possible. As you know, Eric—
Eric: Yes.
Emily: —you really need to edit. You really need to spend time editing, especially if it’s experts. You know, if it’s a comedy show with people who are comedians and they can just talk and talk, like, that’s one thing.
Bridget: We can talk and talk.
Emily: I know. If the subject matter’s a little bit more dense or difficult to understand, you definitely wanna be able to have a lot of editing.
Bridget: Well, one of the things that I [00:27:00] didn’t appreciate, even though Emily tried to convey it before season one, was how important it is to have, even if it’s a small budget, to have a budget for marketing.
Eric: Uh-huh.
Bridget: And Eric, you probably know this, but we thought we could just use our existing social media platforms. And, you know, we got a couple hundred listens that way. But then once we started spending, I think we spend 2 to 3,000, so it’s not anywhere near a big budget—
Emily: By the way, the marketing person that we spoke to recommended at least 20K to launch a season for marketing, just as a reference.
Bridget: Yeah. So, but even just that amount, we went from a couple hundred to a couple thousand.
Eric: And where do you market? What platforms?
Bridget: We have done a range of things. We did some of the various podcasting platforms that allow for marketing, so Castbox and PlayerFM. We worked with a group that does targeted media on related news [00:28:00] articles, and then they’ll play. And that was, we got really good numbers, but we didn’t get as many people subscribing through that. So then it’s kind of like the ups and downs of those pieces. We keep trying to submit Spotify and Apple Spotlights, and we will continue to do that. But those were some of the big ones, yeah.
Eric: Was there a moment on the show… Now, you already talked about a great interview that you had that was kind of a revelation, but was there a moment when you realized that something came back that I didn’t expect, that a listener got back in touch with you, like there’s a moment that’s like, “Oh, boy, oh, boy, I didn’t see that coming.”
Bridget: Yeah. The one is, the most listened-to episodes are not the ones necessarily that I would have put or I would have bet on. So we had one season on taking the first steps towards peace, and so we looked at everything from like children in conflict zones to Gen Z comes of age and politics. But one that we saved, this is still our most listened-to episode, is [00:29:00] called Why Listening is the First Step to Peace.
And so we had a scholar who works on what he calls generous listening, and then we had an activist, a woman, both of them are colleagues at Tufts, who hosts small group sessions around improving people’s capacity to listen to each other. Floored me. There was another one on, we had two guys who are both activists and scholars. They’re from Syria, and then they left and went to Holland to pursue graduate work during the war, and we had them on for an episode on how do you rebuild after a dictator is toppled.
Emily: Asking for a friend.
Bridget: Super. So those were ones that… And you never really know, is it the topic? Is it their networks were really activated? Is it going to, you know, something happens in the news the week that you release an episode. So it’s hard to know.
One of the things that I think is [00:30:00] weird about podcasts as well is how bad the algorithms are. Like, it’s so hard to find good podcasts on a topic you care about. And so that’s just weird, so just note to you guys in your profession.
Emily: Yeah, we’re working on it. Improve the algorithms. I mean, I think that’s why video podcasts have really taken off, is because the algorithm on YouTube does make discovery a lot easier.
Eric: Emily, what’s the biggest mistake that you see organizations make?
Emily: I would say number one is thinking about what they wanna say and not what their audience wants to know. Podcasts are something that someone is choosing to listen to. People have a lot of options. And especially with an audio-only podcast, there’s nowhere to hide.
You don’t have any interesting visuals that someone can keep watching because it’s kind of interesting to look at. People will just turn it off. If they’re not interested, they’re just gonna turn it off. And someone with a communications perspective, it might be, “Oh, these are all the things we wanna say about our organization. These are all the things we wanna say [00:31:00] about what we care about,” and da da da da da. But you need to think, “Who do you wanna reach, and what are they not hearing? What are they looking for, and how can you be solving a problem for them?” So I think that’s most important.
And then I also think that another mistake is thinking of it as kind of an afterthought. Like, “Oh, we have all these Zoom recordings that we do, oh, we did all these panels last year. Like, let’s just turn that into a podcast.” And that could be valuable if people just wanna listen to those. Like, some people, it can be nice just to have a recording of something, but if it’s not gonna be that great quality audio, if there’s no editing to make it more interesting, like, you just can’t assume that that many people are gonna, like, maybe the super fans will listen who are already following you, but if you wanna reach new people, you just can’t assume that they’re gonna listen. So yeah, I think having realistic resources to be able to do the kind of editing and prep is really important.
I think also expecting really quick impact from it. I would say a podcast is more of a slow burn. It’s like [00:32:00] a relationship. People are spending time. If you compare it to social media, someone maybe looks, sees a post or an article, they look at it for half a second, scroll on. Compare that to someone spending 25, 35, 45 or more minutes of their time listening to your voice in their ears.
People do have parasocial relationships, as we all know. I’m sure we all have them with the podcast hosts that we listen to and with the people that are speaking. So people just feel a very strong emotional connection, but that can take time to build that relationship, and I think one of the things we’ve experienced is every season of the show, it does slowly build.
We have more connections. Oh, now we have more people who can interview Bridget, who we can do episode swaps with. Now we have more potential guests that can share the show. I don’t know, it just feels like it builds slowly over time, and so to expect, “Oh, how did episode one do? Oh, did we get a million listens on episode one? No? Okay, we’re gonna shut it down.” I think you need to [00:33:00] expect that it could take some time to get the kind of results that you want, but then it does slowly build over time, and it’s a really high-quality way to connect with people.
Eric: Well, thanks for putting that notion of parasocial relationships in my mind. Now I’m gonna spend a little time thinking about that. In the minute or so we have left, Bridget, what would you say to the nonprofit organization person who’s thinking about this as a strategy?
Bridget: I would say think about the stories you wanna tell first. Does your work have compelling stories? And yes, nonprofits always do.
And how do you get those stories across to an audience? ‘Cause so much of our work, you’ve gotta get the facts down, you’ve got data, you’ve got numbers, you’ve got policy racks, you know, all of that stuff, all these metrics. And we’ve had people on the show as guests, and also for ourselves, it’s something I have to learn and relearn all the time, who wanna talk about the high-end ideas or what they’ve achieved.
You know, the more rote [00:34:00] it is, the less compelling. And so it’s like, how do we keep practicing telling the stories about the meaning behind the work that we do?
Eric: Yeah, no child ever climbed up into their parents’ lap at the end of the day and said, “Mommy, Daddy, tell me some statistics.”
Bridget: Check my nutritional intake today. You know? It doesn’t happen.
Eric: Well, the stories you’re telling are really important and really wonderful, and Disrupting Peace is a terrific podcast.
Bridget: Thank you.
Eric: And I congratulate you for your work. And Emily and Bridget, you clearly have a partnership that works. So it sounds like finding your partner in this work is really important. I just thank you very much for sharing what you’ve learned with folks, and we will put links in the show notes to the podcast and to your work, Emily. Just thank you both for coming on.
Bridget: Thanks for having us.
Emily: Yeah, thank you.
Kirk: And we’re back. I’m ready to accept the apology. You just did an entire podcast about [00:35:00] helping organizations start a podcast because it’s a great idea. So, so lot of directions, lot of directions. But—
Eric: Oh, the only apology I will make, I have two. One, to the listeners out there, and B, to anybody else who’s ever met me, because this is a stupid idea.
Kirk: Well, so The Atlantic just wrote an article a little ways back talking about how our attention span is collapsing, that our capacity to read and synthesize—
Eric: Wait, I’m sorry, what?
Kirk: Exactly. And so—
Eric: I wasn’t paying att—
Kirk: As you went through this interview and you were talking, and we’ll go through all the dimensions, and again, it’s so cool to hear Emily and Bridget talking about this work and how well they do it together and their process for getting there. But as you were asking them to talk about the rationale for a nonprofit, what to think about doing, what are the questions that go into creating a podcast, I was seriously sitting here thinking, in an era where the written word is just [00:36:00] becoming, it’s less than a commodity. AI is turning the world—
Eric: The written word is dead. It doesn’t exist.
Kirk: Yeah, and our attention spans are going with it, and whatever that activity is, whatever that space you’re trying to fill, the proliferation of all of these audio and visual channels blasting at us reflects the fact that we have all this time on our hands that we’re trying to fill with high-quality, life-affirming, and that could be a million different things. It could be funny, it could be wasteful. But it can also be about what? How do you deconstruct and disrupt peace? How do you create more awareness of what peace looks like? I think every organization should seriously be thinking about the audiovisual aspects of their work because we live in a world where social media is collapsing, the written word is collapsing, our attention spans are collapsing.
But, and I love that you were thrown off by this phrase, but we’re all looking for parasocial relationships in a world that gets increasingly lonely and [00:37:00] increasingly isolated. So I think you’re onto something here, Mr. Brown. I think you should have more people who’ve done podcasts on the show. What do you think about that?
Eric: Don’t manipulate me, Kirk.
Kirk: It’s so good.
Eric: Nice try. I think there are lots of ways to communicate, and there are lots of modes of communication. I learn a lot by, I don’t know what you wanna call it, parallel playing. I go for a walk and then I listen to somebody’s podcast. The strange thing is, actually, and I’m sure there’s some science about this, that spatial learning is an actual thing.
Kirk: Mm-hmm.
Eric: So where you are in space can correlate to something that you heard or listened to.
Kirk: Sure.
Eric: And so I think that people can actually take in information better while they’re walking their dog or going for a run or something like that and listening on that other channel. So it’s a tool. It’s a thing. It actually can be a valuable tool. And obviously if people are listening to us, they’re podcast listeners and they’re crazy.
Kirk: [00:38:00] Right.
Eric: So they know—
Kirk: We’re so sorry.
Eric: Yeah, I know. Actually, you know what? We’re probably just getting Bridget and Emily’s listeners a little like, “Oh, this is curious.”
Kirk: That’s right. Let’s hear what Emily and Bridget have to say. That’s right.
Eric: But it is a way to provide information and it is a way to learn in a different way than just sitting there and looking at a computer screen, for example. Or God forbid, you should actually sit in a chair and read a piece of printed material. That’s another way to learn, but it’s—
Kirk: Nobody’s doing it anymore. And then what do you do? You talk about what do you need to bake into your sensibilities for how you’re even gonna start a podcast, you know, and Emily is talking about the different sensibilities people need to bring to that.
But what’s one of the threshold ones? You gotta think about the stories you’re trying to tell. We keep coming back to this question of stories, and not the stories you wanna tell. What’s your audience gonna try to listen to? What are they gonna respond to? And just think about the organizational [00:39:00] practice.
What if you created a podcast within your organization just for your team? Because this notion that, you know, if you’re trying to do communications, you’ve gotta have this audience of bazillions or else it doesn’t matter, that’s actually not true. What’s on offer here is the thought process, the thinking that goes into surfacing, identifying, and putting forward the stories that are gonna resonate with the audiences where they actually are at.
So here we are, this bedrock sensibility about communications. Where’s your audience? Where are they at? What can you say that helps move them? This filter, this lens, this tool, this podcast tool helps you get there in a way that probably is different than any other tactic you could think about, really, when you think about it.
You know, your long-form report, your study, your press release, even your social media feeds, all these different tools and tactics we think about that populate the communication space, they’re all kind of dying, right? In a weird way. I mean, am I taking this too far? I know I am, but I think there’s something really salient here, and then we have to talk about Disrupting Peace and the World Peace Foundation, but what do you think about this?
Eric: I just have a question for you, Kirk.
Kirk: Yeah. I’m not on anything, I swear to God. I’m not on anything.
Eric: No, no, no. Do [00:40:00] you have your angina medication handy? Do you have the nitroglycerin?
Kirk: So let’s go here. Let’s go here.
Eric: You’re gonna grab your chest right now, fall off the chair, and then I’m gonna have to fill.
Kirk: Here we go. Here you go. So this is a very impolite thing I’m about to say.
Eric: Oh.
Kirk: Heck yes. ‘Cause we’ve had a lot… Think about the range of incredible organizations and people we’ve had on this podcast.
Eric: Yes.
Kirk: Is it possible that this is the most audacious organization we’ve ever heard from on Let’s Hear It? Is the World Peace Foundation? Let’s deploy three people to think about how to secure the research that helps create pathways for peace, and then the research director for an organization that has a mission that is that extraordinary says, “You know, actually, let’s try something new. Let’s try something innovative. Let’s try to actually tell stories.” And then they get the learning that’s like, you know, actually, when we put stories like listening is a key aspect for creating peace, and that gets a lot of attention, they start creating real learning. So again, for an organization like the World Peace Foundation to be [00:41:00] willing to play with this and to try something out, that innovation, that’s at the center of all of our work. We have to try—
Eric: Try risks.
Kirk: We have to try these new ideas. So anyway, I just think it’s so cool that this organization is trying this stuff out.
Eric: I’m very sorry to say, Kirk, that I agree with you. No, you’re right. It is audacious. It’s kind of glorious if you think about it. That you have a small organization that’s 100 years old, though, at the same time.
Kirk: Right.
Eric: And you sit there and you think, “Okay, what are some of the ways that I can communicate, not only communicate with folks, but learn as I go?”
Kirk: Yeah.
Eric: And this, I think, is a really helpful tool. Now, I have to say that when they dropped the bomb of the budget, I almost fell off my chair. But no, no, it’s true. If you’re gonna do something, do it right.
Kirk: Right.
Eric: But if you’re gonna get some schmo who’s gonna do all the work by himself while his friend sits on his tuffet, that’s [00:42:00] fine too. That actually can work. But I do think that there are many ways to do it.
Kirk: Yeah.
Eric: And I would encourage people not to be cowed by a large budget. Try something.
Kirk: Yeah.
Eric: And put it out, do a little limited series. You could do it any way you like, and just get it out there and see what comes back, because you do learn as you go, and people will respond to you in ways that you didn’t expect.
Kirk: Yeah.
Eric: And we have folks who listen regularly, who listen to shows that are not in their area of expertise, and they say, “I learned something. And it expanded how I think about the world,” or, “It might have changed the way I think about my work even though I don’t do education,” or, “I don’t do climate,” or, “I don’t do this,” or, “I don’t do that.” So I do think that there are many ways to connect with people whom you didn’t expect you would connect with that will add value to what it is you do, and may kind of refract on the world in ways that you could not expect. This is a relatively cheap tool to learn and to share.
Kirk: 100%. [00:43:00] And let’s yes-and this in the sense that, yes, this can be a do-it-yourself thing, but even there, you know, when the conversation about resources comes to bear, let’s face it, if you’re talking about people that are trying to work within a 40-hour workweek, and we all know people in our field kind of fudge that, then it’s being 50 or 60 hours anyway ’cause you’re so committed and you can’t get away from your desk.
Even that part of, well, if you’re gonna do something like create a podcast, just like if you’re gonna create a report or just like if you’re gonna create a project, you’ve gotta have people, you’ve gotta give people time to do the work right and do it well. So I totally agree, second that notion of just try it. Just try it out. Literally, I’m like every organization, just give this a shot, you know? ‘Cause again, that sensibility about what we’re communicating and the stories we’re trying to tell is so important.
And I would add to that, and it’s funny, this is maybe where our lives are a little bit divergent, but I remember a million years ago telling people who wanted to get their stuff plastered all over the world, they wanted to make global A1 above the fold with their cutting-edge [00:44:00] study or their cutting-edge research, and it’s like, “Well, yeah, we can do that, but it’s probably gonna be $50,000 to $100,000 to actually structure the campaign that you really wanna do along those lines and do that well.” How many times the phone hung up immediately, because it’s so shocking. ‘Cause people are like, “Wait a minute. It’s just a piece of paper, right?”
And then you fax it to a couple of people, and it’s like, no, actually there’s a lot more work that goes into it. So I would say part of that is if you have the capacity to assign a real budget, just like any other communications project, and you have the ability to find someone like Emily Shaw, who is available at Emily Shaw Creates, for sure use that resource because you’re gonna get so much learning, and I do believe that it’s gonna amplify your impact many times over if you can actually allocate those resources. I think that’s totally true.
Eric: Oh, I totally agree. If you can identify a number of stories that you would love to tell and to bring in other voices that can help you tell it or that can help you learn, it’s a great way to experience your own work through another [00:45:00] context, another set of eyes or ears or voices, and that’s why it’s interesting. For us, however, none of those things apply.
Kirk: Yeah, right. None of those things apply. It’s true.
Eric: Actually, what we do is we get to highlight other people who are actually doing interesting things.
Kirk: This is true.
Eric: 100%. You do interesting things. I do not. And I learn, and I feel like it is an opportunity to share what other people are doing. So that part is good. So it wasn’t a totally terrible idea you had, Kirk.
Kirk: Well, it’s a terrible idea.
Eric: It’s kind of a terrible idea.
Kirk: But here’s the other thing that gets me excited about hearing Bridget and Emily talk about this, and this has always been the thing in the communications field that’s got me most interested and most excited, is that let’s face it, there are different kinds, there’s a whole continuum of communications out there that we refer to as communications.
And I would say there’s a lot of it that’s very necessary and important, but it’s a lot more like marketing laundry detergent in a way.
Eric: Say more.
Kirk: Very vanilla. It’s just not gonna take a lot of risks, right? And it shouldn’t take risks because there’s just [00:46:00] basic blocking and tackling we need to do at times to just get the basic facts and information out there.
But then there’s an entirely different part of our same continuum of work, our same field, that actually is sitting on the cutting edge of risk, trying things out for the first time, trying to see if this could work. This could fail and fail badly. You know, this could be a big waste.
Or we could get a lot of learning. And it strikes me that something like a podcast is really unique today in particular as being more the latter than the former. That actually putting your institutional resources behind something that’s got even a private face, even amongst your team, but hearing each other talk about the work in a storytelling way, hearing each other try to animate what’s important about this in a way that’s different than just the staff meeting report-out or what have you, that actually it’s risky.
And it’s important for us as a field to take risks because that’s where our learning is gonna come from. And so it’s interesting hearing Bridget and Emily even talking about this. Like, they’ve corrected real learning with each other as they’ve done [00:47:00] this work. And it strikes me, you need a Bridget and you need an Emily to make this work.
You know, you need the technical person with the producing chops, and you need that content person who’s willing to take those risks and drive things forward. And so I think that was another cool thing about this interview, Eric, is that you brought those kinds of spokespeople together to talk about what they’re doing because they have the ingredients of what’s a really powerful combination to put something forward that’s got a lot of value to it and creates a lot of benefit for people.
Eric: Obviously, Emily is acting… Oh, I think we talked about this a little bit, is she’s, like, the audience advocate. So you kind of need somebody out there who can ask the kinds of questions that the audience will be asking, to be their proxy. That’s a very important part of the partnership. As we discussed, it’s not just about what do I wanna say, but who is it I’m trying to communicate and what do they care about so that I can talk to them in ways that are meaningful to them?
And that gets to this point about audience, which is you don’t need Joe Rogan’s audience to be [00:48:00] effective with a podcast. You just need to understand who it is who cares about the work that you’re doing or the people that you are highlighting.
So it’s not always about you, it’s about your constituents, your grantees if you’re a foundation, your partners if you’re a nonprofit, and highlighting those stories in ways that some audience out there is gonna learn from, is gonna do something about, is gonna engage on. And that audience doesn’t need to be a million people. It can be the right thousand people, and you will have used your time phenomenally effectively.
Kirk: Absolutely. Wonderful.
Eric: So that’s another thing. So I kinda wanna disabuse people of this notion that they have to be huge. What they have to do is understand who it is they care about and find a way to be a part of a conversation that is meaningful to that audience.
Kirk: We used to say this about a certain social media platform that I’m not even gonna use its name or its new name to reference, but we used to say, you know, it’s not about broadcasting, even though it has that capacity, but it’s [00:49:00] microcasting. If you could invite the right 100 people to a dinner and they would all show up, you would love to have that dinner.
Well, guess what? You just got a free way to do it, and I think that a podcast can be a very similar mechanism. And one of the things I love, too, I have to say, Bridget and Emily, they cut me to the quick with this comment.
Eric: Uh-oh.
Kirk: So they’re putting forward different stories, but also different messengers, and they said, “You know, we got started. There are a lot of bros out there talking about it.” I’m like, “Oh, okay, here we are. We’re just a couple of bros. We’re just a couple of bros out there.” Ugh. Right? Mansplaining.
Eric: I disgust myself.
Kirk: I know. We’re just terrible.
Eric: I’m disgusted.
Kirk: But what can you do? You can create your own platform for elevating these voices. So it’s not just the stories, but it’s who’s telling the stories, right? And again, we can just do the work, and we have to put the effort in to do the kind of quality work that we need to do, and if you can microcast that, and if you can get the right dinner party of 20, 30, 40, 100, or 1,000 people together, you’ve just done something [00:50:00] that’s probably one of the most impactful things you could do. To, you know, echoing what you just said. So I think that’s really great.
So I do wanna share here publicly that I am gonna start cheating on you. Because I’m gonna email Emily Shaw immediately. As you were doing this podcast, I had, like, three great ideas that came to mind.
Eric: No, no, no, no. Don’t burden some other person. She has to make a living. If you’re gonna pay Emily, great. If you’re not, don’t burden her with your dumb ideas that she has to spend time on uncompensated. If that’s where you’re going, I forbid it.
Kirk: Emily does have a link at Emily Shaw Creates where you can send ideas in, and Emily, again, has done such great work. And then—
Eric: Oh—
Kirk: —my—
Eric: No, don’t send ideas to her. Hire her.
Kirk: Well, that’s what got me—
Eric: You see, you don’t understand how this works, Kirk. You call somebody, you hire them, you give them money, and they get compensated, they build their career, you get your ideas out. [00:51:00] That’s how it works. You don’t just call people and tell them to do stuff. Except that’s what you did to me.
Kirk: Couldn’t we agree that the World Peace Foundation should double in its capacity? Couldn’t we agree that we need desperately these days more dollars going to the World Peace Foundation?
Eric: We need way more of the World Peace Foundation and way less of us.
Kirk: Oh my goodness. I do wanna have Bridget back someday, and I actually want Bridget to carefully define for me what peace means and how far we ever are away from it. ‘Cause I was thinking to myself, like, what really do we mean by peace, and how distant from my little house or your little house, how far do you travel before the conditions of peace collapse?
And I think that that could be very immediate. That could be very near to us, like if we think about what it looks like to have peace with us.
Eric: All right, Kirk. I need to ask you a favor.
Kirk: Yeah, go ahead.
Eric: No more doing ayahuasca before we do the pod drop.
Kirk: Come on. Oh, come on. Are you gonna disagree that this was one of the best and most interesting… You’ve had a lot of great conversations. This is right up, this is [00:52:00] so important. This is such good stuff, right?
Eric: No, I’m sorry. I apologize.
Kirk: That’s okay. You’re New York citizen-ed. It gets the best of you from time to time.
Eric: Your Iowa whatever it is gets the best of me, too. No, you’re—
Kirk: Smart?
Eric: No, no, you’re right. I apologize. I apologize to everybody. I apologize to ayahuasca.
Kirk: So a couple of good takeaways. First, listen to your consultants. That was said loud and clear in this interview.
Eric: That was self-serving.
Kirk: But secondly, start your podcast.
Eric: Yeah.
Kirk: I think start your podcast. Give it a whirl.
Eric: Yeah, give it a whirl.
Kirk: So this was great. Oh my goodness. So Emily Shaw, emilyshawcreates.com. Bridget Conley, the research director of the World Peace Foundation. Please go find Disrupting Peace. We’ll put it in the show notes.
Eric: We’re gonna put 117 links in the show notes just so that folks can, you know, find everything we talked about and a few things that we didn’t even talk about.
Kirk: And honestly, I’d love it someday, Eric, if we could get Emily and Bridget back, I’d love to hear how this work progresses for them and what they learn along the way, ’cause this is so exciting.
So Eric, thank you. That was a great conversation. Thank you, Emily and Bridget, [00:53:00] for being so generous to come here and talk with us about Disrupting Peace. And thank y’all for listening to us. We’ll see you next time on Let’s Hear It.
Okay, everybody, that’s it for this episode. Please let us know if you have any thoughts about what you heard today or people we should have on this show, and that definitely includes yourself. And we’d like to thank John Allee, the tuneful and inspiring composer of our theme music.
Eric: Our sponsor, the Lumina Foundation.
Kirk: And please check out Lumina’s terrific podcast, Today’s Students, Tomorrow’s Talent, and you can find that at luminafoundation.org.
Eric: We certainly thank today’s guest, and of course, all of you.
Kirk: And most importantly, thank you, Mr. Brown.
Eric: Oh, no, no, no, no. Thank you, Mr. Brown.
Kirk: Okay, everybody. Till next time.
Kirk: Okay, come on. So, okay, so here’s my ideas. Wanna hear them?
Eric: [00:54:00] No.
Kirk: Come on. They’re really good ideas.
Eric: No.